Thirteen
The next morning she was just the same, sitting silently before the fire, with unseeing eyes gazing into it, thinking not of light but of darkness. Her mother, who had slept little and worried much, offered her tea and breakfast, which she refused. She asked her then to build up the fire, to which the girl consented, though not for any reason that her mother might have hoped. And this solitary action, which she repeated several times that day, was all the movement that the woman could rouse from her.
When evening came, she asked her daughter why she stared into the coals. Mary answered simply, without emotion. “I am watching the fire die. Like a human life, no matter how many times it is built up, the end is always the same. And when the will to feed it is gone, there is death.” With this she turned slowly towards her mother, adding with grim satisfaction. “Yes. At least there is Death.” Then she turned away again, the faint smile dissolving into the stone coldness of her face.
The witch spent the whole of that first day, and much of the second, reading through her books of lore, trying to find some spell or charm that would cure her daughter’s malady. Because to her understanding, she had been touched by some dark spirit of the Netherworld, or perhaps possessed in some measure by the Stone itself.
But what ailed the girl was not the work of witchcraft, and there was nothing in her mother’s books or box of talismans that would move or affect her in the least. What the old woman could not see, because it was too close to her own experience, was that Mary had given herself heart and soul to a man she could never have, the only man that she would ever love; and without him all life seemed but a mockery of hope. There was no longer any reason to live, nor did she wish to find one. And so she had resolved to die, death being the only comfort she could see on the black horizon of her ravaged world.
Her mother put her to bed on that second night, to which she consented only because it was less troublesome than to refuse. And whether she slept at all the woman could not have said, for in the morning she lay exactly as she had before, hands at her sides, staring blankly at some fixed point above her. Again she would not eat, and rising, drank a little water only because her throat felt dry and uncomfortable.
But as the third morning wore on, the young girl began to show signs of agitation, as it recalling some unpleasant fact that interfered with her sullen wish to die. All at once she stood up from the chair, pulling the hair at her temples and groaning angrily. The old woman, glad for any sign of life, stepped closer.
“What is it, Mary?”
“The fool! The fool!” she raged, pacing back and forth like a caged animal.
“Who?”
“Stephen Purceville! Today we are to, ‘Ride again, and make our love in the fields.’ Oh, if he only knew how I detest him now!”
As if some horrid music box which played always the same restless dirge, the lid of it thus lifted, her mother’s long obsession for vengeance once more began to work inside her. Even then.
“You must be careful, lass. If you tell him as much there could be trouble, and not the swift and easy death you seem to long for. If you truly wish to hurt him---”
Mary cut her short with a swift, knifing motion of her arm. Upon hearing these words an intolerable irritation had come over her at the stupidity of these sorry puppets: her mother, and the Purcevilles both young and old, playing out their little games of lust and hate, as if they mattered at all in the end. How could they fail to see that everything, everything ended in death and ruin? All their petty desires were less than meaningless; they were absurd.
But this was not what lay at the heart of her unease. For at the thought of her half-brother, and of the very real threat he posed, the will to survive had once more begun to assert itself inside her. She was afraid. And this simple, undeniable impulse---the desire to avoid pain and danger---tormented her now because it would not be suppressed. Death she did not fear. But thoughts of trying to fight off her brother’s oblivious, self-satisfied advances, the possibility of rape or imprisonment if she refused him..... These she could not face.
“I’ve got to get out of here!” she said suddenly, as if herself a puppet whose strings had been violently jerked. And rushing to the door before her mother could stop her, she broke from the hut and began running wildly down the path, her one desire to reach its root and turn aside before Stephen Purceville could arrive there, trapping her in the narrow pass.
She did not know how narrowly she succeeded. For no sooner had she reached and taken the track west, climbing a shallow hill and then dropping again out of sight, than the expectant officer on his panting steed arrived at the meeting of ways, and began climbing steadily the final stretch to the hut, and the long-awaited rendezvous with his imagined lover.