Voices approached; and I watched his eyes come into his face as he leaned forward! From a blurr’ of lids they turned to beautiful clear balls shot through with yearning. Around the jut of rook appeared a bicycle girl, a golf girl, and a youth in knickers having his stockings laid in correct folds below the knee. They passed without noticing us. To see his looks dim and his eagerness relax was too painful. I watched the water ridging against the horizon like goldstone and changing swiftly to the blackest of greens. Distance folded into distance so that the remote drew near. He was certainly waiting for somebody, but it could not be that he had waited thirty-five years: thirty-five winters, whitening the ice-bound island; thirty-five summers, bringing all paradise except what he waited for.
Just as I glanced at the blue man again his lips began to move, and the peculiar tingle ran down my back, though I felt ashamed of it in his sweet presence.
“Madame, it will—it will comfort me if you permit me to talk to you.”
“I shall be very glad, sir, to hear whatever you have to tell.”
“I have—have waited here thirty-five years, and in all that time I have not spoken to any one!”
He said this quite candidly, closing his lips before his voice ceased to sound. The cedar sapling against which his head rested was not more real than the sincerity of that blue man’s face. Some hermit soul, who had proved me by watching me seven years, was opening himself, and I felt the tears come in my eyes.
“Have you never heard of me, madame?”
“You forget, sir, that I do not even know your name.”
“My name is probably forgotten on the island now. I stopped here between steamers during your American Civil War. A passing boat put in to leave a young girl who had cholera. I saw her hair floating out of the litter.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed; “that is an island story.” The blue man was actually presenting credentials when he spoke of the cholera story. “She was taken care of on the island until she recovered; and she was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Southern family trying to get home from her convent in France, but unable to run the blockade. The nun who brought her died on shipboard before she landed at Montreal, and she hoped to get through the lines by venturing down the lakes. Yes, indeed! Madame Clementine has told me that story.”