“Hast thou conceived?” he asked her.
“Why?” she said.
“Thou art like a tree whose green leaves follow the blossom, full of sap. And there is a withdrawing about thee.”
“It is so,” she said. “I am with young by thee. Is it good?”
“Yea!” he said. “How should it not be good? So the nightingale calls no more from the valley-bed. But where wilt thou bear the child, for I am naked of all but life?”
“We will stay here,” she said.
“But the lady, your mother?”
A shadow crossed her brow. She did not answer.
“What when she knows?” he said.
“She begins to know.”
“And would she hurt you?”
“Ah, not me! What I have is all my own. And I shall be big with Osiris…But thou, do you watch her slaves.”
She looked at him, and the peace of her maternity was troubled by anxiety.
“Let not your heart be troubled!” he said. “I have died the death once.”
So he knew the time was come again for him to depart. He would go alone, with his destiny. Yet not alone, for the touch would be upon him, even as he left his touch on her. And invisible suns would go with him.
Yet he must go. For here on the bay the little life of jealousy and property was resuming sway again, as the suns of passionate fecundity relaxed their sway. In the name of property, the widow and her slaves would seek to be revenged on him for the bread he had eaten, and the living touch he had established, the woman he had delighted in. But he said: “Not twice! They shall not now profane the touch in me. My wits against theirs.”
So he watched. And he knew they plotted. So he moved from the little cave and found another shelter, a tiny cove of sand by the sea, dry and secret under the rocks.
He said to the woman:
“I must go now soon. Trouble is coming to me from the slaves. But I am a man, and the world is open. But what is between us is good, and is established. Be at peace. And when the nightingale calls again from your valley-bed, I shall come again, sure as spring.”
She said: “0, don’t go! Stay with me on half the island, and I will build a house for you and me under the pine trees by the temple, where we can live apart.”
Yet she knew that he would go. And even she wanted the coolness of her own air around her, and the release from anxiety.
“If I stay,” he said, “they will betray me to the Romans and to their justice. But I will never be betrayed again. So when I am gone, live in peace with the growing child. And I shall come again: all is good between us, near or apart. The suns come back in their seasons: and I shall come again.”
“Do not go yet,” she said. “I have set a slave to watch at the neck of the peninsula. Do not go yet, till the harm shows.”
But as he lay in his little cove, on a calm, still night, he heard the soft knock of oars, and the bump of a boat against the rock. So he crept out to listen. And he heard the Roman overseer say:
“Lead softly to the goat’s den. And Lysippus shall throw the net over the malefactor while he sleeps, and we will bring him before justice, and the Lady of Isis shall know nothing of it…”
The man who had died caught a whiff of flesh from the oiled and naked slaves as they crept up, then the faint perfume of the Roman. He crept nearer to the sea. The slave who sat in the boat sat motionless, holding the oars, for the sea was quite still. And the man who had died knew him.
So out of the deep cleft of a rock he said, in a clear voice:
Page 1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829
