Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/133



He bowed low before the princess.

“I, too, have waited long,” he said, “waited long for the wooing of swords!”

And, strangely, incongruously, though at the time there was no sense to him in his own words, he felt, he knew, that he was not telling a lie, that he was not acting a part, that a hidden, yet enormously vital element of his inner consciousness had dictated the words—out of a terribly intense, terribly ancient, terribly prolonged yearning.

Neither then, nor during the baroque, twisted adventures of the weeks to come, did he stop to analyze why thus, without a question, without a concise doubt, without a demand for explanation, without natural, normal curiosity even, he bowed his head before this strange Fate that had come to him out of the purple Indian night—with a young Oriental princess' soft kiss, with her dim words about Brother and Sister and the Wooing of Swords.

Later on, he would try to explain it out of existence by saying that the romance, the flaming spirit of the moment, had carried him away as the wind carries away brittle leaves; that his old life was dead, that here beckoned the cresset of a new life which he must follow, untrammeled by the past, untrammeled even by the desires and doubts and natural reactions of the past.

And this attempt at explanation was palpably wrong; was the bitter fruit of his racial English inhibition to be as logical and inquisitive and truth-seeking in psychic, as he was in mental and physical,