"Don't stay too long. Good-night, my dear, good-night."
Archibald, watching the fog shut out the moonlight, had still upon him that sense of revolt. Fame had never come to him, and love had come too late.
Yet for Randy there was to be fulfillment—the wife of his heart, the applause of the world. What did it all mean? Why should one man have all, and the other—nothing?
Yet he had had his dreams. And the dreams of men lived. That which died was the least of them. The great old gods of democracy—Washington, Jefferson, Adams—had seen visions, and the visions had endured. Only yesterday Roosevelt had proclaimed his gallant doctrines. He had died proclaiming them, and the world held its head higher, because of his belief in its essential rightness.
The mists enveloped Archibald in a sort of woolly dampness. He saw for a moment a dim and distant moon. If he could have painted a moon like that—with fingers of fog reaching up to it——!
His own dreams of beauty? What of them? His pictures would not live. He knew that now. But he had given more than pictures to the world. He had given himself in a crusade which had been born of high idealism and a sense of brotherhood. Day after day, night after night, his plane had hung, poised like an eagle, above the enemy. He had been one of the young gods who had set their strength and courage against the greed and grossness of gray-coated hordes.
And these dreams must live—the dreams of the
young gods—as the dreams of the old gods had endured. Because men had died to make others free, freedom must be the song on the lips of all men.
He thought of Randy's story. The Trumpeter Swan was only a stuffed bird in a glass case. But once he had spread his wings—flown high in the upper air. There had been strength in his pinions—joy in his heart—thrilling life in every feather of him. Some lovely lines drifted through Archibald's consciousness—