Naught in heaven or earth may affright him,
But join thou with me and we will smite him.”
The woman thus in anticipation stabs her rival with her husband's cowardice.
“Hear, thou Eve, the man's heart in Adam
(And O the bower and the hour!)—
Of his brave words hark to the bravest,
This the woman gave that thou gavest.”
How she wriggles and gasps and hugs herself at the thought of the woe she is to bring upon her victims, gloating over every detail of their desolate exile, and forecasting the death of one son and the damnation of another. Lilith after all is a fiend, and, as a creation of art, a fiend is a creature that lives and revels in wickedness as a salamander was supposed to inhabit fire, with a keen sense of pleasure and without moral responsibility; but in “Sister Helen” we have something much more dreadful because more human—“Hate born of Love”—hate that has devoured all love, even love of self—the hatred that is despair. A ruined girl, dwelling in a lonely tower with her little brother, seeks vengeance upon her seducer after the mediæval manner, by consuming his waxen image before the fire. And now upon the third night she is nigh upon its achievement, for the wax is wasting fast. The child takes a child's interest in the little figure that was once so plump, but through which the flame is now shining red. He prattles about it, but understands nothing, nor yet that there is anything to understand. His sister coaxes him out into the balcony to look out and say what he sees, for she knows what must come. And one after the other the brothers and father of the dying man ride up in the wild night and implore her mercy, at first that she will save his life, and then that at least she will forgive and save him from his despair, that body and soul may not perish. There is something simply appalling in the way in which each entreaty, as it comes to her repeated by her little brother's voice, is slain by the calm, ruthless, sometimes ironical comment in which she conveys her refusal.
“ ‘He calls your name in his agony, Sister Helen,
That even dead love must weep to see.’