“Luney,” he said, “I can’t think what has happened to you. But somehow, as I say, you are not the same. Your looks are so different—you have no idea how wide and bright your eyes are. And your speech is different—it is so much clearer and stronger, and you don’t seem to stammer at all. But you were always beyond me, old boy, and now you seem to have got farther and farther away.”
“Yet never was I so near to you, Jimmy, as I am this day,” said William Jordan. “You are no longer a street-person, nor an Olympian, nor one of other race and texture. You are just yourself, your own baffled, bewildered, arrested self—my own half-developed younger brother who one day may come to flower.”
“I don’t understand you, Luney,” said his mentor; “you have altered so much that I don’t understand you at all. And yet, when I hear your voice and I look at your eyes, you make me feel somehow——”
XXXIX
When William Jordan returned again to the little room his father greeted him in silence. The aged man whose hair was now snow-white, whose eyes were dim, whose limbs were enfeebled, looked upon the returned wayfarer without speech and without question.
“I observe, my father,” said the young man, peering into the failing eyes, “that you were of good faith.”
“I had your assurance, Achilles, that you would return,” said the aged man.
“You have no curiosity, my father,” said the young man. “You do not ask whether my journeyings, like those of Odysseus of old, were fraught with hazard and great vicissitude.”
“With that measure of sight that still remains to me, beloved one,” said his father, “I observe that to be the case.”
The young man smiled with a kind of submission.