'You must start again--you must. Always you rustle your red leaves of a
blasted summer. You are not dead. Even if you want to be, you're not.
Even if it's a bitter thing to say, you have to say it: you are
not dead....' Smiling a peculiar, painful smile, as if he hurt her, she turned to gaze
at a photograph that hung over the piano. It was the profile of a
handsome man in the prime of life. He was leaning slightly forward, as
if yielding beneath a burden of life, or to the pull of fate. He looked
out musingly, and there was no hint of rebellion in the contours of the
regular features. The hair was brushed back, soft and thick, straight
from his fine brow. His nose was small and shapely, his chin rounded,
cleft, rather beautifully moulded. Byrne gazed also at the photo. His
look became distressed and helpless.
'You cannot say you are dead with Siegmund,' he cried brutally. She
shuddered, clasped her burning arms on her breast, and looked into the
fire. 'You are not dead with Siegmund,' he persisted, 'so you can't say
you live with him. You may live with his memory. But Siegmund is dead,
and his memory is not he--himself,' He made a fierce gesture of
impatience. 'Siegmund now--he is not a memory--he is not your dead red
leaves--he is Siegmund Dead! And you do not know him, because you are
alive, like me, so Siegmund Dead is a stranger to you.' With her head bowed down, cowering like a sulky animal, she looked at
him under her brows. He stared fiercely back at her, but beneath her
steady, glowering gaze he shrank, then turned aside.
'You stretch your hands blindly to the dead; you look backwards. No, you
never touch the thing,' he cried.
'I have the arms of Louisa always round my neck,' came her voice, like
the cry of a cat. She put her hands on her throat as if she must relieve
an ache. He saw her lip raised in a kind of disgust, a revulsion from
life. She was very sick after the tragedy.
He frowned, and his eyes dilated.
'Folk are good; they are good for one. You never have looked at them.
You would linger hours over a blue weed, and let all the people down the
road go by. Folks are better than a garden in full blossom--' She watched him again. A certain beauty in his speech, and his
passionate way, roused her when she did not want to be roused, when
moving from her torpor was painful. At last-'You are merciless, you know, Cecil,' she said.