Was not this absolute chastity itself
a kind of death? She, too, in secret makes her gruesome midnight
offering with averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger;
creeps to his cubicle [172] to see; the face is covered, as he lies,
against the cold. She traces the motionless outline, raises the
coverlet; with the nice black head deep in the fleecy pillow he is
sleeping quietly, he dreams of that other mother gliding in upon the
moonbeam, and awaking turns sympathetically upon the living woman, is
subdued in a moment to the expression of her troubled spirit, and
understands.
And when the child departed from her for the first time, springing
from his white bed before the dawn, to accompany the elders on their
annual visit to the Eleusinian goddess, the after-sense of his
wonderful happiness, tranquillising her in spite of herself by its
genial power over the actual moment, stirred nevertheless a new sort
of anxiety for the future. Her work in life henceforward was defined
as a ministry to so precious a gift, in full consciousness of its
risk; it became her religion, the centre of her pieties. She missed
painfully his continual singing hovering about the place, like the
earth itself made audible in all its humanities.
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