“I was trying,” I said, “to imagine your husband....”
The chair creaked, and from the shadow of the hat one blue eye looked at me like a blue stone worn by fire. “Two,” she said. “They are dead.”
I wondered what she saw, looking over my shoulder. She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains. Then suddenly the headlines of a penny paper of two years ago unrolled before my mind, stood livid against my memory, slashed with the name of Storm. I had not a doubt but that he had been her second husband. “V.C. murdered. Sinn Feiners kill Captain Storm, V.C. Left on roadside with five bullet wounds....”
She said suddenly: “I am a house of men.”
“What!” I said. “You surprise me.”
“A house of men. Of their desires and defeats and deaths. Of their desires, yes, of their deaths, yes and yes. It is, you can see, a great responsibility for me, and I have lodged complaints about it, but it is no use. I am a house of men. Ah me, ah me! Oh, dear! My friend, there is a curse, a quite visible curse. On us, the Marches. You will see it in my eyes one day, and you will be sorry for me.”
“You mustn’t believe in curses,” I said. “Good God, curses!”
“The Marches,” she said, “are never let off anything. That is the curse.”
Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far below, like pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs of Anaïtis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as they can in their minds. I said: “And so the house of March, fatal and damned, can never avoid its destiny....”
“Yes,” she said reasonably, “it can avoid it. By not being weak enough to desire so strongly.”