But what she ate she knew not, nor what good fairy suggested to her questions and answers and remarks that were to her as dry as husks, yet which served as a screen to her misery. She seemed to have a secondary mind which worked mechanically.
There are certain proverbial sayings which have an air of such owl-like wisdom and are such a saving of mental work to those who repeat them that they seem immortal. One of these is that no person is fit to command who cannot obey. If it were said that no person is fit to command an inferior who cannot obey a superior, a reasonable idea would be conveyed.
Setting aside such cases as the apprenticeship of Apollo to a swineherd, and the voluntary self-humiliation of an ascetic who seeks to win heaven by effacing himself on earth, there is no more murderous injustice than the enforced subjection of a lofty nature to a lower one. It is not a question of pride, nor of fitness; it is a question of individual existence.
Iona had been like a queen in San Salvador; and she had been a wise and gentle sovereign. She had assumed no authority, and fully acknowledged that she had none. She was always consulted, and she had made no mistakes. Her whole strength had been expended to make herself worthy of this preëminence, and she had succeeded. Her powers had risen with the need of them, and she stood upright, sustained by this pressure from all sides.
The pressure removed, for to her mind it was almost removed and would be totally so, she collapsed and fell into confusion. With Tacita the wife of Dylar, she took for granted that her reign in San Salvador was at an end. For it was her power in the community, she persistently told herself, not her power over the heart of Dylar, which she lamented. “It is not love! I do not love him!” she had repeated a hundred times.
To her mind, Tacita, however sweet and lovely, was a girl of limited capacity, but also one who could assume a dignified and even haughty reserve when her relations with Dylar were called into question. As his wife, she might object to any other female authority in the place; and Iona well knew that the fair-haired girl, with her charming grace and caressing manners, would win a greater affection from the people than she herself would be able to win by the devotion of a life.
She went to her chamber with the hope of sleeping; but sleep was impossible. She rose, took her lamp, and went downstairs, meeting the housekeeper on the way.
“I am going out through the cellar,” she said. “Give me a long roll of wax taper, and the key of the cellar door. I will take care of all.”
She tied the great roll of taper to her girdle, took a little wallet and a lamp, and went down to the cellar. But instead of descending the second stair, she went along under the damp arches, past the rows of moist hogsheads, to a little stair that went up to a walled-up door. The stairs had been utilized as shelves, and rows of jars and little bottles of olives were set along them.
Iona cleared them all away from the four lower steps, and with a deft hand took out two or three screws from the boards; then, turning back the three lower stairs like a door, disclosed a steep stair underneath through a square opening. The stair ended in a corridor from which was heard the sound of waters, growing clearer as the passage led into a cave that had a high opening at one side, like a round window, almost lost in a long, close passage that looked as if broken in the rock by an earthquake, louder again when a door was unlocked and opened into a roofless passage of which one side diminished in height and showed a fringe of little plants and mosses, and the other soared, a precipice. Here was a little hollow through which flowed a brook coming through crevices northward to disappear southward into crevices. Where it issued from the rock in a fall of a few feet were two troughs, side by side, turning on a hinge, so that the water might be made to pass through either. Both were lined with nets that could be raised and drained.