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Updated: May 21, 2025
Balder was on the point of asking; but he was wise enough to refrain. If he could believe it true, let him not tempt his happiness; if faith were weak, why build a barrier against it? So he kept silence. "You found my violets!" whispered Gnulemah, with a shy smile. "You understand all I do and am; it is happiness to be with you."
"How could I be happy? for either must I draw myself apart from you O Balder! or else live as your equal, and so degrade you; for I am not a goddess!" "Then there are no goddesses on earth, nor gods! Gnulemah, you need not shrink from me for that." The beautiful woman smiled through her sparkling eyelashes. She could love and reverence the man who, as a deity, bewildered and disappointed her.
"What should you think of one who put to death a man?" Gnulemah looked for a moment perplexed and indignant. Then, to Balder's great discomfiture, she laughed like a bird-chorus. "Why do you imagine what cannot be? Would you and Hiero kill each other? The gray owl kills little mice, but that is to eat them. Would you eat Hiero " "Don't laugh, Gnulemah!" besought he.
"If she be not Gnulemah, daughter of fire, it must rest with you to give her another name," said he. "I care not who was her father or her mother," rejoined the lover, after a short silence; "Gnulemah is herself!" The lithe fingers on his arm clutched it hard for a moment, and Manetho averted his face.
Through the semi-scriptural, symbolic language, he fancied he could discern a basis of materialism so revolting that the man of the world the lover now! listened with shame and anger. Here was a professed worshipper of Gnulemah, who ascribed to her no nobler worth than to be the incarnation of his own desires and passions!
Gnulemah spoke, after some pause, in a full tone of joy; yet her voice shrank at the last, from the feeling that she had penetrated all at once to a holy place. A delicious fear seized her, and she clung to her lover so that he could perceive the tremor that agitated her. No more was said. Their confidence was in each other; with Balder at her side, Gnulemah was fearful of the world no longer.
Gnulemah was thus made the touchstone of Balder's morality. He stood ready to abide by her decision. Her understanding of the case should first be made full; then, if condemned by her look, he would publish his crime to the world, and suffer its penalty.
O my flower fascinating, terrible! the time is ripe for the gathering, for the smelling of the perfume, for the kissing of the petals! I must yield thee up, O my idol! but in thy hand are my life and my reason, yea, Gnulemah, thou art all I am!" The tears, gestures, voice, with which Manetho thus delivered himself, shocked the Northern taste of Helwyse.
"My sister died, was burned to death before she was a year old. In trying to save her, the nurse almost lost her own life. On that same night, this nurse gave birth to a daughter, whose name you have called Gnulemah. Salome is her mother. Who her father is, Manetho, you best know!" The words were spoken, but had the culprit heard them?
He thought only of the Gnulemah of to-day, unique, beautiful, untamed, divinely ignorant; but whose heart walked before, leading the giddy mind by paths the wisest dared not tempt. The sounds of her voice, the shiftings of her expression, her look, her touch, he recalled them all. He centred time and space in her. Change, new conditions, succession of events, these came not near her.
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