Suddenly it was midnight. The muffled woman rose, turned toward
the settle, and slowly unwound the long swathes that hid her face:
they dropped on the ground, and she stepped over them. The feet of
the princess were toward the hearth; Mara went to her head, and
turning, stood behind it. Then I saw her face. It was lovely
beyond speech--white and sad, heart-and-soul sad, but not unhappy,
and I knew it never could be unhappy. Great tears were running down
her cheeks: she wiped them away with her robe; her countenance grew
very still, and she wept no more. But for the pity in every line
of her expression, she would have seemed severe. She laid her hand
on the head of the princess--on the hair that grew low on the
forehead, and stooping, breathed on the sallow brow. The body
shuddered.
"Will you turn away from the wicked things you have been doing so
long?" said Mara gently.
The princess did not answer. Mara put the question again, in the
same soft, inviting tone.
Still there was no sign of hearing. She spoke the words a third
time.
Then the seeming corpse opened its mouth and answered, its words
appearing to frame themselves of something else than sound.--I
cannot shape the thing further: sounds they were not, yet they were
words to me.
"I will not," she said. "I will be myself and not another!"
"Alas, you are another now, not yourself! Will you not be your real
self?"
"I will be what I mean myself now."
"If you were restored, would you not make what amends you could for
the misery you have caused?"
"I would do after my nature."
"You do not know it: your nature is good, and you do evil!"
"I will do as my Self pleases--as my Self desires."
"You will do as the Shadow, overshadowing your Self inclines you?"
"I will do what I will to do."
"You have killed your daughter, Lilith!"
"I have killed thousands. She is my own!"
"She was never yours as you are another's."
|