CHAPTER XXV
Only some fifteen hours have passed and the world is changed to a dazzling brilliance.
Alicia would not leave me, poor overwrought child. She has refused to go to bed and insisted upon staying near me, upon "meeting the dawn" with me. She now lies stretched upon my couch, covered over with a rug, and she has just been overtaken by slumber.
And her presence there under my eyes, Randolph Byrd, is the nearest taste of Heaven that you and I have known, or possibly ever will know, in this life. It is dawn enough for me now and for you, my friend—a dawn so resplendent that I for one shall never desire a brighter.
And since there can be no more sleep for me this night, and since this may be the last entry for you in these memoirs, for many a day, if not forever, I shall endeavor to still the flying heart, the mad exultation rioting in my veins, by noting down for you, how sketchily and incoherently soever, the momentous occurrences of the youngest hours.
It came about—but has it come about? Or is this some mad dream from which I shall wake to the old somber reality? How can a dark turbid current so suddenly bring one out into a flashing, sparkling, sunlit lagoon, overhung with a verdure so rich and lustrous it would seem to have come fresh from the Creator's hand? I hear birds piping in wondrous music, or do I imagine it? But I began by telling you I should be incoherent.
It must have been some time past midnight when I screened the fire, put out the lights and wearily, in darkness, made my way up the stairs.
The fire had unaccountably and fitfully smoked to-night and I remember the last thing I did was to take out Fred Salmon's gold-colored certificates from the safe, examine them with smarting eyes and then gaze in sleepy astonishment at the quotation of Salmon Oil in the newspapers. According to that the shares were now worth twenty-six thousand dollars! It seemed incredible, absurd. And the year was up and I might sell the stuff. Like a miser who has nothing else in life to look for, I gazed spellbound at those securities in whose security I even now could not believe. But unlike the miser of fiction, but like my dull, stupid self, I neglected to replace the crackling papers, though I did put the Valdarfer Boccaccio in and closed the safe.
In the upper passageway, I distinctly recall walking on tiptoe so that Alicia might not be disturbed. Was it hallucination I wonder, or did I actually hear like a sighing whisper through the darkness,
"Good night, Uncle Ranny!"