" she said to
Segda, for it was Segda's mother who had come to save him; and then
that sinless queen and her son went back to their home of enchantment,
leaving the king and Fionn and the magicians and nobles of Ireland
astonished and ashamed.

CHAPTER VIII

There are good and evil people in this and in every other world, and the
person who goes hence will go to the good or the evil that is native
to him, while those who return come as surely to their due. The trouble
which had fallen on Becuma did not leave her repentant, and the sweet
lady began to do wrong as instantly and innocently as a flower begins
to grow. It was she who was responsible for the ills which had come on
Ireland, and we may wonder why she brought these plagues and droughts to
what was now her own country.

Under all wrong-doing lies personal vanity or the feeling that we are
endowed and privileged beyond our fellows. It is probable that, however
courageously she had accepted fate, Becuma had been sharply stricken in
her pride; in the sense of personal strength, aloofness, and identity,
in which the mind likens itself to god and will resist every domination
but its own. She had been punished, that is, she had submitted to
control, and her sense of freedom, of privilege, of very being, was
outraged. The mind flinches even from the control of natural law, and
how much more from the despotism of its own separated likenesses, for if
another can control me that other has usurped me, has become me, and how
terribly I seem diminished by the seeming addition!

This sense of separateness is vanity, and is the bed of all wrong-doing.
For we are not freedom, we are control, and we must submit to our own
function ere we can exercise it. Even unconsciously we accept the rights
of others to all that we have, and if we will not share our good with
them, it is because we cannot, having none; but we will yet give what
we have, although that be evil. To insist on other people sharing in
our personal torment is the first step towards insisting that they shall
share in our joy, as we shall insist when we get it.

Becuma considered that if she must suffer all else she met should suffer
also. She raged, therefore, against Ireland, and in particular she raged
against young Art, her husband's son, and she left undone nothing that
could afflict Ireland or the prince. She may have felt that she could
not make them suffer, and that is a maddening thought to any woman.