“Listen,” said Leece. “Oh, hear. I am not ignorant. If you really desire
that I should come no more, I will not. I am not one to intrude.”
“Lovely Leece,” he said, “it is for you, not I,” (yet knowing it was for
himself) and drew her hand to his lips, folding her fingers round the
kiss he placed in the palm.
She looked at him intently. “There is a cold breeze,” she said, and
stepping to the door, closed it before she ran across the room with
little quick steps to throw back the covers and slip in beside him. The
black brows brushed his cheek.
“If you hated me and really wanted to get rid of me, let me ask you,
what would you do? How different would you behave toward me than you are
now doing? You tell me that talking with you here in the morning gives
you pleasure and is a help to you. Why do you wish to stop it then, if I
am willing to come? And if you are thinking of any danger to me, why
surely that is my concern.”
As her arm came around his neck and their lips met in the long deep
kiss, he closed his eyes, not daring to look into hers, for this was no
Damaris the maid (and it was not that he dared not, but that he would
not). They came shuddering from the contact. “Ah, no,” he cried and drew
her close again and for a third time. But then she said suddenly; “Three
is enough,” and without another word slipped from beside him and was
gone.
All nights were now turned into a prelude to the mornings, and all days
to a prelude for the evenings, when one of the other sisters would talk
with them and gently jest at them for a pair of lovers, until Rodvard
and Leece went out for a stroll under avenues of plane-trees, where
lights flickered through the leaves in the warm summer air. The elder
Vyana or the younger Madaille often accompanied them on these journeys,
laughing a great deal as they conversed on matters of no importance, for
it was as though he and Leece had signed a treaty never to show anyone
outside how deeply they were concerned with each other. In the mornings,
when the subject turned to themselves, there were checks and
uncertainties in their words; yet it was a topic they could not avoid.
Rodvard would often leave his breakfast uneaten, the better to lie
beside her, kissing and kissing, with now and then some little thing
said.
“You must not love me,” she whispered one morning, turning her burning
face from his; “not in the human way.”
“Why not, Leece? I love—this,” and kissed her again.
“Ah, so do I. But to love, to love—it would be falling into the hands of
the Evil god for me to love you or you to love me, before you had been
to instruction and accepted the doctrine of the Prophet. Do you
understand?”
He did not (nor, when he broke the rule he had set on himself and looked
into her eyes, could he read behind them any illumination). “I am not
sure I want to be an Amorosian,” he said, gravely, “but if you say I
shall not love you, I will try not to. Only—”
She hugged him close then, and her lips sought his to end this, and to
say without words that this commerce of theirs was a pleasure for its
own sake and might be brought to destruction by any talk of a deeper
relation—or so he reasoned out her action, that night, as he lay in the
hour between waking and sleep. The pleasure of it was so sweet that he
dared do nothing to change the pattern; though when she tried to tell
him of the strange religion of the Prophet, he would change the
conversation to the mystery of their mutual attraction—in the midst of
which a vertigo of kissing and clasping would come upon them and there
would be silence for a long time. The door was always closed now;
sometimes the footsteps of Dame Gualdis could be heard outside, but
after the first time, when Leece slipped from the bed in panic, they
paid no attention, for the mother neither knocked nor entered. Only when
the steps sounded, Leece would gently hold his hand to make him cease
fondling her breasts, which she now allowed him freely to do at all
times, lying with dark lashes on her cheek and lips half parted.
She would not let him go further than this, nor did the cold Blue Star
speak of any willingness to do so. When once, with senses reeling, he
would have pressed the matter on, she said no, someone might come, there
was no time, and made other excuses, though she kissed him as she said
it, and caressed him with curious fingers. Yet it had become part of an
unspoken agreement between them that he should ask for no more, only
kiss her and be as bold as she permitted; and it was she who ultimately
brought the matter into words.
“If we were married, you could have me whenever you wished.” She said it
half regretfully (and he did look this time, catching behind her eyes
something like a color, something that spoke of a desire in her, though
somehow not of the same kind as his own).
By the convention into which they had fallen, he must now clasp her
eagerly and say, “Ah, Leece,” and kiss her for a long time, before
saying; “Yet if we did marry, and the mixture proved imperfect, consider
how we might hate each other.”
“I like to kiss you,” she said simply. “Vyana cried last night. She saw
him in the afternoon, and does not know what to do.”
“Feel my heart beat,” he said, placing her hand over it. “It would seem
to me that she and her lover are really meant for a perfect union. Could
she not enter the Myonessae and be chosen and persuade him to marriage
afterward?”
The girl went stiff in his arms, looking at him with eyes wide in
astonishment. “Why,” she cried, “that would be deception and sin—leading
him from the service of the God of love to Evil. Oh, Rodvard, never say
such things.”
There was a true trembling in her voice and he felt the moisture of a
tear, where her face was pressed into the crotch of his neck. (It did
not seem to him that a chance remark was a matter for such fervor, for
as he knew religion, it was a guide, and the world would go mad if one
tried to observe its commands in every particular.) But all this was
only the background of a flicker of surprise across his mind, as he left
her face and kissed her closed eyes. “Leece, Leece,” he said, “I didn’t
mean—” and did not know what more to say.
“Oh, Rodvard, I could not bear it if you deceived me like that.”
“Do you think I am trying to?” (Kiss.)
“I do not know. No. Ah, we must not do this. It leads us into the hands
of Evil. Rodvard, Rodvard, you must, if you want me. . . . Oh—” The word
died into lips moving without sound, on which his lips closed, her
breath began to come fast, she let his seeking fingers linger a moment
at her breasts and slide past, he could not see her eyes, but without
the intervention of his amulet, he knew that this was the moment—but at
the very point of sliding from the crest, Leece flung herself gasping
from his arms, and with a sob was gone.
Next morning his breakfast was left outside the door.