But he drawled on lazily:
“I’ve only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I’ve got all the cheese—which is you, my dear.”
“I certainly feel eaten up,” she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him lying in a royal ease, his eyes naïve as a boy’s, his whole being careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she felt very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a sense of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy, his fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or spoil one minute of his consummate hour.
From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them. Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid’s chair, wheeling silently over the short dry grass. The invalid, a young man, was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide—“the life tide,” she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her own distress. She was fretted to her soul.
“Come!” she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him.
“We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow—so quiet,” she said to herself.
They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her own state, after her own fashion.
“The Mist Spirit,” she said to herself. “The Mist Spirit draws a curtain round us—it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a thin, torn curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the curtain again, I do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of the outside, and I am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I want to be in our own fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain.”
As if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said:
“Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next year, and stay for a whole month?”