When she came to herself she sighed deeply. She woke to the exquisite
heaving of his life beneath her.
'I have been beyond life. I have been a little way into death!' she said
to her soul, with wide-eyed delight. She lay dazed, wondering upon it.
That she should come back into a marvellous, peaceful happiness
astonished her.
Suddenly she became aware that she must be slowly weighing down the life
of Siegmund. There was a long space between the lift of one breath and
the next. Her heart melted with sorrowful pity. Resting herself on her
hands, she kissed him--a long, anguished kiss, as if she would fuse her
soul into his for ever. Then she rose, sighing, sighing again deeply.
She put up her hands to her head and looked at the moon. 'No more,' said
her heart, almost as if it sighed too-'no more!' She looked down at Siegmund. He was drawing in great heavy breaths. He
lay still on his back, gazing up at her, and she stood motionless at his
side, looking down at him. He felt stunned, half-conscious. Yet as he
lay helplessly looking up at her some other consciousness inside him
murmured; 'Hawwa--Eve--Mother!' She stood compassionate over him.
Without touching him she seemed to be yearning over him like a mother.
Her compassion, her benignity, seemed so different from his little
Helena. This woman, tall and pale, drooping with the strength of her
compassion, seemed stable, immortal, not a fragile human being, but a
personification of the great motherhood of women.
'I am her child, too,' he dreamed, as a child murmurs unconscious in
sleep. He had never felt her eyes so much as now, in the darkness, when
he looked only into deep shadow. She had never before so entered and
gathered his plaintive masculine soul to the bosom of her nurture.
'Come,' she said gently, when she knew he was restored. 'Shall we go?' He rose, with difficulty gathering his strength.