And then for the first time in her life the passion for song came into her. She felt that she must sing. Always before she had shuddered at the thought of song, for the song of Ligeia and others had ever brought death with it. But now she felt that she must sing, and she knew not why; for a study of hereditary tendencies was not included in the Board School education of that period. She had reached an open space now. The ground was sandy, with here and there a stunted clump of grass, and in one place a beautiful golden poppy.
“No one will hear me,” she thought, “and if I do not sing my heart will break.” So she sang, standing there white and naked, with the sunlight upon her, holding a lyre in her little hands.
And the music came out of her soul, but she knew not whence the words came.
She sang that it was not sweet for the golden poppy to bloom there alone, though the sun made it warm, and the wind was fragrant about it. It was sweeter that she should pluck it in her little hands, which were warm with a better life than the life of the sun, and more fragrant than the west wind with its burden of the breath of the flowers. She paused, and her fingers rested lightly on the lyre. Her eyes were strained in looking up to the east, and she did not see that the poppy had bowed its golden head and withered away.
“And it is not sweet,” she sang again, “for you, white bird, to fly on and on, and never to rest. It is better to lie here, and let me touch you, and fondle you, and love you.”
And out from the eastern sky flew the white bird, and it nestled for one moment at the child’s breast, and then fell dead on the sand.
And the child saw what she had done, and she flung herself down beside the dead bird and the withered flower, and sobbed in the foolishest way.
So the afternoon wore on, and the sea still murmured, and she still lay there. And when it was evening a new wind sprang up from the south, and it whispered to her,—
“A girl’s voice for a bird’s life.”
She stood up, erect, with eyes that flashed brightly, though the tears still stood in them. She held the white bird in her little hands. “I’ll give you my voice,” she said, as she kissed it. And the bird flew far away from her, and the girl was dumb.