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Read Ebook: Maru: A Dream of the Sea by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere
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Ebook has 73 lines and 8189 words, and 2 pages
Away, deep in the woods, hiding amongst the bushes, springing alive with alarm at the slightest sound, he debated this matter with himself; and curiously, now, love did not move him at all or urge him--it was as though the ghost of Talia had stepped between him and his love for Talia, not destroying it, but obscuring it. Talia for him had become two things, the body he had left lying on the sand under the trees and the ghost he had seen walking on the beach; the real Talia no longer existed for him except as the vaguest wraith. He lay in the bushes facing the fact that so long as the body lay unburied the ghost would walk. It might even leave the beach and come to him.
This thought brought him from his hiding-place--he could not lie alone with it amongst the bushes, and then he found that he could not stand alone with it amongst the trees, for at any moment she might appear wringing her hands in one of the glades, or glide to his side from behind one of the tree boles.
He made for the southern beach.
He felt safe here. Even when Talia had been with him the woods had always seemed to him peopled with lurking things, unused as he was to trees in great masses; and now released from them and touched again by the warmth of the sun he felt safe. It seemed to him that the ghost could not come here. The gulls said it to him and the flashing water, and as he lay down on the sands the surf on the reef said it to him. It was too far away for the ghost to come. It seemed to him that he had travelled many thousand miles from a country remote as his extreme youth, losing everything on the way but a weariness greater than time could hold or thought take recognition of.
Then he fell asleep, and he slept whilst the sun went down into the west and the flood swept into the lagoon and the stars broke out above. That tremendous sleep, unstirred by the vaguest dream, lasted till the dawn was full.
Then he sat up, renewed, as though God had remade him in mind and body.
A gull was strutting on the sands by the water's edge, it's long shadow strutting after it, and the shadow of the gull flew straight as a javelin into the renewed mind of Maru. Talia was not dead. He had not seen her ghost. She had come to life and had been walking by the sea wringing her hands for him thinking him drowned. For the form he had seen walking on the sands had cast a shadow. He remembered that now. Ghosts do not cast shadows.
And instantly his mind, made reasonable by rest and sleep, revisualized the picture that had terrified his mind distraught by grief. That was a real form--what folly could have made him doubt it! Talia was alive--alive, warm, and waiting for him on the northern beach, and the love for her that fear had veiled rushed in upon him and seized him with a great joy that made him shout aloud as he sprang to his feet, yet with a pain at his heart like the pain of a rankling spear wound as he broke through the trees shouting as he ran. "Talia! Talia! Talia!"
He passed the bushes where he had hidden, and the ferns; he heard the sound of the surf coming to meet him, he saw the veils of the leaves divide and the blare of light and morning splendour on the northern sands and lagoon and sea.
He stood and looked.
Nothing.
He ran to the place where he had laid her beneath the trees; there was still faintly visible the slight depression made by her body, and close by, strangely and clearly cut, the imprint of a little foot.
Nothing else.
He stood and called and called, and no answer came but the wood echo and the sound of the morning wind, then he ran to the sea edge. Then he knew.
The sand was trodden up, and on the sand, clear cut and fresh, lay the mark left by a beached canoe and the marks by the feet of the men who had beached her and floated her again.
He lunged into the lagoon and swimming like an otter and helped by the outgoing tide, reached the reef. Scrambling on to the rough coral, bleeding from cuts but feeling nothing of his wounds, he stood with wrinkled eyes facing the sea blaze and with the land breeze blowing past him out beyond the thundering foam of the reef to the blue and heaving sea.
Away from the north, like a brown wing tip, showed the sail of a canoe. He watched it. Tossed by the lilt of the swell it seemed beckoning to him. Now it vanished in the sea dazzle, now reappeared, dwindling to a point, to vanish at last like a dream of the sea, gone, never to be recaptured.
"Never," said Lygon "The islands of the sea are many. Wait." He struck a gong that stood close to his chair, struck it three times, and the sounds passing into the night mixed with the voices of the canoe men returning from fishing on the reef.
Then a servant came on to the verandah, an old, old man, half bent like a withered tree.
"Maru," said Lygon, "you can take away these glasses--but, one moment, Maru, tell this gentleman your story."
"The islands of the sea are many," said Maru, like a child repeating a lesson. He paused for a moment as though trying to remember some more, then he passed out of the lamplight with the glasses.
"A year ago he remembered the whole story," said Lygon.
But for me the whole story lay in those words, that voice, those trembling hands that seemed still searching for what the eyes could see no more.
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