Just as if nothing had happened! Iona put her hand to her forehead and for a moment wondered if anything had happened.
“I must work hard!” she thought. “‘When nature is in revolt, put her into the treadmill;’” and she went out to see what there was to do, going from house to house, greeting the people and welcomed by them. They supposed that she had just arrived from some distant city, but asked no questions, knowing that she was one of Dylar’s messengers.
There was a field of wheat ripened, and Iona put on a broad-brimmed hat and thick gloves, and taking a sickle, went out to it across the vineyards. “I am to do it all,” she said laughingly. “Let no one come near me.”
Had any one in San Salvador seen her speaking to those people, he would have thought that he had never seen her so gay; and had he seen her when, leaving all behind, she went out alone, he would have wondered at the gloomy passion of her face.
She put her sickle into the grain, and bent to her work like any habitual laborer. In fact, she had done the same work before in play. Handful by handful, the golden glistening stalks fell in a straight ridge across the field; and as the movement grew mechanical, her thoughts took, as it were, a sickle, and began to reap in another field. With a savage strength it cut through the years of her life, all its golden promise and fulfillment, all its holy aspirations, all its towering visionary building which had been, indeed, but a dream of empire and of love. It cut through the humbler growth of sweetness blooming like the little blue flowers she severed from their roots and cast aside to wither, or trampled under her feet. As she wrought thus, sternly, with a double blade, the mental harvest even more real to her mind than this one that the June sun shone upon, her breath kept time with a sharp hiss to the hiss of the sickle, and her heart bled.
With no cessation from her labor except to wipe the perspiration from her face, she reaped till sunset. Then, after standing a little while in doubt what next to do, she bent again, and reaped till the stars came out. Their lambent shining through the falling dew lighted her back to the castle. The windows were all open in the houses as she passed them, and some of the people were seated at supper in their great basement rooms, as large as churches, with their rows of arches, instead of walls, supporting the ceiling.
“Let no one touch my work,” Iona called gayly in at one of the windows, “unless you should wish to bring in what I have reaped. I have put a cornice around the field. I would have reaped all night if there were a moon. Good-night. Peace be with you.”
They echoed her salutation; and she hung her sickle on the outer wall, and took her way to the castle.
“Don’t tell me that you have had your supper!” the housekeeper said; “for I have taken such pleasure in preparing one for you.”
“I shall eat it, for I have earned it,” Iona replied, taking off her coarse gloves and straightening out her cramped fingers.