"Because you act like one, with your fairy tales of women in the
wind...."
Suddenly Robin's agony overflowed and he caught at her, holding her
around the knees, clinging to her as he had not done since he was a
small child, his words stumbling and rushing over one another.
"Helen, Helen darling, don't be angry with me," he begged, and caught
her in a blind embrace that pulled her off her feet. She had never
guessed how strong he was; but he seemed very like a little boy, and
she hugged him quickly as he began to cover her face with childish
kisses.
"Don't cry, Robin, my baby, it's all right," she murmured, kneeling
close to him. Gradually the wildness of his passionate crying abated;
she touched his forehead with her cheek to see if it were heated with
fever, and he reached up and held her there. Helen let him lie against
her shoulder, feeling that perhaps after the violence of his outburst
he would fall asleep, and she was half asleep herself when a sudden
shock of realization darted through her; quickly she tried to free
herself from Robin's entangling arms.
"Robin, let me go."
He clung to her, not understanding. "Don't let go of me, Helen.
Darling, stay here beside me," he begged, and pressed a kiss into her
throat.
Helen, her blood icing over, realized that unless she freed herself
very quickly now, she would be fighting against a strong, aroused young
man not clearly aware of what he was doing. She took refuge in the
sharp maternal note of ten years ago, almost vanished in the closer,
more equal companionship of the time between:
"No, Robin. Stop it, at once, do you hear?"
Automatically he let her go, and she rolled quickly away, out of his
reach, and got to her feet. Robin, too intelligent to be unaware of her
anger and too naive to know its cause, suddenly dropped his head and
wept, wholly unstrung. "Why are you angry?" he blurted out. "I was only
loving you."
And at the phrase of the five-year-old child, Helen felt her throat
would burst with its ache. She managed to choke out, "I'm not angry,
Robin--we'll talk about this later, I promise--" and then, her own
control vanishing, turned and fled precipitately into the pouring rain.
She plunged through the familiar woods for a long time, in a daze of
unthinking misery. She did not even fully realize that she was sobbing
and muttering aloud, "No, no, no, no--"
She must have wandered for several hours. The rain had stopped and the
darkness was lifting before she began to grow calmer and to think more
clearly.
She had been blind, not to foresee this day when Robin was a child;
only if her child had been a daughter could it have been avoided.
Or--she was shocked at the hysterical sound of her own laughter--if
Colin had stayed and they had raised a family like Adam and Eve!
But what now? Robin was sixteen; she was not yet forty. Helen caught at
vanishing memories of society; taboos so deeply rooted that for Helen
they were instinctual and impregnable. Yet for Robin nothing existed
except this little patch of forest and Helen herself--the only person
in his world, more specifically at the moment the only woman in his
world. _So much_, she thought bitterly, _for instinct. But have I the
right to begin this all over again? Worse; have I the right to deny its
existence and when I die, leave Robin alone?_
She had stumbled and paused for breath, realizing that she had
wandered in circles and that she was at a familiar point on the river
bank which she had avoided for sixteen years. On the heels of this
realization she became aware that for only the second time in memory,
the winds were wholly stilled.
* * * * *
Her eyes, swollen with crying, ached as she tried to pierce the gloom
of the mist, lilac-tinted with the approaching sunrise, which hung
around the water. Through the dispersing mist she made out, dimly, the
form of a man.
He was tall, and his pale skin shone with misty white colors. Helen sat
frozen, her mouth open, and for the space of several seconds he looked
down at her without moving. His eyes, dark splashes in the pale face,
had an air of infinite sadness and compassion, and she thought his lips
moved in speech, but she heard only a thin familiar rustle of wind.
Behind him, mere flickers, she seemed to make out the ghosts of other
faces, tips of fingers of invisible hands, eyes, the outline of a
woman's breast, the curve of a child's foot. For a minute, in Helen's
weary numbed state, all her defenses went down and she thought: _Then
I'm not mad and it wasn't a dream and Robin isn't Reynolds' son at all.
His father was this--one of these--and they've been watching me and
Robin, Robin has seen them, he doesn't know he's one of them, but they
know. They know and I've kept Robin from them all these sixteen years._
The man took two steps toward her, the translucent body shifting
to a dozen colors before her blurred eyes. His face had a curious
familiarity--_familiarity_--and in a sudden spasm of terror Helen
thought, "I'm going mad, it's Robin, _it's Robin_--"
* * * * *
His hand was actually outstretched to touch her when her scream cut icy
lashes through the forest, stirring wild echoes in the wind-voices, and
she whirled and ran blindly toward the treacherous, crumbling bank.
Behind her came steps, a voice, a cry--Robin, the strange dryad-man,
she could not guess. The horror of incest, the son the father the lover
suddenly melting into one, overwhelmed her reeling brain and she fled
insanely to the brink. She felt a masculine hand actually gripping her
shoulder, she might have been pulled back even then, but she twisted
free blindly, shrieking, "No, Robin, no, no--" and flung herself down
the steep bank, to slip and hurl downward and whirl around in the
raging current to spinning oblivion and death....
* * * * *
Many years later, Merrihew, grown old in the Space Service, falsified
a log entry to send his ship for a little while into the orbit of the
tiny green planet he had named Robin's World. The old buildings had
fallen into rotted timbers, and Merrihew quartered the little world for
two months from pole to pole but found nothing. Nothing but shadows and
whispers and the unending voices of the wind. Finally, he lifted his
ship and went away.