CHAPTER IX
This conversation greatly exercised Lavarcham, and she cast about for some means whereby she might restrain her ward. It was waste of time, as she quickly saw, for who that has been charged with a young person aged sixteen has not been forced at last to renounce all real guardianship?
At that age the time has passed for prohibitions, and the time has not yet come when advice can be listened to except in the form of flattery. The young body is eager for experience, and will be satisfied with nothing less actual, so the older person must grant freedom of movement or be run to death by that untiring energy. For a while the youngster will drink deeply, secretly, of her own will, and will then disengage for herself that which is serious and enduringfrom that which is merely pleasant and unprofitable. For all people who are not mentally lacking are sober-minded by instinct, and when the eager limbs have had their way the being looks inwardly, pining to exercise the mind and to equip itself for true existence.
At fourteen years of age Deirdre was not the untameable little savage she had been at twelve, and at the age of sixteen she had begun to long for some one to whom she might submit her will and from whom she could receive the guidance and wisdom and refreshment which she divined to be in herself, but which she could not reach.
Her fury of activity would be broken by equal periods of languor, wherein she would sit as in a daze, staring at the sky and not seeing it, or looking at the grass with a vague wonder as to what this was upon which her eyes were resting. Wild creatures or tame would trot or amble before her, but she was only conscious of a movement without a form. A bird might light and flirt and hop and fly, and her forsaken mind would touch those facts without gaining information from them, and would loseitself behind the movement vaguely, blindly, dizzily, until the bird mixed into the sky and the sky rounded and receded and disappeared, leaving her eyes nothing to rest on and her errant mind without any support.
She would look on her arms, as they hung helplessly in the grass, and wonder that they were so unoccupied, and wonder that they were so empty. And an oppression came to her heart, gentle enough, but without end, as though something stirred there that could not stir, as though something sought to weep and could not weep; so that she must weep for it, and grieve for it, and be of a tenderness to that unknown beyond all the tenderness that she had sensed about her. And these idle tears would arouse, or assuage her, so that she wondered why she wept, and she would leap from such nonsense and speed away like one distraught with excess of life and energy.
She would become affectionate then. She mothered the cow and its lanky calf; the peeping rabbit and her popping brood. The shaggy mare and her dear, shy foaleen, an arm about each neck, listenedto a conversation they loved and seemed to understand. When she tried to leave them they trotted behind with gentle, persistent feet and eyes of such pleading that she must run passionately back, crying that she would come again, that she would surely come back to them on the morrow. There was not a nest she did not know of, and the young grey mother, snuggling among the leaves, would look gravely out at the grey eye that peeped within, and would hearken to a cooing so delicious, so burthened with love, that her broody hour would pass uncounted, and she would forget her mate abroad, and the wide airs of the tree-tops.
At night the moon could woo her so passionately she must forsake her bed and go tiptoe among dark corridors until she came into the presence. What wild counsel did she receive from the glowing queen! Or was it the unmoving quietude that whispered without words; intimations of—what? Shy touches at the heart, so that she, who feared nothing, would look about her, startled as a young roe, who senses something on the wind, and flies without more query.
How lovely to her was that suspense and fear, when her every nerve thrilled to a life more poignant than she had surmised; when something that did not happen was perpetually occurring; when, as it were in a moment, she might be told—what secrets! or be cautioned of something imminent and advised!
She lost herself in the moon, wooing it, wooed by it, until she seemed to move in the moon, and the moon to move in her; a sole whiteness, a sole chillness, one equal potency—For what? for that, for it, for something, for nothing, for everything. She submitted her destiny to the delicate sweet lady of the sky, and one night, beckoned to, drawn at, surrounded, a small moon shining in the moon, she went on and on, passing the grass to the turf; leaving the turf for the stony places; from there to the wall, and over the wall also; so lightly, so imperceptibly, so moonily, the drowsy guard did not see; or if he saw ’twas but a moonbeam that rose and fell, that fluttered and faded, that lapsed over a piece of hollow ground and glimmered away on the slope, merging in the silver flood and the shadesof ebony, and gone while he rubbed his eyes.
So she marched towards destiny.
She went among the darkness of trees, and farther, where the wood grew thin, into a dappled dancing of jet and silver; and, beyond, to where young voices called and called and called.
Such fresh young voices she had never heard before, used as she was to the dry, clipped utterance of Lavarcham, the toothless mumble of the servants, the rusty bawling of Fat-face as of an obstinate door that told of aches and reluctances, and the wheezing and grunting of his stiff companions. She stayed listening to those voices, young as her own, and as sweet; rattling like the waters that tumble and ride in the river; chattering like a nestful of young birds in spring; soaring up and falling down with an infinite eagerness and joy; until it seemed that a lark’s song and the flight of a swallow had come together and fused into one streaming of sound.
Standing behind a vast black tree her astonished heart released itself in tears, and she wept for her cloistered youth, andfor all that she did not know she had missed.
Then boldly she trod forward and sat herself resolutely at the camp-fire of the sons of Uisneac.