“Listen, Abel, do you ever lie on the dry moss and look straight up into a tree and count a thousand leaves?”
“No, sweetest, that could not be done, it is so many to count. Do you know how many a thousand are?”
“Oh, do I not! When a humming-bird flies close to my face and stops still in the air, humming like a bee, and then is gone, in that short time I can count a hundred small round bright feathers on its throat. That is only a hundred; a thousand are more, ten times. Looking up I count a thousand leaves; then stop counting, because there are thousands more behind the first, and thousands more, crowded together so that I cannot count them. Lying in your arms, looking up into your face, it was like that; I could not count the things I remembered. In the wood, when you were there, and before; and long, long ago at Voa, when I was a child with mother.”
“Tell me some of the things you remembered, Rima.”
“Yes, one—only one now. When I was a child at Voa mother was very lame—you know that. Whenever we went out, away from the houses, into the forest, walking slowly, slowly, she would sit under a tree while I ran about playing. And every time I came back to her I would find her so pale, so sad, crying—crying. That was when I would hide and come softly back so that she would not hear me coming. ‘Oh, mother, why are you crying? Does your lame foot hurt you?’ And one day she took me in her arms and told me truly why she cried.”
She ceased speaking, but looked at me with a strange new light coming into her eyes.
“Why did she cry, my love?”
“Oh, Abel, can you understand—now—at last!” And putting her lips close to my ear, she began to murmur soft, melodious sounds that told me nothing. Then drawing back her head, she looked again at me, her eyes glistening with tears, her lips half parted with a smile, tender and wistful.
Ah, poor child! in spite of all that had been said, all that had happened, she had returned to the old delusion that I must understand her speech. I could only return her look, sorrowfully and in silence.
Her face became clouded with disappointment, then she spoke again with something of pleading in her tone. “Look, we are not now apart, I hiding in the wood, you seeking, but together, saying the same things. In your language—yours and now mine. But before you came I knew nothing, nothing, for there was only grandfather to talk to. A few words each day, the same words. If yours is mine, mine must be yours. Oh, do you not know that mine is better?”