“Nay,” said Domitia, “that can never be. When all light is gone, then all desire for return goes likewise. I know that in myself—I—I am such a comet. When I was a child I longed, I hungered for the light, and in my days of adolescence it was the same, only stronger—it was as a famine. I was the poor comet sweeping up towards my sun; but where my sun was, that—in the vast abyss of infinity—I knew not. I sought and found not, I sought and shed my glory, till there was but a faint glimmer left in me; and now—now all light is extinguished, and with it desire to know, to love, to be happy, to return.”
“Madam, you, as the comet, are reaching your apogee, your extreme limit; you must shed all your light before you can return to the source of light.”
“What! is that your philosophy? The Father of Light sends forth his ray to expire in utter darkness, predestined this ray of light to extinction. If so—then He is not good. And yet,” she sighed, “it is so. I am such. In blackness of night. Look you, Elymas, when I was a child, I laughed and danced; I cannot dance, I can but force a laugh now. I once loved the flowers and the butterflies; I love them no more. My light is gone. The faculty of enjoyment is gone with it. Do I want to return? To what? To the source of light that launched me into this misery? No, not into that cold and cruel fate. Let me go on my inky way, I have no more light to lose—I look only to go out as a fallen star and leave nothing behind me.”
“What! when a great future is before you?”
“What future? you have none to offer me that I value. Away with your hints concerning the purple—it is the sable of mourning to me.”
She panted. The tears came into her eyes.
“It is you who have wrecked my life—you—you. It was you who devised that crime—when I was snatched away from the only man I loved—the only man with whom I could have been happy—whom I—” she turned aside and hid her face. Then recovering herself, but with a cheek glistening with tears, she said: “I admit it, I love still, and ever shall love. And he loves me. He has taken none to wife, for he thinks on me. There, could darkness be deeper than my now condition? And you did it, you betrayed me into the hands—” she had sufficient self-control not to say to whom, before this man and her slave.
“Lady, it is not I, but Destiny.”
“And you, with your tortuous ways, work to ends that you desire, and excuse it by saying, It is Destiny.”
“What, discussing the lore of emanations, little woman?” asked the Emperor, coming suddenly up.