And as she spoke, once more she went back to her flowers. And she
dragged her great basket, with difficulty, to the very edge of the
cliff, and knelt, sitting on her own feet, beside it. And taking out
its flowers, one by one, she began rapidly and skilfully to weave them
in a garland, crooning to herself all the while a kind of song, in a
voice so low as to be all but inaudible. And she paid absolutely no
attention to the King at all, wholly absorbed as it seemed in her work,
and ignoring his presence altogether. And every now and then, she took
a flower, and held it up before her, speaking as it were to it, before
she wove it in among its fellows; and now and then she looked, with
attention, at a flower, and as if condemning it, threw it away into the
valley. So she continued, weaving, and muttering as it were a spell.
And all the while she swayed to and fro, a very little, as if keeping
time to her own unintelligible song.
And so as she sat and wove, the King stood watching her, leaning
against the door-post, with his arms folded, absolutely still. And he
resembled a rock, against which the sea of her beauty came beating,
wave after wave, as if to shake it from its base. And his soul went
travelling, by the means of his eye, slowly and carefully about her,
like a painter. And like a bee, it hovered about the flower of her
moving lips, and flew circling all about the slowly moving curve of her
bosom, and wandered in and out about her slender waist, lost, as she
sat kneeling, in the folds of her heavy limbs, and then rose and
repeated its journey, ending where it first began, and going round and
round her, as if unable to go away. And as he gazed, he became as it
were himself a sea, and began as it were to surge in agitation, under
the soft mysterious attraction of that moonlike mass of grace and
symmetry and curve and colour, floating as it seemed before him in the
air, on the edge of that cliff. And all the while, there was silence
in the arbour, broken only by the low sound of the singing of the
King's daughter. And in that silence, the humming of the bees outside
came, every now and then, drifting in upon the breeze, that carried
also the scent of the blossoms of the trees, and floated about the
King, charming at once by a double spell, like billows of the essence
of intoxication rolling in on his already intoxicated soul. And he
heard the wind below in the valley sweep sighing among its trees, and
now and then, the note of the wild pigeon calling to his wife. So he
stood, wrapped in a dream, lifted as it were on that cloud-loved
terrace above the world, and bathing in the nectar-poison of the
nervous apprehension of pure passion that was absolutely lost, in the
ecstasy of self-annihilation, in its object, the maiden form before
him, singing and swaying as she wove.
And then, at last, she finished her work, and stopped. And she stood
up, and took the garland she had made, and laid it carefully aside, in
a corner. And then she turned towards him, and pointed with her finger
to the marble seat that ran like a long bench all along the arbour
wall. And the King instantly went and took his seat, as if obeying her
commands, upon it, while she returned and remained, half sitting, half
kneeling, beside her basket with fragments of flowers all around her,
and her two hands joined together on her lap.