‘Pain and separation, then, are welcome,’ I tried to stammer, ‘and we will desire them’—but my thought got no further into expression than the first two words. Aching blotted out coherent utterance.
She bent down very close against my face. Her fragrance was about my lips. But her voice ran off like a faint thrill of music, far, far away. I caught the final words, dying away as wind dies in high branches of a wood. And they reached me this time through the droning of bees and of waves that murmured close at hand upon the shore.
‘... for our love is of the soul, and our souls are moulded in Eternity. It is not yet, it is not now, our perfect consummation. Nor shall our next time of meeting know it. We shall not even speak.... For I shall not be free....’ was what I heard. She paused.
‘You mean we shall not know each other?’ I cried, in an anguish of spirit that mastered the lesser physical pain.
I barely caught her answer:
‘My discipline then will be in another’s keeping—yet only that I may come back to you ... more perfect ... in the end....’
The bees and waves then cushioned her whisper with their humming. The trail of a deeper silence led them far away. The rush of temporary darkness passed and lifted. I opened my eyes. My love sat close beside me in the shadow of the poplars. One hand held both my own, while with the other she arranged my pillows and stroked my aching head. The world dropped back into a tiny scale once more.
‘You have had the pain again,’ Marion murmured anxiously, ‘but it is better now. It is passing.’ She kissed my cheek. ‘You must come in....’
But I would not let her go. I held her to me with all the strength that was in me. ‘I had it, but it’s gone again. An awful darkness came with it,’ I whispered in the little ear that was so close against my mouth. ‘I’ve been dreaming,’ I told her, as memory dipped away, ‘dreaming of you and me—together somewhere—in old gardens, or forests—where the sun was——’
But she would not let me finish. I think, in any case, I could not have said more, for thought evaded me, and any language of coherent description was in the same instant beyond my power. Exhaustion came upon me, that vile, compelling nausea with it.