undred times that we are one? One
in all things except in passion. Yet this very coldness in me in which I
differ from others is my chief strength and glory, and has made our two
lives one life. And when he is tired and satiated with the common beauty
and the common passions of other women he returns to me only to have his
first love kindled afresh, and when in love and pity I give myself to
him and am his bride afresh as when first he had my body in his arms, it
is to him as if one of the immortals had stooped to a mortal, and he
tells me I am the flower of womankind and of the world, that my white
body is a perfect white flower, my hair a shining gold flower, my mouth
a fragrant scarlet flower, and my eyes a sacred blue flower, surpassing
all others in loveliness. And when I have satisfied him, and the tempest
in his blood has abated, then for the rapture he has had I have mine,
when, ashamed at his violence, as if it had been an insult to me, he
covers his face with my hair and sheds tears of love and contrition on
my breasts. O nothing can ever disunite us! Even from the first, before
I ever saw him, when he was coming to me I knew that we were destined to
be one. And he too knew it from the moment of seeing me, and knew that I
knew it; and when he sat at meat with us and looked smilingly at the
friend of his bosom and spoke merrily to him, and resolved at the same
time to take his life, he knew that by so doing he would fulfil my
desire, and as my knowledge of the betrayal was first, so the desire to
shed that abhorred blood was in me first. Nevertheless, I cannot be free
of all anxious thoughts, and fear too of my implacable enemy and
traducer who from a distance watches all my movements, who reads Edgar's
mind even as he would a book, and what he finds there writ by me he
seeks to blot out; and thus does he ever thwart me. But though I cannot
measure my strength against his, it will not always be so, seeing that
he is old and I am young, with Time and Death on my side, who will like
good and faithful servants bring him to the dust, so that my triumph
must come. And when he is no more I shall have time to unbuild the
structure he has raised with lies for stones and my name coupled with
some evil deed cut in every stone. For I look ever to the future, even
to the end to see this Edgar, with the light of life shining so brightly
in him now, a venerable king with silver hair, his passions cool, his
strength failing, le