“Moral weakness and physical self-indulgence. In America we are all so comfortable we are all like to be damned!”
She could have wept aloud to hear the half-whimsical, half-delirious tone of the wreck upon the camp-bed deprecating comfort.
“If Borisoff had lived—I don’t know. But Borisoff is sleeping in the lee of that great shaft of Siberian pine, and I—if I know anything in the hereafter, I shall be glad that I left the hope behind me for other men.”
“Left it for some new Norse Viking maybe, or some sea-faring Briton. And America will never know—”
“’Sh. I’m not sure whether I’m more sorry that America shouldn’t know she was first at the goal, or whether I’m not more proud that it should be an American who wins the race and refrains from making the world resound with it. That it should be an American, after all, to do just that. One, too,”—he smiled with a curious sweetness,—“one as guilty of boasting as his brothers are. So you see I keep some spark of vanity to light me—out. Here!” He gathered the hoard in his arms an instant, and held it half-hidden under his beard.
But it seemed as hard for him to loose his arms from about his treasure as for a mother to part from her child.
Hildegarde made a tender, half-unconscious motion of protecting both the broken man and the toys his dying hands still clung to. But he, not comprehending, said faintly: “I’ve carried this little bundle of papers across the crown of the world to—to give it to a strange woman at last!”
“No, no.” She fell on her knees by the bed. “I am not strange! I am Hildegarde.”
His blazing eyes looked over her bowed head at the little heap among the blackened stones. “Here!” he whispered.