CHAPTER XXVII
Unorna struggled for a moment. The Wanderer did not understand, but loosed his arms, so that she was free. She rose to her feet and stood before him.
“You have dreamed all this,” she said. “I am not Beatrice.”
“Dreamed? Not Beatrice?” she heard him cry in his bewilderment.
Something more he said, but she could not catch the words. She was already gone, through the labyrinth of the many plants, to the door through which twelve hours earlier she had fled from Israel Kafka. She ran the faster as she left him behind. She passed the entrance and the passage and the vestibule beyond, not thinking whither she was going, or not caring. She found herself in that large, well-lighted room in which the ancient sleeper lay alone. Perhaps her instinct led her there as to a retreat safer even than her own chamber. She knew that if she would there was something there which she could use.
She sank into a chair and covered her face, trembling from head to foot. For many minutes after that she could neither see nor hear—she would hardly have felt a wound or a blow. And yet she knew that she meant to end her life, since all that made it life was ended.
After a time, her hands fell in a despairing gesture upon her knees and she stared about the room. Her eyes rested on the sleeper, then upon his couch, lying as a prophet in state, the massive head raised upon a silken pillow, the vast limbs just outlined beneath the snow-white robe, the hoary beard flowing down over the great breast that slowly rose and fell.
To her there was a dreadful irony in that useless life, prolonged in sleep beyond the limits of human age. Yet she had thought it worth the labour and care and endless watchfulness it had cost for years. And now her own, strong, young and fresh, seemed not only useless but fit only to be cut off and cast away, as an existence that offended God and man and most of all herself.
But if she died then, there, in that secret chamber where she and her companion had sought the secret of life for years, if she died now—how would all end? Was it an expiation—or a flight? Would one short moment of half-conscious suffering pay half her debt?