“You are like the dreaming dawn,” I said, “beautiful and silent. You’re the daughter of all the dawns that ever were, and I’d perish if you’d be gone from me.”
“It’s beautiful to be in the world with you, Michael, and to feel your strength about me.”
“It’s lonely to be in the world with you, Mary, and no hope in my heart, but doubt filling it.”
“I will bring you into my heaven, Michael.”
“Mary, it’s in a little thicket of cedar I would sit with you, hearing the wild bee’s hymn; beautiful grapes I would give you, and apples rich as the moon.”
We were silent for a while and then she told me what I have written here of her own fine words as I remember them. We were sitting against the white altar stone, the sun was setting; there was one great gulf of brightness in the west of the sky, and pieces of fiery cloud, little flukes of flame shaped like fishes, swimming there. In the hinder part of the sky a great bush-tailed animal had sprung into its dying fields, a purple fox.
“I dreamed,” said Mary, “that I was in marriage with a carpenter. His name was Joseph and he was older than I by many years. He left me at the marriage and went away to Liverpool; there was a great strike on in that place, but what he was to do there or why he was gone I do not know. It was at Easter, and when I woke in my bed on the first morning there was bright wind blowing in the curtains, and sun upon the bed linen. Some cattle were lowing and I heard the very first cuckoo of the year. I can remember the round looking glass with a brass frame upon the table, and the queer little alabaster jar of scented oil. There was a picture of some cranes flying on the wall, and a china figure of a man called O’Connell on the shelf above the fire-place. My white veil was blown from its hook down on the floor, and it was strewed over with daffodils I had carried to my marriage.
“And at that a figure was in the room—I don’t know how—he just came, dressed in strange clothes, a dark handsome young man with black long hair and smiling eyes, full of every grace, and I loved him on the moment. But he took up some of my daffodils only—and vanished. Then I remember getting up, and after breakfast I walked about the fields very happy. There was a letter at the post office from my husband: I took it home and dropped it into the fire unopened. I put the little house into its order and set the daffodils in a bowl close upon the bedroom window. And at night in the darkness, when I could not see him, the dark man came to my bed, but was gone before the morning, taking more of my daffodils with him. And this happened night upon night until all my flowers were gone, and then he came no more.
“It was a long time before my husband came home from Liverpool but he came at last and we lived very happily until Christmas when I had a little child.”
“And did you have a child?” I asked her.