'As thou'lt answer for her, so will I for him.'
Bernardo sighed, and lay a long while silent. Suddenly he moaned in her arms, like a child over-tired, and spoke the words already quoted:—'My feet are weary for the turning.'
'Death is Love's seed—a sweet child quickened of ourselves. He comes to us, his pink hands full of flowers. "See, father, see, mother," says he, "the myrtles and the orange blooms which made fragrant your bridal bed. I am their fruit—the full maturity of Love's promise. Will you not kiss your little son, and come with him to the wise gardens where he ripened? 'Tis cold in this dark room!"'
So, in such rhapsodies, 'in love with tuneful death,' would he often murmur, or melt, through them, into song as strange.
'Love and Forever would wed
Fearless in Heaven's sight.
Life came to them and said,
"Lease ye my house of light!"
He put them on earth to bed,
All in the noonday bright:
"Sooth," to Forever Love said,
"Here may we prosper right."
Sudden, day waned and fled:
Truth saw Forever in night.
"We are deceived," he said;
"Who shall pity our plight?"
Death, winging by o'erhead,
Heard them moan in affright.
"Hold by my hem," he said;
"I go the way to light."'
All the last day Cicada held him in her arms, so quiet, so motionless, that the gradual running down of his pulses was steadily perceptible to her. She felt Death stealing in, like a ghostly dawn—watched its growing glimmer with a fierce, hard-held agony. Once, before their scrap of daylight failed them, she stole her wrist to her mouth, and bit at it secretly, savagely, drawing a sluggish trickle of red. She had thought him sunk beyond notice of her; and started, and hid away the wound, as he put up a gentle, exhausted arm, detaining hers.
'Sting'st thyself, scorpion?'
Cicada gave a thick crow—merciful God! it was meant for a laugh—and began to screak and mumble some legend of a bird that, in difficult times, would bleed itself to feed its young—a most admirable lesson from Nature. The child laughed in his turn—poor little croupy mirth—and answered with a story: how the right and left hands once had a dispute as to which most loved and served the other, each asserting that he would cut himself off in proof of his devotion. Which being impracticable, it was decided that the right should sever the left, and the left the right; whereof the latter stood the test first without a wince. But, lo! when it came to the left's turn, there was no right hand to carve him.
'Anan?' croaked Cicada sourly.
'Why,' said Bernardo, 'we will exchange the wine of our veins, if you like, to prove our mutual devotion; but, if I suck all thine first, there will be no suck left in thy lips to return the compliment on me.'