"But the water-lilies will hear you and him again, Emily," I answered.
"Will they? What name shall we give him, Kitty-wren?" she asked of the bird, "let's call him Mr Hopeful, Mr Butterlips; let's screech him down with nicknames, Jenny"—whereat the bird from picking at the scab in her palm broke, as if in answer, into chattering, so that we had to smile: indeed, this tiny brown being that had come to us so strangely with its message from Styria, and would never leave us, was seldom silent even in the winter, and now in the spring would sometimes scatter one's talk with its showers of music. Miss Emily touched its cocky, short tail, saying: "Jenny knows! and the water-lilies know, too: they are never to hear us more. Birds and herbs and women: they are in the original obiah-dodge, and know what they do know."
"Women above all," I remember saying, though my heart was sore for her and for me.
"Look at her now!" she cried—"perched right atop of the harp, screaming something: the devil's in the bird, I think—pneuma akatharton echei!" This she said with a laugh, but when the bird now suddenly hopped upon her she stepped back from it with grave looks, brushing it off, murmuring, "get away, you, go"; and at this I found myself bowed over her drawn left palm, choked with her name; for she was no longer herself, and feelings surged within me which cannot be told; but as I held her hand, she first looked gravely at me, and then, to my wonder, began to hum the common song: "two in a bed," whereat, with playful reproach, I murmured "Gregorian," and let go her hand. Just then, the bird settling afresh upon her, she said to it: "well, come then, Kitty-wren: though you be the banshee, the very moth of death, I sha'n't shun you—not though your mood be all of shrouds, and of thundery lone nights in the ground, and good-bye all. Still, you were sick, you know, and I nursed you, I have fed you, and watered you, and cleaned you, and tamed you, and loved you, and you have a devil against me, Jenny."
"Oh, but, Emily," I said, "this little bird begins now to take up too much of your thoughts!"
She did not answer me, but remarked thoughtfully: "she has baseness in her nature; yes, she makes a show of affection, but how flightily she forsook me that evening! I was just by that whitethorn bush out there, looking down at the water-lilies, and she was on my left shoulder, when suddenly she flew away, and before you could say 'Jenny!' a wet cloth was over my face, my mouth was crammed, and the scream of my being made no sound in my ears. Yet I have a sort of memory of a man, a masked man, a lanky man with a stoop, so strong, so rude, dark as death, cruel as the grave——"
"But, Emily, you speak of that?" I cried.
"Aubrey isn't here to hear," she said in a confidential way, "so it is nothing. Let me talk. There's something in mere blackness without one ray, in ravines without bottom, in bitterness so bitter that it churns to cud in the chewing. You don't know how strong he was: I struggled with him, but I was like a straw in his grasp; and when I felt myself going, and no succour nor ruth in the world, and the large darkness glooming, why then I sighed and was reconciled, and I chewed the brash of the grave like black bread, and it was boon and good to me."
When I began now to reproach her for such melancholies she hummed a catch of Langler's—
"In its dash
Showers down the rill,"