Ruggles remembered the nights he had spent before the footlights of the Gaiety, and that the pale woman trembling there weeping was a great singer.
“I guess he wants to hear you sing.”
She kneeled down by him; she trembled so she couldn’t stand.
The others, the doctor and Ruggles, the waiters and porters gathered in the hall, heard. No one of them understood the Gaiety girl’s English words.
“From Greenland’s icy mountains,
From India’s coral strands ...”
They were merciful and let him listen in peace. Through the blur in his brain, over the beat of his young ardent heart, above the short breaths the notes reached his failing senses, and lifted him—lifted him. There wasn’t a very long distance between his boyhood and his twenty-two years to go, and he was not so weak but that he could travel so far.
He sat there by his father again—and heard. The flies buzzed, and he didn’t mind them. The smell of the fields came in through the windows and the Sodawater Fountain Girl sang—and sang; and as she sang her face grew holy to his eyes—radiant with a beauty he had not dreamed a woman’s face could wear. Above the choir rail she stood and sang peerlessly, and the church began to fade and fade, and still she stood there in a shaft of light, and her face was like an angel’s, and she held her arms out to him as the waters rose to his lips. She bent and lifted him—lifted him high upon the strands....
CHAPTER XXXI—IN REALITY
Dan awoke from his dream, and sat suddenly up in bed in his shirt sleeves, and stared at the people in his room,—a hotel boy and two strangers, not unlike the men in his dream. He brushed his hand across his eyes.
“Sit down, will you? Do you speak English?”