“He should not,” said Lavarcham.
“He had to,” the girl replied, “for I threw stones at him from the top of the wall until he agreed to let me do it. But that was a long time ago.”
“He should have reported all this.”
“Do you mean he should have told on me,” cried Deirdre indignantly. “Indeed I should like to see Fat-face daring to tell anything about me. Why, the men would beat him if he told. I would get down off the wall and beat him myself.”
[6] The Shí = Fairyland.
CHAPTER IX
This conversation greatly exercised Lavarcham, and she cast about for some means whereby she might restrain her ward. It was waste of time, as she quickly saw, for who that has been charged with a young person aged sixteen has not been forced at last to renounce all real guardianship?
At that age the time has passed for prohibitions, and the time has not yet come when advice can be listened to except in the form of flattery. The young body is eager for experience, and will be satisfied with nothing less actual, so the older person must grant freedom of movement or be run to death by that untiring energy. For a while the youngster will drink deeply, secretly, of her own will, and will then disengage for herself that which is serious and enduring from that which is merely pleasant and unprofitable. For all people who are not mentally lacking are sober-minded by instinct, and when the eager limbs have had their way the being looks inwardly, pining to exercise the mind and to equip itself for true existence.
At fourteen years of age Deirdre was not the untameable little savage she had been at twelve, and at the age of sixteen she had begun to long for some one to whom she might submit her will and from whom she could receive the guidance and wisdom and refreshment which she divined to be in herself, but which she could not reach.
Her fury of activity would be broken by equal periods of languor, wherein she would sit as in a daze, staring at the sky and not seeing it, or looking at the grass with a vague wonder as to what this was upon which her eyes were resting. Wild creatures or tame would trot or amble before her, but she was only conscious of a movement without a form. A bird might light and flirt and hop and fly, and her forsaken mind would touch those facts without gaining information from them, and would lose itself behind the movement vaguely, blindly, dizzily, until the bird mixed into the sky and the sky rounded and receded and disappeared, leaving her eyes nothing to rest on and her errant mind without any support.