When evening came, she asked her daughter why she stared into the coals. Mary answered simply, without emotion. “I am watching the fire die. Like a human life, no matter how many times it is built up, the end is always the same. And when the will to feed it is gone, there is death.” With this she turned slowly towards her mother, adding with grim satisfaction. “Yes. At least there is Death.” Then she turned away again, the faint smile dissolving into the stone coldness of her face.
The witch spent the whole of that first day, and much of the second, reading through her books of lore, trying to find some spell or charm that would cure her daughter’s malady. Because to her understanding, she had been touched by some dark spirit of the Netherworld, or perhaps possessed in some measure by the Stone itself.
But what ailed the girl was not the work of witchcraft, and there was nothing in her mother’s books or box of talismans that would move or affect her in the least. What the old woman could not see, because it was too close to her own experience, was that Mary had given herself heart and soul to a man she could never have, the only man that she would ever love; and without him all life seemed but a mockery of hope. There was no longer any reason to live, nor did she wish to find one. And so she had resolved to die, death being the only comfort she could see on the black horizon of her ravaged world.
Her mother put her to bed on that second night, to which she consented only because it was less troublesome than to refuse. And whether she slept at all the woman could not have said, for in the morning she lay exactly as she had before, hands at her sides, staring blankly at some fixed point above her. Again she would not eat, and rising, drank a little water only because her throat felt dry and uncomfortable.
But as the third morning wore on, the young girl began to show signs of agitation, as it recalling some unpleasant fact that interfered with her sullen wish to die. All at once she stood up from the chair, pulling the hair at her temples and groaning angrily. The old woman, glad for any sign of life, stepped closer.
“What is it, Mary?”
“The fool! The fool!” she raged, pacing back and forth like a caged animal.
“Who?”
“Stephen Purceville! Today we are to, ‘Ride again, and make our love in the fields.’ Oh, if he only knew how I detest him now!”
As if some horrid music box which played always the same restless dirge, the lid of it thus lifted, her mother’s long obsession for vengeance once more began to work inside her. Even then.