'I want nothing more and nothing different,' he continued; 'and that's
the extreme of a decent time, I should think.' 'The extreme of a decent time!' she repeated.
But he drawled on lazily: 'I've only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I've got
all the cheese--which is you, my dear.' 'I certainly feel eaten up,' she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him
lying in a royal ease, his eyes naïve as a boy's, his whole being
careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she felt
very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a sense
of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy, his
fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his
buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or
spoil one minute of his consummate hour.
From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the
path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them.
Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid's chair,
wheeling silently over the short dry grass. The invalid, a young man,
was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his
pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted
body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken
eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half
obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he
should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the
torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide--'the life
tide,' she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her own
distress. She was fretted to her soul.
'Come!' she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the
completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him.
'We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow--so
quiet,' she said to herself.
They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her own
state, after her own fashion.
'The Mist Spirit,' she said to herself. 'The Mist Spirit draws a curtain
round us--it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a thin, torn
curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the curtain again, I
do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of the outside, and I
am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I want to be in our own
fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain.' As if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said: 'Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next
year, and stay for a whole month?' 'If there be any next year,' said she.