CHAPTER XXI
And Conachúr lived anew as he drove homewards.
He did not see the humble people who louted and stared as he dashed by, nor the others who stood at strict attention marvelling at a king who returned no salute.
His feet were so light he could have bounded in the chariot, but his heart was lighter still.
It flew into his brain and stayed there, buoyant as a bubble, creative as a moon; so charging his mind with its own essence that all which was material merged in a flash to the spirit. The earth was eased of grossness and became a shimmer of colours and transparencies; an aura of gold and green rose on the crests of the manifolding hills. The tender involutions of no bird’s song were heard, for all songs merged into that of the lyrical earth and the clouds and the shining spaces between them. The world was singing for Conachúr, and he was song. For to the clairvoyance of love all that is unseen takes on sweet shape, and all that we see we are shapen to. A new world emerges softly from the old: not imperceptibly and unreckoned, but by such divine gradations as we may note and rejoice in. Then the creator is manifest in his creation, and all in us. We are it and all: we are the soul of the world, and our own soul: we are the victors, for we are beyond fear: we are the masters, for we are beyond desire.
How should fear or lust reach to the tops we spurn! The sour-faced beggar shaking his oaken bowl may have our purse and a clasp of the hand to boot. Yon shaking anatomy that hovers and limps shall have our own health if none other is at hand, for all now is soft and easy, and at one bend of a brow the Land of Heart’s Desire may be in being.
So Conachúr went, dreaming; the shaper of a world that was malleable to his wish.
To this hour he had triumphed in all that he had undertaken, but he had been unfriended, forging alone as in granite all that he willed, and feeling at every instant the rigour of life and the intractability of events. He saw that nothing he had yet done was so completed that it might be forgotten. Here an event had left dissatisfaction in its wake: there it had left an enemy. But from henceforth his work would have the clean finish of the spring, and all that he planted should grow from the root.
He would have double strength; his titanic own, and hers, breathing in him like an elixir, exciting him, heartening him. She was—what was she not! She was his to-morrow. She was his all and his last chance. She was his future, vivifying all that had grown stale, and unfolding horizons where an uttermost end had seemed. For at times an ending comes on every man, and thereafter there is nothing to strive for, there being nothing left to hope for; energy winces from the thought of any task, and the future but prolongs a present that is insipid and wearisome.
The departure of Maeve had been such an ending for Conachúr. Life had halted there for him, or had moved in a round of sameness which chafed and tormented his whirling mind. But he could forget her now and start afresh, for when he looked on Deirdre she went into his blood and into his bones, so that to be removed from her was as though he were distant from his own arms or his own head.