The voice and the light both ended together as if one knife had cut them short. Then, in the silence, I heard again the noise of the weeping.
I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.
I rose to go to her. But already the weeping was further away. She went wailing far off to my right, down to the end of the valley where I had never been, where doubtless it fell away, or dropped in sheer cliffs, towards the south. And I could not cross the stream. It would not even drown me. It would bruise and freeze and bemire me, but somehow whenever I grasped a rock—earth was no use now, for great slabs of the bank were slipping into the current every moment—I found I was still on this side. Sometimes I could not even find the river; I was so bewildered in the dark, and all the ground was now little better than a swamp, so that pools and new–formed brooks lured me now this way, now that.
I cannot remember more of that night. When day began to break, I could see what the god’s anger had done to the valley. It was all bare rock, raw earth, and foul water; trees, bushes, sheep, and here and there a deer, floated in it. If I could have crossed the first river in the night it would not have profited me; I should have reached only the narrow bank of mud between it and the next. Even now I could not help calling out Psyche’s name, calling till my voice was gone, but I knew it was foolishness. I had heard her leaving the valley. She had already gone into the exile which the god foretold. She had begun to wander, weeping, from land to land; weeping for her lover, not (I mustn’t so cheat myself) for me.
I went and found Gram; a wet, shivering wretch he was, who gave one scared glance at my bandaged arm, and no more, and asked no questions. We ate food from the saddle–bags and began our journey. The weather was fair enough.
I looked on the things about me with a new eye. Now that I’d proved for certain that the gods are and that they hated me, it seemed that I had nothing to do but to wait for my punishment. I wondered on which dangerous edge the horse would slip and fling us down a few hundred feet into a gully; or what tree would drop a branch on my neck as we rode under it; or whether my wound would corrupt and I should die that way. Often, remembering that it is sometimes the gods’ way to turn us into beasts, I put my hand up under my veil to see if I could feel cat’s fur, or dog’s muzzle, or hog’s tusks beginning to grow there. Yet with it all I was not afraid; never less. It is a strange, yet somehow a quiet and steady thing, to look round on earth and grass and the sky and say in one’s heart to each, “You are all my enemies now. None of you will ever do me good again. I see now only executioners.”
But I thought it most likely those words You also shall be Psyche meant that if she went into exile and wandering, I must do the same. And this, I had thought before, might very easily come about, if the men of Glome had no will to be ruled by a woman. But the god had been wide of the mark—so then they don’t know all things?—if he thought he could grieve me most by making my punishment the same as Psyche’s. If I could have borne hers as well as my own … but next best was to share. And with this I felt a sort of hard and cheerless strength rising in me. I would make a good beggarwoman. I was ugly; and Bardia had taught me how to fight.
Bardia … that set me thinking how much of my story I would tell him. Then, how much I would tell the Fox. I had not thought of this at all.
16. XVI
I crept in by the back parts of the palace and soon learned that my father had not yet come home from the hunting. But I went as soft and slinking to my place as if he had. When it became clear to my own mind (it did not at first) that I was hiding now not from the King but from the Fox, it was a trouble to me. Always before he had been my refuge and comforter.
Poobi cried over my wound and when she had the bandage off—that part was bad—laid good dressings on it. That was hardly done, and I was eating (hungrily enough) when the Fox came.
“Daughter, daughter,” he said. “Praise the gods who have sent you back. I have been in pain for you all day. Where have you been?”
“To the Mountain, Grandfather,” said I, keeping my left arm out of sight. This was the first of my difficulties. I could not tell him of the self–wounding. I knew, now I saw him (I had not thought of it before), that he would rebuke me for putting that kind of force upon Psyche. One of his maxims was that if we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content “and not bring a mercenary army to our aid”. (He meant passions.)
“Oh, child, that was sudden,” he said. “I thought we parted that night to talk it over again in the morning.”
“We parted to let you sleep,” said I. The words came fiercely, without my will and in my father’s own voice. Then I was ashamed.
“So that’s my sin,” said the Fox, smiling sadly. “Well, Lady, you have punished it. But what’s your news? Would Psyche hear you?”
I said nothing to that question but told him of the storm and the flood and how that mountain valley was now a mere swamp, and how I had tried to cross the stream and could not, and how I had heard Psyche go weeping away, on the south side of it, out of Glome altogether. There was no use in telling him about the god; he would have thought I had been mad or dreaming.
“Do you mean, child, you never came to speech with her at all?” said the Fox, looking very haggard.
“Yes,” I said. “We did talk a little; earlier.”
“Child, what is wrong? Was there a quarrel? What passed between you?”
This was harder to answer. In the end, when he questioned me closely, I told him about my plan of the lamp.
“Daughter, daughter!” cried the Fox, “what demon put such a device in your thoughts? What did you hope to do? Would not the villain by her side—he, a hunted man and an outlaw—be certain to wake? And what would he do then but snatch her up and drag her away to some other lair? Unless he stabbed her to the heart for fear she’d betray him to his pursuers. Why, the light alone would convince him she’d betrayed him already. How if it were a wound that made her weep? Oh, if you’d only taken counsel!”
I could say nothing. For now I wondered why indeed I had not thought of any of these things and whether I had ever at all believed her lover was a mountainy man.
The Fox stared at me, wondering more and more, I saw, at my silence. At last he said, “Did you find it easy to make her do this?”
“No,” said I. I had taken off, while I ate, the veil I had worn all day; now I greatly wished I had it on.
“And how did you persuade her?” he asked.
This was the worst of all. I could not tell him what I had really done. Nor much of what I’d said. For when I told Psyche that he and Bardia were both agreed about her lover I meant what was very true; both agreed it was some shameful or dreadful thing. But if I said this to the Fox, he would say that Bardia’s belief and his were sheer contraries, the one all old wives’ tales and the other plain workaday probabilities. He would make it seem that I had lied. I could never make him understand how different it had looked on the Mountain.
“I—I spoke with her,” said I at last. “I persuaded her.”
He looked long and searchingly at me, but never so tenderly since those old days when he used to sing The Moon’s gone down … I on his knee.
“Well. You have a secret from me,” he said in the end. “No, don’t turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it. Some day—but you must obey the god within you, not the god within me. There, do not weep. I shall not cease to love you if you have a hundred secrets. I’m an old tree and my best branches were lopped off me the day I became a slave. You and Psyche were all that remained. Now—alas, poor Psyche! I see no way to her now. But I’ll not lose you.”