CHAPTER XXIII
Lavarcham left the king’s presence.
She came away bowed and blind and dizzy, shuffling in any direction and unaware of why she was walking or where she was going. An hundred thoughts, battling furiously for precedence, kept her thoughtless; an hundred pictures, each striving for place and examination, kept her blind. She was all a din and whirl and swirl, as though the winds that raged in gust and countercurrent through her brain were blowing her along. At times she would remember that she did not wish to go where she was going, and she would spin furiously aside and go as stupidly in another path; and at times she would discover that she was standing, still and collected as a stone, a nothing; staring on nothing. Great sighs broke from hermiserable heart; or she was so shattered by dry sobbings that it seemed her bones must part company with her flesh and with each other; and again, with her two hands gripped on her mouth she squeezed back a medley of screams, and listened, as in amazement, to the thin whinings that forced through the crooked spaces in her fingers. Again, the cautious woman would peep and peer to see if any person was nigh to observe her, and before that survey could make its round she would forget what she was looking for, and think thattheycould not be seen from this place, for they have hours’ start, and will be—where? by this time.
With what unbelieving anguish that flight had forced itself upon her! She had gone trotting and ambling and panting about her rooms and fields, calling—
“Deirdre, Deirdre, Deirdre?”
Searching for her baby in a work-basket or on the flat of a ceiling, while the servants gibbered and squealed and bubbled and blared at her and at each other.
With what an iron dismay the thought of Conachúr came on her, desolating andunreckoned as the thunderclap which howls on the heels of its howling brother.
He must be told.
And at that she poked up her nose like a moonstruck dog pealing scream on scream, until the attending hags fled into corners as the mice do when they are frightened, and screamed with her and at her and at the roof.
She went to Conachúr.
She stood mumbling and staring outside the door and then trotted in, whispering at him:
“She’s gone.”
And Conachúr echoed, in uncomprehending amazement:
“She’s gone.”
Lavarcham stared into the king’s face that was carved in the granite of suspense and astonishment.
“She’s gone, little Deirdre’s gone,” she yelled, and emptied her thin fingers on the air as though she emptied them of Deirdre. She clapped her hands together with a dreadful giggle, and flapped her arms along her thighs like some ungainly crow that has been set dancing drunk on mead.
“When a maid goes a man goes with her,” she croaked.
She flopped to the door and hopped out of it and popped back.
“She’s gone,” she cried. “She’s gone; she ran away with a man”; and she wobbled to the doorway again, nodding and tittering at the king until she disappeared.
The servants and guards were listening with their eyes staring, their mouths open, and their breathing forgotten.
A whisper, a thrill, a terrible constriction of the heart fled through the vast palace, and went zigzagging like wildfire about Ulster. And in the centre of that Conachúr stood, alone; with his fists closed and his eyes closed; listening to the whispers that were an inch away and an hundred miles away; that were over him and under him and in him: listening to the blanching of his face and to the liquifying of his bones: listening in a rage of curiosity and woe for the more that might be said and all the more that might be thought: trying, as with one gripping of the mind, to sense all the bitterness that might be; to exhaust it in one gulp, and re-awaken as at a million removes from all that had ever been or could be till Doom.