“Poor Gavan,” she said.
He just hesitated. “Why?”
“Your religion is a hatred, a distrust of life; mine is trust in it, love of it. You see it as a sort of murderous uncle, beckoning to the babes in the wood; I own that I wouldn’t stir a step to follow it if I suspected it of such a character. And I see life—“ She paused here, looking down, musing, it seemed, on what she saw, and the pause grew long. In it, suddenly, Gavan knew again the invasion of emotion. Her downcast, musing face pervaded his consciousness with that sense of trembling. “You see life as what?” he asked her, not because he wanted to know, but because her words were always less to him than her silences.
Eppie, unconscious, was finding words.
“As something mysterious, beautiful. Something strange, yet near, like the thought of a mother about her unborn child, but, more still, like the thought of an unborn child about its unknown mother. We are such unborn children. And this something mysterious and beautiful says: Come; through thorns, over chasms, past terrors, and in darkness. So, one goes.”
Gavan was silent. Looking up at him, her eyes full of her own vision, she saw tears in his.
For a moment the full benignity, sweet, austere, of a maternal thing in her rested on him, so that it might have been she who said “Come.” Then, looking away from him again, knowing that she had seen more than he had meant to show, she said, “Own that if it’s all illusion, mine’s the best to live with.”
He had never seen her so beautiful as at this moment when she did not pursue, but looked away, quiet in her strength, and he answered mechanically, conscious only of that beauty, that more than beauty, alluring when it no longer pursued: “No; there are no thorns, nor chasms, nor terrors any longer for me. I am satisfied, Eppie.”
She was walking now, a little ahead of him, down the thread-like path that wound among phantom bracken. The islet of space where they could see seemed like a tiny ship gliding forward with them into a white, boundless ocean. Such, thought Gavan, was human life.
In a long silence he felt that her mood had changed. Over her shoulder she looked round at him at last with her eyes of the spiritual steeplechaser. “It’s war to the knife, Gavan.”