He looked at me with disconcerting steadiness for a moment, and, without offering any other response, turned aside, resting his arm against the trunk of a tree and gazing into the quiet forest.
I set about packing my traps, grumbling various sarcasms, the last mutterings of a departed storm, for already I realised that I had taken out my own mortification upon him, and I was stricken with remorse. And yet, so contrarily are we made, I continued to be unkind while in my heart I was asking pardon of him. I tried to make my reproaches gentler, to lend my voice a hint of friendly humour, but in spite of me the one sounded gruffer and the other sourer with everything I said. This was the worse because of the continued silence of the victim: he did not once answer, nor by the slightest movement alter his attitude until I had finished—and more than finished.
“There—and that’s all!” I said desperately, when the things were strapped and I had slung them to my shoulder. “Let’s be off, in heaven’s name!”
At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to see that he had grown very pale.
“I wouldn’t have frightened her for the world,” he said, and his voice and his whole body shook with a strange violence. “I wouldn’t have frightened her to please the angels in heaven!”
A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control the passion that my imbecile scolding had evoked. Whatever the barriers Keredec’s training had built for his protection, they were down now.
“You think I told a lie!” he cried. “You think I lied when I said I couldn’t help speaking to her!”
“No, no,” I said earnestly. “I didn’t mean—”
“Words!” he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling vehemence. “And what does it matter? You CAN’T understand. When YOU want to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you; and I look back—AH!” He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent syllable. “I look back and it’s all—BLIND! All these things you CAN do and CAN’T do—all these infinite little things! You know, and Keredec knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows—but I don’t know! Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don’t know. I haven’t HAD my life. It’s gone! All I have is words that Keredec has said to me, and it’s like a man with no eyes, out in the sunshine hunting for the light. Do you think words can teach you to resist such impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d’Armand? Can life itself teach you to resist them? Perhaps you never had them?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.