If it rested only with the boys the girls might go unmarried, for boys
have urgent interests and have little of the leisure for dream which
girls enjoy.
They feel, moreover, at a loss in that art wherein a girl seems
instinctively wise; for as a young bee will undertake untaught the
curious angles and subtle perfections of his home, so a girl will
adventure herself in love without misgiving and without teaching.
The secret of the bee and of the girl is that they give their whole
minds to their idea; and this powerful concentration, wherein the
being comes to a oneness of desire, moves to its ends as unerringly as
a bird wings to the sole hedge he aims for among all the hedges of a
country-side.
So, although Naoise did think again of their visitor, his thought of
her was but one among many, for he had grave businesses in hand, and,
except when he slept, his leisure for dreaming was limited.
He had long since left the Boy Troop at Emania. He had performed the
feats by which an apprentice rises to be a master, and a full two years
had passed since Conachúr, in the presence of a solemn concourse, had
received him into the Red Branch, and bestowed on him the armour which
he had won, and the shield which he would honourably guard.
He was a gentleman by birth, but he was now a soldier also, and must
lift his hand for those who besought protection or against those who
derided it. He would move habitually where death urged about him at no
greater distance than the length of a spear, and he would look upon
death as being so instant a part of life, that he must woo the one as
earnestly as he loved the other.
His thought of Deirdre was also complicated by the knowledge that she
was his master’s ward, and his personal loyalty to Conachúr was such
that he would not dwell even in imagination on that which belonged to
the king.
Stories of Deirdre had long ago come abroad. The fact of her lonely
keeping lent a romantic charm to gossip, and all that was said about
her was stressed by the singular condition of her birth and upbringing.
The old servants hinted and blinked and nodded, indicating thus a
beauty for which there was no parallel; and the ancient guards, partly
in brag, partly in truth, lent an aid to the spread of the Deirdre
rumour.
These things, however, were to be talked about, but they were not to
be further looked into, for she belonged to the king, and curiosity
itself went lightly in the presence of that notable fact. Therefore, so
far as a young man could, Naoise put Deirdre out of his mind, or only
remembered her as a delicious apparition, and he warned his brothers
that they must on no account mention her escapade.
But if this was the case with the boy it was not so with the girl.
For good or ill her imagination had been captured, and through it her
senses had awakened. Her fancies had now a home to fly to, and while
the unrest proper to her years grew as stealthily as her limbs, it was
no longer unnoted. She had a direction and she leaned there as ardently
and unconsciously as a flower turns to the sun.
Now she became a creature of another reverie; no longer staring vaguely
into space, but looking there, and seeing what even the wise Lavarcham
could not surmise.
This powerful brooding of desire is a magical act, and the object of it
does not remain entirely unaffected; for, even if no coherent message
is despatched, the unrest is shared in however diffused a form, and it
may be that in sleep Naoise was no longer the master of his dreams.
But the real scope of an action is with the actor, and Deirdre,
brooding on Naoise, was Deirdre brooding on herself, and taking
conscious control and direction of her own growth and culture.
Lavarcham noticed the difference; for when she spoke to the girl she
was replied to by the woman, and she sensed in her ward something
intractable, obedient still, and yet as removed from her cognizance,
and so from her control, as she was herself from the cognizance of any
person about her.