said Helena, slipping from his knee. “She goes out when the nights are fine.”
Siegmund rose to set free the tabby. Hearing the front door open, Mrs. Curtiss called from upstairs:
“Is that you, dear?”
“I have just let Kitty out,” said Siegmund.
“Ah, thank you. Good-night!” They heard the old lady lock her bedroom door.
Helena was kneeling on the hearth. Siegmund softly closed the door, then waited a moment. His heart was beating fast.
“Shall we sit by firelight?” he asked tentatively.
“Yes if you wish,” she replied, very slowly, as if against her will. He carefully turned down the lamp, then blew out the light. His whole body was burning and surging with desire.
The room was black and red with firelight. Helena shone ruddily as she knelt, a bright, bowed figure, full in the glow. Now and then red stripes of firelight leapt across the walls. Siegmund, his face ruddy, advanced out of the shadows.
He sat in the chair beside her, leaning forward, his hands hanging like two scarlet flowers listless in the fire glow, near to her, as she knelt on the hearth, with head bowed down. One of the flowers awoke and spread towards her. It asked for her mutely. She was fascinated, scarcely able to move.
“Come,” he pleaded softly.
She turned, lifted her hands to him. The lace fell back, and her arms, bare to the shoulder, shone rosily. He saw her breasts raised towards him. Her face was bent between her arms as she looked up at him afraid. Lit up by the firelight, in her white, clinging dress, cowering between her uplifted arms, she seemed to be offering him herself to sacrifice.
In an instant he was kneeling, and she was lying on his shoulder, abandoned to him. There was a good deal of sorrow in his joy.
*****
It was eleven o’clock when Helena at last loosened Siegmund’s arms, and rose from the armchair where she lay beside him. She was very hot, feverish, and restless. For the last half-hour he had lain absolutely still, with his heavy arms about her, making her hot. If she had not seen his eyes blue and dark, she would have thought him asleep. She tossed in restlessness on his breast.
“Am I not uneasy?” she had said, to make him speak. He had smiled gently.
“It is wonderful to be as still as this,” he said. She had lain tranquil with him, then, for a few moments. To her there was something sacred in his stillness and peace. She wondered at him; he was so different from an hour ago. How could he be the same! Now he was like the sea, blue and hazy in the morning, musing by itself. Before, he was burning, volcanic, as if he would destroy her.
She had given him this new soft beauty. She was the earth in which his strange flowers grew. But she herself wondered at the flowers produced of her. He was so strange to her, so different from herself. What next would he ask of her, what new blossom would she rear in him then. He seemed to grow and flower involuntarily. She merely helped to produce him.
Helena could not keep still; her body was full of strange sensations, of involuntary recoil from shock. She was tired, but restless. All the time Siegmund lay with his hot arms over her, himself so incomprehensible in his haze of blue, open-eyed slumber, she grew more breathless and unbearable to herself.
At last she lifted his arm, and drew herself out of the chair. Siegmund looked at her from his tranquillity. She put the damp hair from her forehead, breathed deep, almost panting. Then she glanced hauntingly at her flushed face in the mirror. With the same restlessness, she turned to look at the night. The cool, dark, watery sea called to her. She pushed back the curtain.
The moon was wading deliciously through shallows of white cloud. Beyond the trees and the few houses was the great concave of darkness, the sea, and the moonlight. The moon was there to put a cool hand of absolution on her brow.
“Shall we go out a moment, Siegmund?” she asked fretfully.
“Ay, if you wish to,” he answered, altogether willing. He was filled with an easiness that would comply with her every wish.
They went out softly, walked in silence to the bay. There they stood at the head of the white, living moonpath, where the water whispered at the casement of the land seductively.
“It’s the finest night I have seen,” said Siegmund. Helena’s eyes suddenly filled with tears, at his simplicity of happiness.
“I like the moon on the water,” she said.
“I can hardly tell the one from the other,” he replied simply. “The sea seems to be poured out of the moon, and rocking in the hands of the coast. They are all one, just as your eyes and hands and what you say, are all you.”
“Yes,” she answered, thrilled. This was the Siegmund of her dream, and she had created him. Yet there was a quiver of pain. He was beyond her now, and did not need her.
“I feel at home here,” he said; “as if I had come home where I was bred.”
She pressed his hand hard, clinging to him.
“We go an awful long way round, Helena,” he said, “just to find we’re all right.” He laughed pleasantly. “I have thought myself such an outcast! How can one be outcast in one’s own night, and the moon always naked to us, and the sky half her time in rags? What do we want?”
Helena did not know. Nor did she know what he meant. But she felt something of the harmony.
“Whatever I have or haven’t from now,” he continued, “the darkness is a sort of mother, and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and sometimes the sea is a brother: and there’s a family in one house, you see.”
“And I, Siegmund?” she said softly, taking him in all seriousness. She looked up at him piteously. He saw the silver of tears among the moonlit ivory of her face. His heart tightened with tenderness, and he laughed, then bent to kiss her.
“The key of the castle,” he said. He put his face against hers, and felt on his cheek the smart of her tears.
“It’s all very grandiose,” he said comfortably, “but it does for to-night, all this that I say.”
“It is true for ever,” she declared.
“In so far as to-night is eternal,” he said.
He remained, with the wetness of her cheek smarting on his, looking from under his brows at the white transport of the water beneath the moon. They stood folded together, gazing into the white heart of the night.
Chapter VI
VI
