They were coming out of the trance of love into a time which would have to be put up with until luck turned them birds again. He had given her his treasure. If he rose and strangled her, she had that to remember to him. There was trouble in his face, the old trouble, Picus’s grief. That was not named or rational or tamed or shared. Untractable, inexplicable, near to wickedness.
The water divided them. She crossed it. He moved his hands as though he would be rid of them.
“Shew me the skeleton!” He shook his head.
“Make the bird come back! I want to see him again.”
“Woodpecker-Zeus,” she said, “leave your skeleton under the tree. Stop flirting with us. We know who you are. Eagle. Kingfisher. Swan. We have met you before. I am Leda. You know best who he is.”
She waited, hoping for the best.
“There it is,” said Picus. She could not see it. The shadow of the cliff was moving towards them.
“In the thicket.” She clapped her hands, and the bird flew out.
“There,” she said, and saw him suddenly pleased and changed.
Then he said:
“Wonder what that chap Carston’ll make of it?”
“Make of what?”
They were looking at the other out of the corner of their eyes. Picus paddled one hand in the stream.
Scylla said:
“There is one thing which may have surprised him already. His room’s between ours.”
“Well, that ought to interest him.”
“Only,” she said, “if he wanted me.”
“He may be wanting you. Perhaps you’d better sleep with him. It would be better than his coming down here. Where nothing has been spoiled, love.”
“I see. Mais comme tu taquines éternité.”
She thought again: ‘I have no business to be glad that Clarence does not know, nor ask if he will be taken here. I came first.’ This was an excuse, not only in honour, but in letting life alone.
He got up and drew her on to her feet. He walked her along the grass between the thickets and boulders, so that her feet never touched a stone. Up the landslide she hardly felt the slant of the earth, held as if he were walking with a tree. At the top of the cliffs he gave her no time to look back. In their triumph they walked alone a little separate from each other.
At a gate he caught her up.
“What y’ thinking about?” She saw his head on one side.
“Carston and the cup. That ought to get him going more than us.”
“Perhaps it will.”
“Picus, demon, where did you hide it?”
“Hush! love.”
After an accident in the sea with a small octopus he would sooner have avoided, Carston returned to the house. Felix had not talked to him, said that it would be wiser not to talk, because there might be big magic about. Could not Carston feel it cooking up? Convinced that the boy was enjoying himself, he went up to his room. And what was there to do but think of those two, up somewhere high in air, kissing, or finding some strangeness in Nature and forgetting to kiss. He lay staring and fretting, until with slow alarm growing like a dream, he saw the lost cup, by itself, on the end of his mantelpiece. And earlier in the day, they had passed in and out of his room looking for it there.
His first impulse was to run downstairs with it, crying. Crossing the room to take it, he slipped on the glassy boards, and the fall and anger from pain turned him. He did not want to touch it. There might be something about it after all. Working a splinter out of his hand, it occurred to him that they had put it there; that the morning had been a farce played for his benefit, a vile joke to make a fool of him. Those people who made love under his eyes, who had lost him on a moor. They had not let him into their lives. They would not believe his innocence. Under the shock of his fall, his imagination galloped reeling. He felt very lonely. He was very lonely. It did not cross his head that they would believe what he told them. Still less that it did not matter whether they believed him or not. Behind this, a dead fever reviving in the blood, was the literal fear of the cup, that it was uncanny, tabu. He passed a dreadful minute, staring at its impressive antiquity. His sensitive intelligence raced through a variety of panics, till the shock of his fall subsided and he began to arrange alternatives. To go down to tea with the cup and say: “I found it in my room. I don’t know how it got there.”
To hide it in his baggage. In the house. To put it somewhere—say, in Picus’s room. To destroy it.
