For seven months he had been away, and every week he had written to Maxine, saying little enough about the progress of his work, and frequently using the cryptic statement, “I will tell you everything when I come back.”
And “He will be back to-day,” murmured Maxine, as she stood in the little garden watching the old man at his work.
The newness and the freshness of spring were in the air, snow that had fallen three days ago was nearly gone, just a trace of it lay on the black earth of the flower beds; white crocuses, blue crocuses, snow-drops, those first trumpeters of spring, blew valiantly in the little garden, the air was sharp and clear, and the sky above blue and sparkling. Great masses of white cloud filled the horizon, sun-stricken, fair, and snow-bright, solid as mountains, and like far-off mountains filled with the fascination and the call of distance.
“Spring is here,” cried the birds from the new-budding trees.
The blackbird in Dr. Pons’s garden to the left, answered a rapturous thrush in the trees across the way, children’s voices came from the Paris road and the sounds of wheels and hoofs.
A sparrow with a long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine’s garden, a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing the whole story of spring.
Maxine smiled as it vanished, then she turned; the garden gate had clicked its latch, and a big man was coming up the path.
There was only Father Champardy to see; and as his back was turned, he saw nothing and as he was deaf, he heard nothing. The old man, bent and warped by the years, deaf, and blind to the little love-scene behind him, was, without knowing it, also a poem of spring; but not so joyous as the poem of the sparrow.
“And now tell me all,” said Maxine, as they sat in the chintz-hung sitting room before a bright fire of logs. They had finished their private affairs. The day was two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at them through the diamond-paned window had travelled away and vanished. The day was darker outside, and it was as though spring had lost her sportive mood and then withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale that Adams had to tell.
In Adams’s hand Papeete’s skull had been a talisman of terrible and magical power, for with it he had touched men, and the men touched had disclosed their worth and their worthlessness. It had been a lamp which showed him society as it is.