Page:Celtic Stories by Edward Thomas.djvu/53

 rounding forests, and the penalty on other hunters was death.

There were no other children, and so for years she lived in that wild solitude. She was its child, like stag and hare and falcon, yet she hated it. For sixteen years she saw the young oaks growing higher, and the dead old ones crumbling lower, behind the ridge of the roof; for sixteen years she saw the ancient swineherd getting more and more ancient, though each year it seemed to be impossible. When she saw herself in mirrors or in the waters of the forest she said to herself:

'They tell me I am beautiful. I cannot see it. I see the beauty of the stag running with the herd, and the hare at play with his own, and the falcon soaring with his mate, and the flower growing on the mountains which its kind has never left, but not the beauty of a girl mewed in this inhuman dark forest with old men and women.'

The swineherd was bent like a reed in winter, and yet he turned himself slowly round to follow her with his eyes, and then, when his eyes no longer saw anything, with his ears. Once Deirdre tried to escape, and as she ran through the forest she did not see the old man because he was like one of the thousands of dead trees; but suddenly as she was passing he moved to see her better, and in her surprise she struck at him so that he fell dead. In her pity for the old man she forgot her flight. She dragged him to the hut where his old wife, whom she had never seen because she could not move out, lived a still life. As the girl entered the woman stared at her, and continued to do so until she was out of sight; then only did she lament the dead man and curse his destroyer.

It consoled Deirdre little for her imprisonment to