“There are many such roosts,” said Siegmund pertinently.
Helena’s cold scorn was very disagreeable to him. She talked to him winsomely and very kindly as they crossed the open down to meet the next incurving of the coast, and Siegmund was happy. But the sense of humiliation, which he had got from her the day before, and which had fixed itself, bled him secretly, like a wound. This haemorrhage of self-esteem tortured him to the end.
Helena had rejected him. She gave herself to her fancies only. For some time she had confused Siegmund with her god. Yesterday she had cried to her ideal lover, and found only Siegmund. It was the spear in the side of his tortured self-respect.
“At least,” he said, in mortification of himself—“at least, someone must recognize a strain of God in me—and who does? I don’t believe in it myself.”
And, moreover, in the intense joy and suffering of his realized passion, the island, with its sea and sky, had fused till, like a brilliant bead, all their beauty ran together out of the common ore, and Siegmund saw it naked, saw the beauty of everything naked in the shifting magic of this bead. The island would be gone tomorrow: he would look for the beauty and find the dirt. What was he to do?
“You know, Domine,” said Helena—it was his old nickname she used—“you look quite stern today.”
“I feel anything but stern,” he laughed. “Weaker than usual, in fact.”
“Yes, perhaps so, when you talk. Then you are really surprisingly gentle. But when you are silent, I am even afraid of you—you seem so grave.”
He laughed.
“And shall I not be brave?” he said. “Can’t you smell Fumum et opes strepitumque Romae?” He turned quickly to Helena. “I wonder if that’s right,” he said. “It’s years since I did a line of Latin, and I thought it had all gone.”