Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/136

128 “Do you know,” he murmured. “I can positively feel the tears rising up from my heart and throat. They are quite painful gathering, my love. There—you can do anything with me.”

They were silent for some time. After a while, a rather long while, she came upstairs and found mother—and at the end of some minutes I heard my mother go to him.

I sat by my window and watched the low clouds reel and stagger past. It seemed as if everything were being swept along—I myself seemed to have lost my substance, to have become detached from concrete things and the firm trodden pavement of everyday life. Onward, always onward, not knowing where, nor why, the wind, the clouds, the rain and the birds and the leaves, everything whirling along—why?

All this time the old crow sat motionless, though the clouds tumbled, and were rent and piled, though the trees bent, and the window-pane shivered with running water. Then I found it had ceased to rain; that there was a sickly yellow gleam of sunlight, brightening on some great elm-leaves near at hand till they looked like ripe lemons hanging. The crow looked at me—I was certain he looked at me.

“What do you think of it all?” I asked him.

He eyed me with contempt: great f eatherless, half winged bird as I was, incomprehensible, contemptible, but awful. I believe he hated me.

“But,” said I, “if a raven could answer, why won’t you?”

He looked wearily away. Nevertheless my gaze disquieted him. He turned uneasily; he rose, waved