Then the outhouse door opens slowly and from it Blanid steps listeningly across the house, in front of the hearth, to the door of the sleeping-chamber, remaining there for a little time with her ear against the door-boards; then she returns noiselessly across the house, behind the hearth, pausing near the house door.
Blanid, in a hushed voice.
If day were only darkness melting down
From darkness into darkness like this rain,
Lost ere 'tis known, then I might always sleep
And sleep and dream I was a queen once more—
She does not know I was a jewelled queen,
For so I spoil her of new heights of joy
In which she might for haughtiness fondle me.
O, I would sleep in that old Crier's arms,
Enduring silence harder than all else,
A mote shut into one cold, kneaded eyelid
Of the dead mere; and dream into the wind,
And cling to stars lest I should slip through space;
And dream I am the body of him I love,
Who yields me only kindness, never love—
O me, that misery of hopeless kindness.
But I'll not die and leave him to her lips;
Though I can never have him she shall not;
For I can use this body worn to a soul
To barter with that Crier of hidden things
That, if he tangles him in his chill hair,
Then I will follow and follow and follow and follow,
Past where the imaged stars ebb past their light
And turn to water under the dark world.
She goes out into the storm, leaving the door open behind her. Presently she is heard singing to a chant-like, ever-falling melody.
I stand in the sick night, whose hid shape is my own shape,
As dazed life in the flickering hearts of old men;
I think like a lean heron with bald head and frayed nape
Motionlessly moulting in a flat pool of a grey fen,
Whose sleep-blinked horny eyes know it can ne'er moult again.
My age-long cry droops in the hoar unseen stars that shake
Until their discordant rays make darkness inside the sky;
My bare cry shivers along the slimy rushes of the drowned lake—
Weariful waters, do you hear a soul's hair tingling your veiled feet nigh?
I stand outside my keen body, yearning into you as I cry.
Hialti, within.
Is that the lass sobbing a song in sleep?
Thorgerd, within.
The wind, the wind, and so as much as she.
Blanid, still out of doors, singing.
Old father of many waters, can you feel my soul touching yours?
I know that to greet your calling leaves me no more any yea or nay;
Yet I too am of kin with lost woods and sedgy shores,
So come secret as your black wind and take the dark core of my heart away,
Ere you beget me on death to be still-born to an unlit day.
Ohey! Ohey! Ohohey!
The Voice. Ohohey! Ohey!
Hialti, within.
Is there a woman's voice inside the wind?
Thorgerd, within.
... the unclean Crier croaking ... cover your ears ...
Blanid re-enters the house hurriedly; she shuts and bolts the door, hardly knowing what she does; she falls on her knees with her back to the door, breathing quickly and hard, and swaying backward and forward, her face hid in her hands.
Again and again a terrible blast of wind strains at the unyielding door.
The Voice, close at hand.
Open, open; I cannot open; open.
I cannot come to you unless you open.
Blanid, muttering behind her hands.
I will not go ... I can do nothing else ...
It shall not enter ... O, it is in my heart ...
She totters fearfully to the door, after many hesitant backward glances, and opens it slowly and as if she had never known how to open it. She reels against the wall and stands there motionlessly, clutching it with flat hands and outspread arms, as a stooping figure swathed in a rain-coloured, rain-soaked cloak and deep hood enters. Wisps of white hair flutter in the mouth of the hood, and one flicker of the fire-light shows in its depths a soft, shrunken, beardless face with an almost lipless, sunken mouth.