Still her mother stood poised, waited expectantly, a blackened rib held in her uplifted hand.
But when the apparition did not reappear, slowly she lowered it. . .and the look of wild fear passed from her eyes. She trembled, and spat upon the ground. Then with a sharp look at the girl, she turned to extinguish the swift bonfire she had made.
Then without a word, she took the sobbing girl by the wrist and led her away. Utterly devastated, Mary did not resist.
Only when they were safely shut up inside the lair did the old woman give vent to her fear and vexation.
“By all the gods, girl. . .you shall do no such thing again! Did you want to lose your own soul as well?”
“I don’t care!” cried her daughter sullenly. “I don’t care.”
And with the utterance of these words, rising as they did from her long suppressed darker nature, something precious and fine collapsed inside her: the will to live, and keep giving. She moved listlessly to sit before the fire, not for warmth, but only to turn her back on the endless pain and disillusion of this world.
All was lost, and darkness overwhelmed her.
Thirteen
The next morning she was just the same, sitting silently before the fire, with unseeing eyes gazing into it, thinking not of light but of darkness. Her mother, who had slept little and worried much, offered her tea and breakfast, which she refused. She asked her then to build up the fire, to which the girl consented, though not for any reason that her mother might have hoped. And this solitary action, which she repeated several times that day, was all the movement that the woman could rouse from her.