VIII.
At this point in the story the voice of the narrator grew fainter and then made a pause. I still kept my reclining position, with my hands clasped above my closed eyes. In fact, it would have required a greater effort than I at the moment cared to make to have sat up and looked about me. The sun, I knew, had already sunk below the crest of the slope; the gorge lay in shadow, and beneath the oak it was almost dark. As I lay waiting for the tale to recommence, the sombre influence of the wheel asserted itself more strongly than ever. There it loomed, in my imagination, black, grim, and portentous. Its huge spokes stretched out like rigid arms, and the long grass which streamed along the gurgling water resembled the hair of a drowned woman’s head.... But now the voice began again.
One summer afternoon Gloam and Swanhilda were sitting on the wooden bench beside the mill, watching the heavy revolutions of the great wheel. They were alone. David was in the mill-room finishing the day’s work, and Jael was preparing supper in the kitchen. For several minutes neither of them had spoken.
“Do you remember,” said Swanhilda at last, using her native tongue, “the first day I came here, how there came a terrible sound that made me miserably frightened? I have never heard it since then. What was it?”
“Only a rusty axle; at least, so I suppose. That careless David had forgotten to oil it properly. But I gave him such a scolding that there has been no more trouble.”
“David is not careless—he works very hard, and I love him,” retorted Swanhilda, tossing back her yellow hair. “Besides, such a noise could not be made by an axle.”
“You may like David, but you mustn’t love him; you are a little princess, and he is only the housekeeper’s son.”
“What is the difference between loving and liking?” inquired Swanhilda, folding her hands in her lap, and turning round on her companion.
He took her hand and answered, “I shall teach you that when you are older.”
“I am not so young as you think. I am old enough to be taught now.”
“No, no, no!” said Gloam, shaking his head and laughing; “you are nothing but a child yet. There is plenty of time, little water-nymph.”
“If you will not teach me, I’ll find someone else who will teach me. I will ask David; he has taught me some things already.”
“He? What have you learnt from him?” cried Gloam.
Swanhilda hesitated. “I should not have said that—but it’s nothing, only that I am learning to speak English. He didn’t want you to know until I was quite perfect, so as to make it a surprise to you.”
“He had no right to do it. Why should you learn to speak with anyone but me?” exclaimed Gloam passionately.
“Do you think I belong to you?” demanded Swanhilda, lifting her head in half-earnest, half-laughing defiance. “No; I am my own, and there are other places besides this in the world, and other people. I will go back to my own country.”
“Oh, Swanhilda,” said Gloam, his voice husky with dismay, “you will never leave us? I cannot live without you.”
“I will, if you are unkind to me.... Well, then, you must not be angry because David taught me English; and you must let him teach me the difference between liking and loving; I’m sure he knows what it is!”
“Do not ask him—do not ask him! That is my right; no one can take it from me! I saved you, Swanhilda; I brought you back to life, and that new life belongs to me!” The hand that held hers had turned cold, and he was pale and trembling. “I have kept you for myself; I have given up my own life—the life that I used to live—for you. But I cannot return to it, if you leave me.”
“I did not ask you to give it up,” she returned, waywardly. Then she relented, and said, “Well, you may teach me about loving, if you want to. Only, afterwards, you must let me love anyone I please!”
Gloam looked upon her for several moments, his black eyes lingering over every line of her face and figure. “You belong to me,” he repeated at last. “If you left me for another, I should wish that your pearl-shells had drawn you down——”
Before he could finish uttering the thought that was in his heart, the words were drowned in a throbbing yell as of demoniac laughter. The evil spirit of the wheel, after biding its time so long in silence, had seemingly leapt exultingly into life at the first premonition of meditated wrong. Swanhilda shuddered, and hid her face in her hands. David thrust his head out of the mill-room window, and saw Gloam make a gesture of rage and defiance.
“Aha!” he muttered to himself, “so the children’s games are over, are they? Can it be the devil’s game that my beloved brother thinks of beginning now?”
Another year passed, and again a man and a woman were sitting together on the bench beside the mill. It was night, and a few stars twinkled between the rifts of cloud overhead. The gorge was so dark that the mill-stream gurgled past invisibly, save where occasionally a rising eddy caught the dim starlight. The tall wheel, motionless now, and only discernible as a blacker imprint on the darkness, lurked like a secret enemy in ambush. The man’s arm was clasped round the woman’s waist; her head rested on his shoulder, and her soft fingers were playing with the pearl-shell necklace that encircled her neck. They spoke together in whispers, as though fearful of being overheard.
“You silly little goose!” the man said; “a few months ago nothing would make you happy but learning what love was; and now you have found out you must ever be whimpering and paling. Why, what are you afraid of?”
“You know I am happy in loving you, David,” was the tremulous answer; “but must lovers always hide their love, and pretend before others that they do not feel it? When I first dreamed of love, it seemed to me like the blue sky and the sunshine, and the songs of birds; but our love is secret and silent, like the night.”
“Pooh! nonsense, and so much the better! Our love is nobody’s business but our own, my lass. You wouldn’t have Gloam find it out, would you, and part us? What! have you forgotten the fit he was in at my teaching you English a year ago? He wants you all to himself, the old miser! You weren’t happier with him than you have been with me, were you?”
“Oh, David,” whispered the girl, clinging to him, “that was so different! I was happy, then, like a wave on the beach in summer. I had no deep thoughts, and my heart never beat as you make it beat, and my breath never came in long sighs as it does often now. Gloam used to say that he had brought me back from death to life; but it was not so. I lived first when I loved you. And the old happiness was not real happiness, for there was no sadness in it; it never made me cry, as this does.”
He drew her to him with a little laugh. “When you’ve lived a little more and got used to it, you’ll stop sighing and crying, and be as bright and saucy as you were with Gloam. But you won’t want to tell him ... eh?”
She hid her face on his shoulder. “Oh no, no, no; I could not; I should feel ashamed. But why do I feel ashamed, David? Is not loving right?”
“Right? to be sure it is. Nothing more so! And the pleasantest kind of right, too, to my thinking. Eh, little one?”
“David, I have heard—are not people who love each other married—at least sometimes? and after that they are not afraid, or sad, or ashamed?”
A smile hovered on David’s handsome lips. “Married, yes, stupid people get married. Timid folks, who are afraid to manage their own affairs, and can’t be easy till they’ve called in the parson to help them out. They’re the folks that don’t love each other right down hard, as you and I do. They’re suspicious, and afraid of being left in the lurch; so they stand up in a church and tie themselves together by a troublesome knot they call marriage. No, no; we’ve nothing to do with that; we’re much better off as it is.”
“But my father and mother were married, and they were not suspicious,” ventured Swanhilda again, after a pause.
“Oh, ay, they were married,” assented David; adding, half to himself, “and if they were alive, too, and anxious to fill a son-in-law’s pockets, I’d open mine, and gladly. But my father and mother were not married,” he resumed to Swanhilda, with another smile, “so you see we’ve a good example either way.”
She made no reply, but lifted her head from his shoulder and sat twisting the necklace between her restless fingers, her eyes fixed absently on the darkness. The clasps of the necklace came unawares apart, and it slipped from her bosom to the ground. She uttered a little cry, and stood up with her hands clasped, all of a tremble.
“I have lost it!” she said. “David, some harm is coming to me!”
“Nonsense! here it is, as good as ever.” He picked it up as he spoke, and drawing her down beside him, fastened it again round her neck, and then kissed her face and lips. “There, there, you’re all right. Did you think it was dropped in the mill-race?”
“Some harm is coming,” she repeated. “It has never fallen from me since my mother put it on my shoulders, and said it would keep me from being hurt or drowned, but that I must never part from it. But I trust you, oh, my love! I trust you. Something seems wrong somehow; I have given you all myself....”
“Lean close up to me, little one; rest that soft little cheek of yours against mine, and have done with crying now, or I’ll think you mean to melt all away and leave me; and what would I do then?”
She turned and clasped her arms around him with a kind of fierceness. “I leave you, David? Oh—ha, ha, ha! Oh, but you must never leave me, my love—love—love! Oh, what should I do if you were to leave me?”
“Hush, girl; hush! you’ll rouse the house, laughing and crying in the same minute! Don’t you know I won’t leave you? There—hush! You’ll wake Gloam else.”
“He loved me, too; he wouldn’t leave me; but he thought I wasn’t old enough—not old enough, ha, ha!... David, does God know about us?”
“Not enough to trouble Him much, I expect,” said the young man, with a short laugh. “If anything knows about us, it’s the old wheel there, waiting like a black devil to carry us off. Come, we must creep back to the house.”
They rose, Swanhilda stood before him, her sweet sad face glimmering shadowy pale through the darkness. “Say, ‘I love you, Swanhilda, and I will never leave you!’” she whispered.
He hesitated, laughed, stroked her hair, and stooping, gazed deep into her eyes, as on the day when they first met. Did his heart falter for a moment, realising how utterly she was his own? “You trusted me just now,” said he; “are you getting suspicious again?”
“No; but I am afraid—always afraid now. When you are not with me, I am afraid of everyone I meet; I think they will see our secret in my eyes. When I lie alone at night I am afraid to pray to God, as I used to do. What is it? Why do I feel so? It must be that we have done some wrong. My poor love! have I made you do any wrong? I would rather be dead.”
“Little darling—no! You couldn’t do wrong if you tried. There is no wrong—I swear there isn’t. Listen, now in your ear: I love you, Swanhilda, and I will never leave you! Satisfied now?”
Low as the words were whispered, they were heard beyond the stars, and stamped themselves upon the eternal records. But their only palpable witness was the mill wheel. A log of wood, carried over the fall, came forcibly in contact with the low-impending rim. It swung the heavy structure partly round upon its axle. And straightway, upon the hollow night, echoed a faint yet appalling sound as of jeering laughter. Slowly it died away, and silence closed in once more, like darkness after a midnight lightning flash. But it vibrated still in the startled hearts of the man and the woman, who crept so stealthily back to the house, and vanished in the blackness of the doorway, and it revisited their unquiet dreams.