"I mean," and he faced me, "that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?"
"And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up that wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it."
He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me.
"You don't seem to understand," I went on; "it's the waste—the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can't talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched."
"There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should you? But that's the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport."
"Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this—this cage?"
"Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars," he sneered miserably. "Still we are sharing the same language now."
The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey—called me back.
"S-sh!" I whispered, caught up with delight. "A nightjar! Listen. Let's go and look."
I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature's enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue—how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self.