II
Blossom and Seed
Chapter XI
THE PRISONER
When I staggered back to my cabin through the snow-storm in the November dusk, I could not realize the ghastliness of my misfortune. My mind seemed powerless before the bleak reality; it was not until I had re-entered the cabin that I began to look the terror in the face. Then, when I had slammed the door behind me and stood silently in that frigid place, all my dread and loneliness and foreboding became concentrated in one point of acute agony. The shadows deepening within that dingy hovel seemed living, evil things; the wind that hissed and screeched without, with brief lulls and swift crescendos of fury, was like a chorus of demons; and such desolation of spirit was upon me that I could have rushed out into the storm, and delivered myself up to its numbing, fatal embrace.
It was long before, conscious of the increasing chill and the coaly darkness, I went fumbling about the room to make a light. Fortunately, I still had a half-used box of matches, vestiges of the world I had lost; and with their aid, I contrived to light a little wax candle.
But as I watched the taper fitfully burning, with sputtering yellow rays that only half revealed the bare walls of the room and left eerie shadows to brood in the corners, I almost wished that I had remained in darkness. How well I remembered Yasma's teaching me to make the candle; to melt the wax; to pour it into a little wooden mould; to insert the wick in the still viscid mass! Could it be but a month ago when she had stood with me in this very room, so earnestly and yet so gaily giving me instructions? Say rather that it was years ago, eons ago!—what relation could there be between that happy self, which had laughed with Yasma, and this forlorn self, which stood here abandoned in the darkness and the cold?
And as I thought of Yasma, and gazed at her handiwork, the full sense of my wretchedness swept over me. Could she really be gone, mysteriously gone, past any effort of mine to bring her back? Was it possible that many a long bitter day and cold lonely night would pass before I could see her again? Or, for that matter, how did I know that she would ever return?—How attach any hope to her vague promises? What if she could not keep those promises? What if calamity should overtake her in her hiding place? She might be ill, she might be crippled, she might be dead, and I would not even know it!