'What is it, Helena?' he asked at last. 'Why should you cry?' She pressed her face in his breast, and said in a muffled,
unrecognizable voice: 'You won't leave me, will you, Siegmund?' 'How could I? How should I?' he murmured soothingly. She lifted her face
suddenly and pressed on him a fierce kiss.
'How could I leave you?' he repeated, and she heard his voice waking,
the grip coming into his arms, and she was glad.
An intense silence came over everything. Helena almost expected to hear
the stars moving, everything below was so still. She had no idea what
Siegmund was thinking. He lay with his arms strong around her. Then she
heard the beating of his heart, like the muffled sound of salutes, she
thought. It gave her the same thrill of dread and excitement, mingled
with a sense of triumph. Siegmund had changed again, his mood was gone,
so that he was no longer wandering in a night of thoughts, but had
become different, incomprehensible to her. She had no idea what she
thought or felt. All she knew was that he was strong, and was knocking
urgently with his heart on her breast, like a man who wanted something
and who dreaded to be sent away. How he came to be so concentratedly
urgent she could not understand. It seemed an unreasonable an
incomprehensible obsession to her. Yet she was glad, and she smiled in
her heart, feeling triumphant and restored. Yet again, dimly, she
wondered where was the Siegmund of ten minutes ago, and her heart lifted
slightly with yearning, to sink with a dismay. This Siegmund was so
incomprehensible. Then again, when he raised his head and found her
mouth, his lips filled her with a hot flush like wine, a sweet, flaming
flush of her whole body, most exquisite, as if she were nothing but a
soft rosy flame of fire against him for a moment or two. That, she
decided, was supreme, transcendental.
The lights of the little farmhouse below had vanished, the yellow specks
of ships were gone. Only the pier-light, far away, shone in the black
sea like the broken piece of a star. Overhead was a silver-greyness of
stars; below was the velvet blackness of the night and the sea. Helena
found herself glimmering with fragments of poetry, as she saw the sea,
when she looked very closely, glimmered dustily with a reflection
of stars.
_Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser
Ohne Regung ruht das Meer ..._ She was fond of what scraps of German verse she knew. With French verse
she had no sympathy; but Goethe and Heine and Uhland seemed to speak
her language.