The Trespasser

'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.