"Jus' as de sun is tryin'
Climb on de summer sky
Two leetle birds come flyin'
Over de mountain high—
Over de mountain, over de mountain,
Hear dem call,
Hear dem call—poor leetle rossignol!"
They recalled to me that twin song of Björnson's which, despite its joyous note of anticipation, holds the same pathos of unsatisfied longing.
The last note had scarcely been struck when Jamie broke into the jolly accompaniment to
"For he was a grand Seigneur, my dear,
He was a grand Seigneur."
And, listening so to poems and music and the talk of these men of fine mind and high aspirations, to their hopes for Canada as a whole, to their expression of pride in her marvellous growth and their faith in her future, I said to myself:
"Am I the girl, or rather woman now, who a few years ago made her way up from the narrow thoroughfares about Barclay Street to her attic room in 'old Chelsea'—up through the traffic-congested streets of New York, in the dark of the late winter afternoon, the melting snow falling in black drops and streams from the elevated above her; the avenues running brown snow-water; the rails gleaming; the steaming horses plashing through slush; the fog making haloes about the dimmed arc-lights; the hurrying, pressing tide of humanity surging this way and that and nearly taking her off her feet at the crossings; the whole city reeking with a warm-chill mist, and the shrieking, grinding, grating, whistling, roaring polyglot din of the metropolis half deafening her?"
Thinking of this as I stared into the fire, listening to the good talk on many subjects, something—was it the frost of homelessness?—melted in my heart. The feelings and emotions that had been benumbed through the icy chill of circumstance, thawed within me. The tears, usually unready, filled my eyes. I bent my head that the others might not see, but they fell faster and faster. And with every one that plashed on my hands, as they lay folded in my lap, I felt the unbinding from my life of one hard year after another, until the woman who rose to bring in the porridge, in order to cover her emotion, was one who rose free of all thwarting circumstance. I had come into my own—a woman's own.
But I failed to read the third sign.