“Well, you know, the doctor won’t give me my release.”
(Presently he must remember to have a coughing spell. He coughed hollowly and well, thanks to assiduous practice. This was part of the grim and loving comedy of deception: that he had been peremptorily ordered back to Manzanita on account of “weak lungs,” with orders to live in his open shack until he had gained twenty pounds. He was gaining, but with well-considered slowness.)
“But when you can, you’ll go back and help him, even if I’m not here to know about it, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes: I’ll go back to help him when I can,” he promised, as heartily as if he had not made the same promise each time that the subject came up. There was still a good deal of the wistful child about the dying woman.
Out from that forest hermitage where the two worked, one in serene though longing happiness, the other under the stern discipline of loss and self-abnegation, had poured, in six short months, a living current of song which had lifted the fame of Royce Melvin to new heights: her fame only, for Banneker would not use his name to the words that rang with a pure and vivid melody of their own. Herein, too, he was paying his debt to Willis Enderby, through the genius of the woman who loved him; preserving that genius with the thin, lustrous, impregnable fiction of his own making against threatening and impotent truth.
Once, when Banneker had brought her a lyric, alive with the sweetness of youth and love in the great open spaces, she had said:
“Ban, shall we call it ‘Io?’”
“I don’t think it would do,” he said with an effort.
“Where is she?”
“Traveling in the tropics.”