They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did not even curse their God because they had given life to a woman-child.
After awhile they heard of her.
She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud, she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon—pardon for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.
The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself; but the old people never spoke of them to others. "She is happy, it does not matter for us." This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the old man was left alone.
The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice, severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude and oblivion.
The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain grasses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing down the passes, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling the maidens to the dance.
In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of the pastor's house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell at her father's feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned she had given birth to a male child and was dead.
Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury, malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abasement, she had no strength.
She died as her son's eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslàn.
When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with her white large limbs folded to rest, and her noble fair face calm as a mask of marble, the old pastor knew little—nothing—of what her life through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw. Whether she had surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world to be able to learn.