[_Eagerly._] My amulet! My amulet!
[_He speaks gravely._] Small comfort is counsel to broken lives;
But tolerance is medicinal.
In all our textures are loosed
Pulses straining against strictness
Because an easy issue lies therefrom.
(Could they but slink past the hands holding whips
To hunt them from the human pale
Where is the accident to cover? Spite fears bias.)
I am justified at my heart’s plea;
He is justified also.
For the eyes of vanity are sleepless—are suspicious.
Are mad with imaginings
Of secret stabs in words, in looks, in gestures.
Man is a chimera’s eremite,
That lures him from the good kindness of days
Which only ask his willingness.
There is a crazed shadow from no golden body
That poisons at the core
What smiles may stray:
It mixes with all God-ancestralled essences,
And twists the brain and heart.
This shadow sits in the texture of Saul’s being,
Mauling your love and beauty with its lies:
I hold a power like light to shrivel it—
There, in your throat’s hollow—that green jade.
[_He snatches at it as she lets it fall. He grows white and troubled,
and walks to where_ AMAK _is playing, and sees minutely strewn pieces
of paper_.]
[_He mutters._] Lost—lost.
The child has torn the scroll in it,
And half is away. It cannot be spelt now.