The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her
body’s purity, for when this knot was tied she
consigned herself to her end, and had become a bag
of dust. The other knots in the string pointed
to verifications; this first one was a suspicion,
and it was the more precious, she felt it to be more
a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond
us, where all is known. Her belief that it had
come thence was nourished by testimony, the space
of blackness wherein she had lived since, exhausting
her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness,
which was nothing other than the carrying on of her
emotion of the moment of sharp sour sweet—such
as it may be, the doomed below attain for their knowledge
of joy—when, at the first meeting with her
lover, the perception of his treachery to the soul
confiding in him, told her she had lived, and opened
out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility to her
for her heritage.
She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the
wound that slew her. ‘Had it not been so,
I should not have seen him,’ she said:—Her
lover would not have come to her but for his pursuit
of another woman.
She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful
transplant of the fields: pardoned her likewise.
’He when I saw him first was as beautiful to
me. For him I might have done as much.’
Far away in a lighted hall of the West, her family
raised hands of reproach. They were minute objects,
keenly discerned as diminished figures cut in steel.
Feeling could not be very warm for them, they were
so small, and a sea that had drowned her ran between;
and looking that way she had scarce any warmth of
feeling save for a white rhaiadr leaping out of broken
cloud through branched rocks, where she had climbed
and dreamed when a child. The dream was then
of the coloured days to come; now she was more infant
in her mind, and she watched the scattered water broaden,
and tasted the spray, sat there drinking the scene,
untroubled by hopes as a lamb, different only from
an infant in knowing that she had thrown off life
to travel back to her home and be refreshed.
She heard her people talk; they were unending babblers
in the waterfall. Truth was with them, and wisdom.
How, then, could she pretend to any right to live?
Already she had no name; she was less living than
a tombstone. For who was Chloe? Her family
might pass the grave of Chloe without weeping, without
moralizing. They had foreseen her ruin, they
had foretold it, they noised it in the waters, and
on they sped to the plains, telling the world of their
prophecy, and making what was untold as yet a lighter
thing to do.
The lamps in an irregularly dotted line underneath
the hill beckoned her to her task of appearing as
the gayest of them that draw their breath for the
day and have pulses for the morrow.
CHAPTER X
Copyrights
The Tale of Chloe from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
