"I slumbered in the woods at last; the birds were singing in the emerald shadows above when I awoke. A tall girl, lithe as a palm, swarthy as Egypt, was gazing upon me. My heart almost ceased to beat. I beheld in the wild beauty of her dark face as it were the shadow of the face that had haunted me; and in the midnight of her eyes the eyes of my dream. Circles of thin gold were in her ears;—her brown arms and feet were bare. She smiled not; but, keeping her great wild eyes fixed upon mine, addressed me in a strange tongue. Strange as India—yet not all strange to me; for at the sound of its savage syllables dusky chambers of memory long un visited reopened their doors and revealed forgotten things. The tongue was the tongue spoken to me in dreams through all those restless years. And she, perceiving that I understood, although I spoke not, pointed to far tents beyond the trees, and ascending spirals of lazy smoke.
"'Whithersoever we go, thou shalt also go,' she murmured. 'Thou art of our people; the blood that flows in thy veins is also mine. We have long waited and watched for thee, summer by summer, in those months when the great longing comes upon us all. For thy mother was of my people; and thou who hast sucked her breasts mayst not live with the pale children of another race. The heaven is our tent; the birds guide our footsteps south and north; the stars lead us to the east and west. My people have sought word of thee even while wandering in lands of sunrise. Our blood is stronger than wine; our kindred dearer than gold. Thou wilt leave riches, pleasures, honors, and the life of cities for thy heart's sake; and I will be thy sister.'
"And I, having kissed her, followed her to the tents of her people—my people—the world wanderers of the most ancient East."
THE ONE PILL-BOX[30]
Like Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, the sun seemed to blaze with sevenfold heat; the sky glowed like steel in the process of blistering; a haze yellow as the radiance above a crucible gilded the streets; the great plants swooned in the garden—fainting flowers laid their heads on the dry clay; the winds were dead; the Yellow Plague filled the city with invisible exhalations of death. A silence as of cemeteries weighed down upon the place; commerce slept a wasting slumber; the iron muscles and brazen bones of wealth machinery relaxed, and lungs of steel ceased their panting; the ships had spread their white wings and flown; the wharves were desolate; the cotton-presses ceased their mighty mastication, and no longer uttered their titanic sighs.
The English mill-master had remained at his post, with the obstinate courage of his race, until stricken down. There was a sound in his ears as of rushing waters; darkness before his eyes: the whispering of the nurses, the orders of the physicians, the tinkling of glasses and spoons, the bubbling of medicine poured out, the sound of doors softly opened and closed, and of visits made on tiptoe, he no longer heard or remembered. The last object his eyes had rested upon was a tiny white-and-red pill-box, lying on the little table beside the bed.
The past came to him in shadowy pictures between dark intervals of half-conscious suffering—of such violent pain in thighs and loins as he remembered to have felt long years before after some frightful fall from a broken scaffolding. The sound in his ears of rushing water gradually sharpened into a keener sound—like the hum of machinery, like the purring of revolving saws, gnawing their meal of odorous wood with invisibly rapid teeth. Odors of cypress and pine, walnut and oak, seemed to float to his nostrils—with sounds of planing and beveling, hammering and polishing, subdued laughter of workmen, loud orders, hurrying feet, and above all the sharp, trilling purr of the hungry saws, and the shaking rumble of the hundred-handed engines.
He was again in the little office, fresh with odors of resinous woods—seated at the tall desk whose thin legs trembled with the palpitation of the engine's heart. It seemed to him there was a vast press of work to be done—enormous efforts to be made—intricate contracts to be unknotted—huge estimates to be made out—agonizing errors to be remedied—frightful miscalculations to be corrected—a world of anxious faces impatiently watching him. Figures and diagrams swam before his eyes—plans of façades—mathematical calculations for stairways—difficult angles of roofs—puzzling arrangements of corridors. The drawings seemed to vary their shape with fantastic spitefulness; squares lengthened into parallelograms and distorted themselves into rhomboids—circles mockingly formed themselves into ciphers—triangles became superimposed, like the necromantic six-pointed star. Then numerals mingled with the drawings—columns of magical figures which could never be added up, because they seemed to lengthen themselves at will with serpent elasticity—a mad procession of confused notes in addition and subtraction, in division and multiplication, danced before him. And the world of anxious faces watched yet more impatiently.