The Beast left us shortly after this; I was a little disappointed, but I made no move to stop him. I ate my lunch alone, and went out early to take Greatheart for his afternoon ride. We took it very easy that day, and when I put him away, the horse was anxious to be petted and soothed at great length. After he had been groomed hair for hair several times over, I sat between his forelegs and told him silly stories, as if to a child at bedtime, while he investigated my face and hair with his nose. At last he was calm and happy again, and I could leave him. The Beast was waiting for me outside, silhouetted against an amber-and-primrose-coloured sky. “Greatheart and I have been having a long conversation,” I explained, and the Beast nodded without comment.
That night as the whistling breeze unrolled my bedclothes to tuck snugly under ray chin I heard the voices I’d heard before on that dreadful first night in the castle. Several times over the last weeks I had thought I heard them, but always just at the edge of sleep, and usually only a few words: “Good night, child, and sweet dreams,” and once, “For heaven’s sake leave the child alone,” whereupon the quilt had abruptly left off tucking in its corners.
“Well,” I heard. “Are you satisfied yet? No, I shouldn’t ask that. Do you begin to have hope? Are you comforted? You see how well it’s going.”
There was a melancholy sigh. “Oh, yes, already it’s going better than I dared hope, and yet you know it’s not enough. It’s too much, really it is, too much to ask, how can such a little thing understand? How can she possibly guess? There’s nothing to guide her; it’s not allowed.”
“You fidget yourself too much,” said the practical voice, but with sympathy.
“I can’t help it. You know it’s impossible.”
“It was made to be impossible,” the first voice said grimly. “But you needn’t give up on that account,”
“Oh dear, oh dear, if only we could help, even a little,” the melancholy voice went on.
“But we can’t,” said the first voice patiently. “In the first place, she can’t hear us; and even if she could, we are bound to silence.” Fuzzy with sleep, I thought: I know who she reminds me of—my first governess, Miss Dixon, who taught me my alphabet, and to recognize countries on the globe before I could read the printed names; and who was the first of many to fail to teach me to sew a straight seam. Now this voice and its invisible owner brought her back to me with sudden clarity: dear, kind, and above all practical Miss Dixon, who disliked fairy tales and disapproved of witches, who believed that magicians invariably exaggerated their abilities; and once, exasperated at my favourite game of playing dragons, which involved much jumping out of trees, told me rather sharply that a creature as big and heavy as a dragon probably spent most of its life on the ground, wings or no wings. Hers was not a personality I would have expected to find in an enchanted castle.
“Yes, oh I know, I know. It’s probably just as well, because if we could talk to her it would be just too tempting, and then even the last hope would be gone.... Good night, dear heart. It doesn’t hurt to wish her good night,” the voice added, a little defensively. “Maybe she can feel it, somehow.”
“Maybe she can,” said the first voice. “Good night then, child, and sleep well.”
I found myself straining to say, But I can hear you, I can, please talk to me—what is it I can’t understand? What is impossible? What last hope? But I couldn’t open my mouth, and with the effort I suddenly woke up, to find a moon half full staring in through the tall window at me; the fringe of the bed-curtains made a filigree pattern of the light that fell on my bed. I stared back at the serene white half circle and its attendant constellations for a little while, and then fell into a dreamless sleep.
3
Spring grew slowly into summer. I no longer needed a cloak on the long afternoon rides, and the daisies in the meadows grew up to Greatheart’s knees. I finished rereading the Iliad and started the Odyssey^ I still loved Homer, but Cicero, whom I read in a spirit of penance, I liked no better than I had several years ago. I read the Bacchae and Medea over and over again so many times that I knew them by heart. I also found my way back to the great library at the end of the hall of paintings, and read the Browning that the Beast had recommended. On the whole I liked the poems, even if they were a little obscure in places. Emboldened, I tried
The Ad-ventures of Sherlock Holmes, but I had to give that up in a few pages, because I could make nothing of it. Then quite by accident, or at least it seemed so, I discovered a long shelf of wonderful stories and verses by a Sir Walter Scott; and I read a book called The Once and Future King twice, although I still liked Malory better. I stayed away from the hall of paintings. The castle, as usual, ordered itself to the convenience of my comings and goings, and the library was now regularly to be found down one short corridor and up a flight of stairs from my room.
After that day when I introduced the Beast and Great-heart to each other, the Beast occasionally joined us on our morning walks. At first Greatheart was uneasy, although he gave me no more trouble; but after a few weeks Greatheart was nearly as comfortable as I was in the Beast’s company. I let the big horse wander free, without halter or rope, as I had done at home; and I noticed that he kept me between himself and the Beast, and the Beast never offered to touch him.
Sometimes too the Beast would find me in the library, where I was sitting on my feet in a huge wing chair reading The Bride of Lammermoor or The Ring and the Book. Once he found me smiling foolishly over “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” and asked me to read it aloud. I hesitated. I was sitting by the window, where my favourite chair had obligingly arranged itself, my elbow on the ivy-edged stone sill. The Beast turned away from me long enough to call a chair up to him, which was joined a moment later by a footstool with four ivory legs, bowed like the forelegs of a bulldog. He sat down and looked at me expectantly, There didn’t seem to be any opportunity for nervousness on my part, so I put my hesitations aside and read it, “Now it’s your turn,” I said, and passed the book to him.
He held it as if it were a butterfly for a moment, then leaned back and began to turn the pages—with dexterity, I noticed—and then made me laugh with his sly reading of “Soliloquy in the Spanish Cloister.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the beginning of a tradition; most days after that we took turns reading to each other. Once after several weeks of a daily chapter of Bleak House, he did not come one day, and I missed him sadly. I scolded him for his neglect when I saw him at sunset that evening. He looked pleased and said, “Very well. I shan’t miss again.”
This brief exchange made me think, whether I would or no, I wondered that we didn’t tire of each other’s company; perhaps even more I wondered that I sought his. We saw each other several hours of every day; yet I at least always looked forwards to the next meeting, and his visits never seemed long. Part of it, I supposed, was that we were each other’s only alternative to solitude; but I could admit that this wasn’t all. I tried not to wonder too much, and to be grateful. This idyll was not at all what I had imagined during that last month at home with a red rose keeping secret silent watch over the parlour.
There were only two flaws in my enjoyment of this new life. The worst was my longing for home, for the sight of my family; and I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of them at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself. The other was that every evening after supper, when I stood up from the long table in the dining hall and prepared to go upstairs to my room, the Beast asked: “Beauty, will you marry me?” Every evening, I answered, “No,” and left the room at once. The first few weeks I looked over my shoulder as I hastened upstairs, fearing that he would be angry, and would follow me to put his question more forcefully. But he never did. The weeks passed, and with them my fear, which was replaced by friendship and even a timid affection. I came to dread that nightly question for quite a different reason. I did not like to refuse him the only thing he ever asked of me. My “No” grew no less certain, but I said it quietly and walked upstairs feeling as if I had just done something shameful. We had such good times together, and yet they always came to this, at every day’s final parting. I knew I was fond of him, but the thought of marrying him remained horrible.