LVI
ANTHONY gazed above their heads. There, again, clear and sweet, his name shaped like a bell-note. The familiar scent of a springtide of lilacs swept about him; the placid murmur of water slipping between sodded banks, tumbling over a fall; the querulous hunting cry of owls hovered in his hearing, singing in the undertone of that pronouncement of his name out of the magic region of his joy.
“No good,” a voice buzzed, indistinct, immaterial. “Who'll shut this—? who'll get the girl?”
“The girl can't reach us alone....”
An intolerable scarlet hurt stabbed at Anthony out of a pungent, whitish cloud. There was a fretful report. A flat, dark face without expression, without the blink of an eyelid, a twitch of the mouth, loomed before him and then shot up into darkness. The hurt multiplied a thousand fold, it poured through him like molten metal, lay in a flashing pool upon his heart, filled his brain. He opened his lips for a protest, put out his hands appealingly. But he uttered no sound, his arms sank, grew stiff... the light faded from his eyes.... imponderable silence. Frigid night....
Far off he heard her calling him, imperative, confident, glad. Her crystal tones descended into the abyss whose black and eternal walls towered above him. He must rise and bear to her that gift like a precious and fragile vase which he held unbroken in his hands. An ineffable fragrance deepened about him from the massed blooms rosy in the glow where she waited, drawing him up to her out of the chaotic wash beyond the worlds where the vapors of corrupted matter sank and sank in slow coils, falling endlessly, forever.