She brooded over the fire. “What is the truth? Now I believe what I have said—and to-morrow I might go swimming toward a miracle! I have swam so in the past—believed with the shoal there was food there. But no! It shall not be again toward dead-white bone!”
He began, blue-eyed, young and keen, to talk of travel that he wanted so badly! He was talking as youth might talk to motherhood, who always listened. Cathay and Ind by the western way! They hung over the fire, the fog came about the house; they were far, far, far away!
When it was growing dusk, before Ailsa brought the candles, he went through the window and down as he had come to his boat,—and so off like a moth.
If he had not left Morgen Fay gay of heart, yet listening and speaking, and never a caress between, liking this boy and travelling a bit with him, her mood was less ashen, or began to glow amid its ashes. She bent herself over the fire, she put her locked hands over her forehead, she rocked herself; desire and mind went wandering together. “Forest—forest deep and still. Landless sea, salt and clean. Solitude, solitude—and out of it the Miracle rising—and Morgen Fay dead at its feet—but I safe forever, healed forever! But it will not come, my Miracle, it will not come, it will not come!”
The dark increased. Ailsa brought the candles.
The next eve brought Somerville,—alone, in mood of return but not otherwise in good mood. A man of many levels, something had crossed him and he perched to-day upon one of the lower levels of himself. Morgen Fay’s mood to-night was soulless, hard and reckless. She was not nightingale, nor moon in the sky, nor lion-woman nor panther-woman; she was nearer the slut that Ailsa would have under her fingers. She drank much wine with Somerville.
When he was at this ebb and scurf of himself he liked so to loosen her tongue, for she could then flay for him—skilfully as ever Apollo flayed Marsyas—that breadth of living, that cluster of folk or that individual that he chose to lead to her. Perhaps she knew them, or perhaps she took them and their acts from his lips. Either way, with a vigour of disdain, a vigour of hate, of anger against an universe that was increasingly giving her now ennui and now whips of scorpions, she drew from them and held aloft a skin of attributes and motives that made dreadful laughter for the onlookers. She and Somerville were the onlookers.
In these moods he was her demon and she was his. They sat cheek by jowl, in the lowest strata of themselves, drinking each the worst of the other, poisoning and poisoned. When they came to embraces, to a pitiful, animal revivification—thinking so to get light and solace—that was the lesser harm.
Somerville brought into their talk Brother Richard Englefield. “There is a monk at Silver Cross. Watch for appearances and miracles there also!”