And in terrified merriment they made the rest of their arrangements.
CHAPTER XXIII
Lavarcham left the king’s presence.
She came away bowed and blind and dizzy, shuffling in any direction and unaware of why she was walking or where she was going. An hundred thoughts, battling furiously for precedence, kept her thoughtless; an hundred pictures, each striving for place and examination, kept her blind. She was all a din and whirl and swirl, as though the winds that raged in gust and countercurrent through her brain were blowing her along. At times she would remember that she did not wish to go where she was going, and she would spin furiously aside and go as stupidly in another path; and at times she would discover that she was standing, still and collected as a stone, a nothing; staring on nothing. Great sighs broke from her miserable heart; or she was so shattered by dry sobbings that it seemed her bones must part company with her flesh and with each other; and again, with her two hands gripped on her mouth she squeezed back a medley of screams, and listened, as in amazement, to the thin whinings that forced through the crooked spaces in her fingers. Again, the cautious woman would peep and peer to see if any person was nigh to observe her, and before that survey could make its round she would forget what she was looking for, and think that they could not be seen from this place, for they have hours’ start, and will be—where? by this time.
With what unbelieving anguish that flight had forced itself upon her! She had gone trotting and ambling and panting about her rooms and fields, calling—
“Deirdre, Deirdre, Deirdre?”
Searching for her baby in a work-basket or on the flat of a ceiling, while the servants gibbered and squealed and bubbled and blared at her and at each other.
With what an iron dismay the thought of Conachúr came on her, desolating and unreckoned as the thunderclap which howls on the heels of its howling brother.
He must be told.
And at that she poked up her nose like a moonstruck dog pealing scream on scream, until the attending hags fled into corners as the mice do when they are frightened, and screamed with her and at her and at the roof.