“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.
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