“Sure there is no loneliness in the world,” she said.
“I take my soul with me upon this Journey,” said Mary.
“My soul,” she said gravely, “it is what keeps loneliness from me.”
He mused upon that a little. “Look ye’re, Mary, soul is just but the chain of eternal mortality, that is what I think it; but you speak as if it were something you pick up and carry about with you, something made of gutta-percha, like a tobacco pouch.”
She smiled upon him: “It is what covers me from loneliness ... it’s ... it’s the little garment which sometime God will take upon him--being God.”
Seven days only and seven little nights we were together and I made scores of poems about her that were different from any poems that have come into the world, but I could never sing them now. In the mornings she would go wash herself in the pools, and Monk and I would walk a little way off from her. Monk was very delicate about that, but I would turn and see the white-armed girl rolling up her dark hair, and her white feet travelling to the water as she pulled the gown from her beauty. She was made like the down of doves and the bloom of bees. It’s like enough she did love me in a very frail and delicate sort of way, like a bush of lavendie might love the wind that would be snaring it from its root in the garden, but never won a petal of it, nor a bloom, only a little of its kind kind air.
We asked her as we went upon the hills: Had she no fear of getting her death?
“A use of your death--and how would you do that, tell me,” says I.
And she told us grand things about death, in her soft wonderful voice; strange talk to be giving the likes of him and me.
“I’d give the heart out of my skin,” said I, “not to be growing old--the sin and sorrow of the world, with no hope of life and despair in its conclusion.”
“Ha! ha! better a last hope than a hopeless conclusion,” says Mr. Monk; “so try hope with another lozenge, Michael, and give a free drink to despair.”
“Have _you_ no fear of death?” Mary asked of him.
And Monk, he said: “I have no unreasonable regard for him; I may bow before the inevitable, but I decline to grovel before it, and if I burn with the best of ’em--well, I’d rather be torrid than torpid.”
“It would be well,” said Mary, “to praise God for such courage.”