The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark and motionless against the gold of the western sky; on her face still that look of one who worships with intense honor and passionate faith an unknown God.
The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens; the waters grew gray and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came faint and weirdlike.
Still she never moved; the sea at her feet seemed to magnetize her, and draw her to it with some unseen power.
She started again as Arslàn spoke.
"This is but a land-locked bay," he said, with some contempt; he who had seen the white aurora rise over the untraversed ocean of an Arctic world. "And it lies quiet enough there, like a duck-pool, in the twilight. Tell me, why does it move you so?"
She gave a heavy stifled sigh.
"It looks so free. And I——"
On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that she had only exchanged one tyranny for another; that, leaving the dominion of ignorance, she had only entered into a slavery still sterner and more binding. In every vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived the old free blood of an ever lawless, of an often criminal, race, and yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so strong in her, moving her to break all bonds and tear off all yokes, she was the slave of a slave—since she was the slave of love. This she did not know; but its weight was upon her.
He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of poverty and of the world's forgetfulness, and he had not even so much poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.
"It is not free," was all he answered her. "It obeys the laws that govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty, but obedience—just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of the grass. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it, but nature has never accorded it."