That matronly primness, from the child she was, went near to ending my patience. It was almost (but I think now she did not mean it so) as if she taunted me. Yet I ruled myself.
“Well, if you are so sure, Psyche, you will not refuse to put it to the test.”
“What test? Though I need none myself.”
“I have brought a lamp, and oil. See. Here they are.” (I set them down beside her.) “Wait till he—or it—sleeps. Then look.”
“I cannot do that.”
“Ah! … you see! You will abide no test. And why? Because you are not sure yourself. If you were, you’d be eager to do it. If he is, as you say, a god, one glimpse will set all our doubts at rest. What you call our dark thoughts will be put to flight. But you daren’t.”
“Oh, Orual, what evil you think! The reason I cannot look at him—least of all by such trickery as you’d have me do—is that he has forbidden me.”
“I can think—Bardia and the Fox can think—of one reason only for such a forbidding. And of one only for your obeying it.”
“Then you know little of love.”
“You fling my virginity in my face again, do you? Better it than the stye you’re in. So be it. Of what you now call love, I do know nothing. You can whisper about it to Redival better than to me—or to Ungit’s girls, maybe, or the King’s doxies. I know another sort of love. You shall find what it’s like. You shall not——”
“Orual, Orual, you are raving,” said Psyche; herself unangered, gazing at me large–eyed, sorrowful, but nothing humble about her sorrow. You would have thought she was my mother, not I (almost) hers. I had known this long time that the old meek, biddable Psyche was gone for ever; yet it shocked me afresh.
“Yes,” I said. “I was raving. You had made me angry. But I had thought (you will set me right, I don’t doubt, if I am mistaken) that all loves alike were eager to clear the thing they loved of vile charges brought against it; if they could. Tell a mother her child is hideous. If it’s beautiful she’ll show it. No forbidding would stop her. If she keeps it hidden, the charge is true. You’re afraid of the test, Psyche.”
“I am afraid—no, I am ashamed … to disobey him.”
“Then, even at the best, look what you make of him! Something worse than our father. Who that loved you could be angry at your breaking so unreasonable a command—and for so good a reason?”
“Foolishness, Orual,” she answered, shaking her head. “He is a god. He has good grounds for what he does, be sure. How should I know of them? I am only his simple Psyche.”
“Then you will not do it? You think—you say you think—that you can prove him a god and set me free from the fears that sicken my heart. But you will not do it.”
“I would if I could, Orual.”
I looked about me. The sun was almost setting behind the saddle. In a little while she would send me away. I rose up.
“An end of this must be made,” I said. “You shall do it. Psyche, I command you.”
“Dear Maia, my duty is no longer to you.”
“Then my life shall end with it,” said I. I flung back my cloak further, thrust out my bare left arm, and struck the dagger into it till the point pricked out on the other side. Pulling the iron back through the wound was the worse pain; but I can hardly believe now how little I felt it.
“Orual! Are you mad?” cried Psyche, leaping up.
“You’ll find linen in that urn. Tie up my wound,” said I, sitting down and holding the arm out to let the blood fall on the heather.
I had thought she might scream and wring her hands or faint. But I was deceived. She was pale enough but had all her wits about her. She bound my arm. The blood came seeping through fold after fold, but she staunched it in the end. (My stroke had been lucky enough. If I had known as much then as I do now about the inside of an arm, I might not—who knows?—have had the resolution to do it.)
The bandaging could not be done in a moment. The sun was lower and the air colder when we were able to talk again.
“Maia,” said Psyche, “what did you do that for?”
“To show you I’m in earnest, girl. Listen. You have driven me to desperate courses. I give you your choice. Swear on this edge, with my blood still wet on it, that you will this very night do as I have commanded you; or else I’ll first kill you and then myself.”
“Orual,” says she, very queenlike, raising her head, “you might have spared that threat of killing me. All your power over me lies in the other.”
“Then swear, girl. You never knew me break my word.”
The look in her face now was one I did not understand. I think a lover—I mean, a man who loved—might look so on a woman who had been false to him. And at last she said:
“You are indeed teaching me about kinds of love I did not know. It is like looking into a deep pit. I am not sure whether I like your kind better than hatred. Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other, newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture … I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.”
“Enough of your subtleties,” said I. “Both of us die here, in plainest truth and blood, unless you swear.”
“If I do,” said she hotly, “it will not be for any doubt of my husband or his love. It will only be because I think better of him than of you. He cannot be cruel like you. I’ll not believe it. He will know how I was tortured into my disobedience. He will forgive me.”
“He need never know,” said I.
The look of scorn she gave me flayed my soul. And yet, this very nobleness in her—had I not taught it to her? What was there in her that was not my work? And now she used it to look at me as if I were base beneath all baseness.
“You thought I would hide it? Thought I would not tell him?” she said; each word like the rubbing of a file across raw flesh. “Well. It’s all of a piece. Let us, as you say, make an end. You grow more and more a stranger to me at each word. And I had loved you so; loved, honoured, trusted, and (while it was fit) obeyed. And now; but I can’t have your blood, on my threshold. You chose your threat well. I’ll swear. Where’s your dagger?”
So I had won my victory and my heart was in torment. I had a terrible longing to unsay all my words and beg her forgiveness. But I held out the dagger. (The “oath on edge”, as we call it, is our strongest in Glome.)
“And even now,” said Psyche, “I know what I do. I know that I am betraying the best of lovers and that perhaps, before sunrise, all my happiness may be destroyed for ever. This is the price you have put upon your life. Well, I must pay it.”
She took her oath. My tears burst out, and I tried to speak, but she turned her face away.
“The sun is almost down,” she said. “Go. You have saved your life; go and live it as you can.”
I found I was becoming afraid of her. I made my way back to the stream; crossed it somehow. And the shadow of the saddle leaped across the whole valley as the sun set.
15. XV
I think I must have fainted when I got to this side of the water, for there seems to be some gap in my memory between the fording and being fully aware again of three things: cold, and the pain in my arm, and thirst. I drank ravenously. Then I wanted food, and now first remembered that I had left it in the urn with the lamp. My soul rose up against calling Gram, who was very irksome to me. I felt (though I saw it to be folly even at the time) that if Bardia had come with me instead, all might have been different and better. And away my thoughts wandered to imagine all he would be doing and saying now if he had, till suddenly I remembered what business had brought me there. I was ashamed that I had thought, even for a moment, of anything else.