"What is it, Helena?" he asked at last. "Why should you cry?"
She pressed her face in his breast, and said in a m.u.f.fled, unrecognizable voice:
"You won"t leave me, will you, Siegmund?"
"How could I? How should I?" he murmured soothingly. She lifted her face suddenly and pressed on him a fierce kiss.
"How could I leave you?" he repeated, and she heard his voice waking, the grip coming into his arms, and she was glad.
An intense silence came over everything. Helena almost expected to hear the stars moving, everything below was so still. She had no idea what Siegmund was thinking. He lay with his arms strong around her. Then she heard the beating of his heart, like the m.u.f.fled sound of salutes, she thought. It gave her the same thrill of dread and excitement, mingled with a sense of triumph. Siegmund had changed again, his mood was gone, so that he was no longer wandering in a night of thoughts, but had become different, incomprehensible to her. She had no idea what she thought or felt. All she knew was that he was strong, and was knocking urgently with his heart on her breast, like a man who wanted something and who dreaded to be sent away. How he came to be so concentratedly urgent she could not understand. It seemed an unreasonable an incomprehensible obsession to her. Yet she was glad, and she smiled in her heart, feeling triumphant and restored. Yet again, dimly, she wondered where was the Siegmund of ten minutes ago, and her heart lifted slightly with yearning, to sink with a dismay. This Siegmund was so incomprehensible. Then again, when he raised his head and found her mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she decided, was supreme, transcendental.
The lights of the little farmhouse below had vanished, the yellow specks of ships were gone. Only the pier-light, far away, shone in the black sea like the broken piece of a star. Overhead was a silver-greyness of stars; below was the velvet blackness of the night and the sea. Helena found herself glimmering with fragments of poetry, as she saw the sea, when she looked very closely, glimmered dustily with a reflection of stars.
_Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wa.s.ser Ohne Regung ruht das Meer ..._
She was fond of what sc.r.a.ps of German verse she knew. With French verse she had no sympathy; but Goethe and Heine and Uhland seemed to speak her language.
_Die Luft ist kuhl, und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein._
She liked Heine best of all:
_Wie Traume der Kindheit seh" ich es flimmern Auf deinem wogenden Wellengebiet, Und alte Erinnerung erzahlt mir auf"s Neue Von all dem lieben herrlichen Spielzeug, Von all den blinkenden Weihnachtsgaben...._
As she lay in Siegmund"s arms again, and he was very still, dreaming she knew not what, fragments such as these flickered and were gone, like the gleam of a falling star over water. The night moved on imperceptibly across the sky. Unlike the day, it made no sound and gave no sign, but pa.s.sed unseen, unfelt, over them. Till the moon was ready to step forth.
Then the eastern sky blenched, and there was a small gathering of clouds round the opening gates:
_Aus alten Marchen winket es Hervor mit weisser Hand, Da singt es und da klingt es Von einem Zauberland._
Helena sang this to herself as the moon lifted herself slowly among the clouds. She found herself repeating them aloud in in a forgetful singsong, as children do.
"What is it?" said Siegmund. They were both of them sunk in their own stillness, therefore it was a moment or two before she repeated her singsong, in a little louder tone. He did not listen to her, having forgotten that he had asked her a question.
"Turn your head," she told him, when she had finished the verse, "and look at the moon."
He pressed back his head, so that there was a gleaming pallor on his chin and his forehead and deep black shadow over his eyes and his nostrils. This thrilled Helena with a sense of mystery and magic.
""_Die grossen Blumen schmachten_,"" she said to herself, curiously awake and joyous. "The big flowers open with black petals and silvery ones, Siegmund. You are the big flowers, Siegmund; yours is the bridegroom face, Siegmund, like a black and glistening flesh-petalled flower, Siegmund, and it blooms in the _Zauberland_, Siegmund--this is the magic land."
Between the phrases of this whispered ecstasy she kissed him swiftly on the throat, in the shadow, and on his faintly gleaming cheeks. He lay still, his heart beating heavily; he was almost afraid of the strange ecstasy she concentrated on him. Meanwhile she whispered over him sharp, breathless phrases in German and English, touching him with her mouth and her cheeks and her forehead.
""_Und Liebesweisen tonen_"-not tonight, Siegmund. They are all still-gorse and the stars and the sea and the trees, are all kissing, Siegmund. The sea has its mouth on the earth, and the gorse and the trees press together, and they all look up at the moon, they put up their faces in a kiss, my darling. But they haven"t you-and it all centres in you, my dear, all the wonder-love is in you, more than in them all Siegmund--Siegmund!"
He felt the tears falling on him as he lay with heart beating in slow heavy drops under the ecstasy of her love. Then she sank down and lay p.r.o.ne on him, spent, clinging to him, lifted up and down by the beautiful strong motion of his breathing. Rocked thus on his strength, she swooned lightly into unconsciousness.
When she came to herself she sighed deeply. She woke to the exquisite heaving of his life beneath her.
"I have been beyond life. I have been a little way into death!" she said to her soul, with wide-eyed delight. She lay dazed, wondering upon it.
That she should come back into a marvellous, peaceful happiness astonished her.
Suddenly she became aware that she must be slowly weighing down the life of Siegmund. There was a long s.p.a.ce between the lift of one breath and the next. Her heart melted with sorrowful pity. Resting herself on her hands, she kissed him--a long, anguished kiss, as if she would fuse her soul into his for ever. Then she rose, sighing, sighing again deeply.
She put up her hands to her head and looked at the moon. "No more," said her heart, almost as if it sighed too-"no more!"
She looked down at Siegmund. He was drawing in great heavy breaths. He lay still on his back, gazing up at her, and she stood motionless at his side, looking down at him. He felt stunned, half-conscious. Yet as he lay helplessly looking up at her some other consciousness inside him murmured; "Hawwa--Eve--Mother!" She stood compa.s.sionate over him.
Without touching him she seemed to be yearning over him like a mother.
Her compa.s.sion, her benignity, seemed so different from his little Helena. This woman, tall and pale, drooping with the strength of her compa.s.sion, seemed stable, immortal, not a fragile human being, but a personification of the great motherhood of women.
"I am her child, too," he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture.
"Come," she said gently, when she knew he was restored. "Shall we go?"
He rose, with difficulty gathering his strength.
_Chapter 12_
Siegmund made a great effort to keep the control of his body. The hill-side, the gorse, when he stood up, seemed to have fallen back into shadowed vagueness about him. They were meaningless dark heaps at some distance, very great, it seemed.
"I can"t get hold of them," he said distractedly to himself. He felt detached from the earth, from all the near, concrete, beloved things; as if these had melted away from him, and left him, sick and unsupported, somewhere alone on the edge of an enormous s.p.a.ce. He wanted to lie down again, to relieve himself of the sickening effort of supporting and controlling his body. If he could lie down again perfectly still he need not struggle to animate the c.u.mbersome matter of his body, and then he would not feel thus sick and outside himself.
But Helena was speaking to him, telling him they would see the moon-path. They must set off downhill. He felt her arm clasped firmly, joyously, round his waist. Therein was his stability and warm support.
Siegmund felt a keen flush of pitiful tenderness for her as she walked with buoyant feet beside him, clasping him so happily, all unconscious.
This pity for her drew him nearer to life.
He shuddered lightly now and again, as they stepped lurching down the hill. He set his jaws hard to suppress this shuddering. It was not in his limbs, or even on the surface of his body, for Helena did not notice it. Yet he shuddered almost in anguish internally.
"What is it?" he asked himself in wonder.
His thought consisted of these detached phrases, which he spoke verbally to himself. Between-whiles he was conscious only of an almost insupportable feeling of sickness, as a man feels who is being brought from under an anaesthetic; also he was vaguely aware of a teeming stir of activity, such as one may hear from a closed hive, within him.
They swung rapidly downhill. Siegmund still shuddered, but not so uncontrollably. They came to a stile which they must climb. As he stepped over it needed a concentrated effort of will to place his foot securely on the step. The effort was so great that he became conscious of it.
"Good Lord!" he said to himself. "I wonder what it is."
He tried to examine himself. He thought of all the organs of his body--his brain, his heart, his liver. There was no pain, and nothing wrong with any of them, he was sure. His dim searching resolved itself into another detached phrase. "There is nothing the matter with me,"
he said.
Then he continued vaguely wondering, recalling the sensation of wretched sickness which sometimes follows drunkenness, thinking of the times when he had fallen ill.
"But I am not like that," he said, "because I don"t feel tremulous. I am sure my hand is steady."
Helena stood still to consider the road. He held out his hand before him. It was motionless as a dead flower on this silent night.
"Yes, I think this is the right way," said Helena, and they set off again, as if gaily.
"It certainly feels rather deathly," said Siegmund to himself. He remembered distinctly, when he was a child and had diphtheria, he had stretched himself in the horrible sickness, which he felt was--and here he chose the French word--"_l"agonie_". But his mother had seen and had cried aloud, which suddenly caused him to struggle with all his soul to spare her her suffering.