He felt that he must now answer her, and himself, in words that wouldn’t imply more than he could face.
“Well, the very force of your craving for life, the very force of your will, might sweep me along for a bit. I might be caught up for a whirl on the wheel of illusion; not that you could ever bind me to it: it would need my own will, blind again, for that.”
Her eyes had met his so steadily that he had imagined only contemplation or perhaps that maternal severity behind the steadiness. But the way in which they received these last tossed pebbles of metaphor showed him unrealized profundities. They deepened, they darkened, they widened on him. They seemed to engulf him in a sudden abyss of pain. And pain in her was indeed a color that could infect him.
“How horrible you are, Gavan,” she said, and her voice went with the words and with the look.
“Eppie!” he exclaimed on a tense, indrawn breath, as if over the sudden stab of a knife. “Have I hurt you?”
Her eyes turned from him. “Not what you say, or do. What you are.”
He leaned toward her. “Dear Eppie, why do you make me talk? Let me be still. I only ask to be still.”
“You are worse still. Don’t you think I see what stillness means?”
She had pushed her low seat from him,--for he stretched his hands to her with his supplication,--and, rising to her feet, stepping back, she stood before the fire, somberly looking down at him.
Gavan, too, rose. Compunction, supplication, a twist of perplexity and suffering, made him careless of discretion. Face to face, laying his hands on her shoulders, he said: “Don’t let me frighten you. It would be horrible if I could convince you, shatter you.”
Standing erect under his hands, she looked hard into his face.
“You could frighten me, horribly; but you couldn’t shatter me. You are ambiguous, veiled, all in mists. I am as clear, as sharp--.”
Her dauntlessness, the old defiance, were a relief--a really delicious relief. He was able to smile at her, a smile that pled for reassurance. “How can I frighten you, then?”
Her somber gaze did not soften. “Your mists come round me, chill, suffocating. They corrode my clearness.”
“No; no; it’s you who come into them. Don’t. Don’t. Keep away from me.”
“I’m not so afraid of you as that,” she answered.