For pity, dear faces, keep off, or she may not come. She would quit me of this anguish—who could will to bear this gnawing fire? They, too, shall have torment, and die with horrors. The waves shall batter and break, and sharks shall tear their live limbs piece-meal, and down in the ooze coils of serpents shall crush them out. Ah God! ah God! I love her so. Would hell be undesirable if you were there, or heaven perfect if you were not? O poor soul, poor soul! who will have mercy? Kiss her, mother, dear; upon her breast lay your hand when she comes. O poor mother, who had not a little dead body to kiss! Go, go—I cannot bear your eyes. I want——Ah, ah, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
He surrendered, and the tide was breast high.
Solitude drifted back, and cleared vision without and within. The despotism of torture succeeded on the exclusion of throes more virulent. He prayed for swift death, yet shrank humanly as promise swung hard at his face. He prayed against Diadyomene, and yet strove with wide eyes to prevent the darkness, quailing, pulsing at gleam of wave and sweep of weed. He would give up his soul if it were possible, not for carnal exchange, but that hers might revive.
Would she of the cold sea nature care greatly for his death? Would she remember where the outcast body lay, and fulfil her word uttered in scorn to lay sea-blossoms about the skull? Dead, void of pain, unresponsive to her touch could he be! O fair, calm life of the sea! O fair, calm sea-queen! No, no, not for him—death, only death, for him. God's merciful death.
The enfeebled brain fails again; sense and will flicker out into misty delirium; from helpless memory a reek distils, and the magic of the sea is upon him.
Through waves heaving gigantically to isolate him from the world, the flash and spin of eager life beckoned the blood left in him; great strengths loomed, his on the loosening of knots of anguish; a roar ran in his veins, noise and tremor beating through him, fluid to it but for his bones. Came trampling and singing and clapping, promising welcome to ineffable glories, ravishing the heart in its anguish to conceive of a regnant presence in the midst. Coming, coming, with ready hands and lips. Came a drench, bitter-sweet, enabling speech: like a moan it broke weak, though at his full expense, 'Diadyomene.' Came she.
Delirium flashes away. Face to face they hang, shattered life and lost soul. He shudders hard. 'Deliver us from evil,' he mutters, and bows his head for a fatal breath and escape.
CHAPTER VIII
'Too late. Wait till the tide go down. What was there?'