She would look on her arms, as they hung helplessly in the grass, and wonder that they were so unoccupied, and wonder that they were so empty. And an oppression came to her heart, gentle enough, but without end, as though something stirred there that could not stir, as though something sought to weep and could not weep; so that she must weep for it, and grieve for it, and be of a tenderness to that unknown beyond all the tenderness that she had sensed about her. And these idle tears would arouse, or assuage her, so that she wondered why she wept, and she would leap from such nonsense and speed away like one distraught with excess of life and energy.
She would become affectionate then. She mothered the cow and its lanky calf; the peeping rabbit and her popping brood. The shaggy mare and her dear, shy foaleen, an arm about each neck, listened to a conversation they loved and seemed to understand. When she tried to leave them they trotted behind with gentle, persistent feet and eyes of such pleading that she must run passionately back, crying that she would come again, that she would surely come back to them on the morrow. There was not a nest she did not know of, and the young grey mother, snuggling among the leaves, would look gravely out at the grey eye that peeped within, and would hearken to a cooing so delicious, so burthened with love, that her broody hour would pass uncounted, and she would forget her mate abroad, and the wide airs of the tree-tops.
At night the moon could woo her so passionately she must forsake her bed and go tiptoe among dark corridors until she came into the presence. What wild counsel did she receive from the glowing queen! Or was it the unmoving quietude that whispered without words; intimations of—what? Shy touches at the heart, so that she, who feared nothing, would look about her, startled as a young roe, who senses something on the wind, and flies without more query.
How lovely to her was that suspense and fear, when her every nerve thrilled to a life more poignant than she had surmised; when something that did not happen was perpetually occurring; when, as it were in a moment, she might be told—what secrets! or be cautioned of something imminent and advised!
She lost herself in the moon, wooing it, wooed by it, until she seemed to move in the moon, and the moon to move in her; a sole whiteness, a sole chillness, one equal potency—For what? for that, for it, for something, for nothing, for everything. She submitted her destiny to the delicate sweet lady of the sky, and one night, beckoned to, drawn at, surrounded, a small moon shining in the moon, she went on and on, passing the grass to the turf; leaving the turf for the stony places; from there to the wall, and over the wall also; so lightly, so imperceptibly, so moonily, the drowsy guard did not see; or if he saw ’twas but a moonbeam that rose and fell, that fluttered and faded, that lapsed over a piece of hollow ground and glimmered away on the slope, merging in the silver flood and the shades of ebony, and gone while he rubbed his eyes.
So she marched towards destiny.
She went among the darkness of trees, and farther, where the wood grew thin, into a dappled dancing of jet and silver; and, beyond, to where young voices called and called and called.
Such fresh young voices she had never heard before, used as she was to the dry, clipped utterance of Lavarcham, the toothless mumble of the servants, the rusty bawling of Fat-face as of an obstinate door that told of aches and reluctances, and the wheezing and grunting of his stiff companions. She stayed listening to those voices, young as her own, and as sweet; rattling like the waters that tumble and ride in the river; chattering like a nestful of young birds in spring; soaring up and falling down with an infinite eagerness and joy; until it seemed that a lark’s song and the flight of a swallow had come together and fused into one streaming of sound.
Standing behind a vast black tree her astonished heart released itself in tears, and she wept for her cloistered youth, and for all that she did not know she had missed.
Then boldly she trod forward and sat herself resolutely at the camp-fire of the sons of Uisneac.