"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.
And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the secrets of men,—he who alone of all the gods reads the truths of men's souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling what lies he will to please the world a little space. Thanatos holds silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all things fall at last.
CHAPTER V.
When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know—and had he known would not have heeded—that instead of going on her straight path back to Yprès she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the riverside.
It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing snatches of a republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in which all their metal tongues joined musically.
She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses and the tufts of the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the gods, the black shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead body, and the bending figure of Arslàn as he stooped above the corpse and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of death.
To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make death—men's conqueror—his servant and his slave; she only begrudged every passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.
He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the darkness.
He worked more than half the night—worked until the small store of oil he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon his lungs.