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He crept up and stole one of these dresses, and by and by the swan-maiden came to him shivering with cold and promising to become his wife if he would only give her back her garment of feathers. The ungallant fellow, however, did not care for a wife, but a little revenge was not unsuited to his way of thinking.
As she finished, the swans turned towards her, and Finola spake: 'Evil is the deed thy magic wand hath wrought, O Eva, on us the children of Lir, but greater evil shall befall thee, because of the hardness and jealousy of thine heart. And Finola's white swan-breast heaved as she sang of their pitiless doom. The song ended, again spake the swan-maiden.
A sombre note of stern denial sounds in the music, and the Swan-Maiden yields to utter despair, drooping slowly to earth. Just as Death himself claims her, her lover, demented with anguish, comes rushing to her side, and turning towards him as she lies dying upon the ground, she yields to his embrace with a last gesture of passionate surrender.
When she did, it was to say with a bitter kind of wonder in her voice: "What centuries ago it seems since the first night of The Swan-Maiden!" "It's not very long," began Gillian, then checked herself and asked quickly: "Is there anything the matter, Magda? Did Antoine bring you bad news of some kind?" "He brought me the offering of his hand and heart. That's no news, is it?"
Yet the story of Marya is equally a Swan-maiden story, and is just as good to build a theory on as Map's variant of Wild Edric.
In the later sagas, such as those of Melusina and the Lady of the Van Pool, it is again absent; though relics of the change of form frequently remain. Capture of the Swan-maiden proper is effected by theft of her robe: in other types either by main force, or more frequently with her consent, more or less willingly given, or by her own initiative.
She was still wearing her costume of the Swan-Maiden, and there was something frailly virginal and elusive about her as she drew away from him that set the hot, foreign blood in him on fire. In two strides he was at her side, his hands gripping her bare arms with a savage clasp that hurt her. "Mon adoree!"
Here we may leave the subject of the taboo. Something, however, must be said on the Swan-maiden as divine ancestress. But first of all, let me advert to one or two cases where divinity is ascribed without progenitorship. The Maori heroine and her husband are worshipped.
If anything had happened to Kit Raynham if it were ultimately found that he had taken his own life society at large was prepared to censure her as more or less responsible for the catastrophe! Side by side with this paragraph was another a panegyric on the perfection of Wielitzska's dancing as a whole, and dwelling particularly upon her brilliant performance in The Swan-Maiden.
A dance, based upon this legend, had been devised for Magda in conjunction with Vladimir Ravinski, the brilliant Russian dancer, he taking the lover's part, and the whole tragic little drama was designed to terminate with a solo dance by Magda as the dying Swan-Maiden.
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