“The little boy came running to meet me. I think he ran to meet me somewhere before. He is different from all the others—except for that touch of the old mother which he has, and that something about the Ploughman. He was white and all eyes when I picked him up. They said he wasn’t well, but in three days he was sound again—color breaking through. To think that my coming could do that for any living soul—I.
“The old Mother.... She was just waiting for me—lingering until I came—watching down the road in the sunlight. We talked a little. She spoke softly of her soldier-son. It was only a few days.... It all came from her, John—the battle of Liaoyang so far as its meaning to me. She was the light on the Ploughman’s brow that made a different man of me. He never dreamed of messages to the world of men, nor the passion to serve men—but he had his mother’s faith and something of her vision. That made him different from other Russian soldiers, so that I could see. The little boy Jan will bring it to life again. Your play goes straight back to her. There’s everlasting quality in being a mother like that. I think it was the fourth morning—that I suddenly began to listen attentively to what she was saying. It was about us all—intimately about her soldier-son.... The younger mother came in—her sad, weary face different.... She went out, and returned with her shoes on.... Suddenly I knew that the old sweet flower was passing. Why, she was gone before I knew it—smiling up at the saints from my arms.... I heard the little boy coming quickly—knew his step as I would know yours, John. I seemed to wait for his hand upon the door. I saw him, and he saw us—came forward on tip-toe, and we were all together——”
Morning didn’t read the rest just then. It seemed one of the finest things he had ever known—Duke Fallows preserving the old mother and the others in their conviction that he was just a peasant like the Ploughman.
4
From that April night after Morning left, when Helen Quiston found her wandering in the halls, and asking in a childish way to be taken to the ’cello (saying that her father had hidden it from her in a strange place), until now in mid-September, Betty Berry had not left the studio-apartment. The real break-down had begun a month before the high day in which Morning came; perhaps on the very night his Guardian had called. She had scarcely played or practiced since then; she read nothing, talked to no one except Helen. Morning had noted her anxiously early on the day of his call at the studio, but such power had come in the flashes of those hours, and so high was she enthroned and illumined in his own mind at the end, (in which she had kept to the darkness), that he had not realized the blight that had touched her life.
Helen Quiston had long loved the woman. She knew much that the Doctor did not. It was she who read the letters which in certain moments of the day Betty hastily penned. It was as if for a moment in a long gray day, a ray of watery sunlight broke through the cloud-banks. In the momentary shining of her mind, Betty would write to Morning. Many of the letters were impossible. Certain of these letters would have brought the lover by the first train. Even Betty had a sense of this and relied upon the music-teacher. Here and there among the notes, too, was a wisp of the old sweet spirit. It was a wonderful conception to Helen Quiston: that all but these had gone to replenish the creative fire of a lover who knew well what his lady had given, but not what it meant to her. Just as surely as the Hindoo woman offers herself upon the funeral pyre with the body of her mate, Betty Berry had given her spirit to the living. A hundred times the singing teacher had heard these words from white lips that smiled:
“We are one—a deathless, world-loving one!”
And often she heard this queer verse from the Persian:
“Four eyes met. There were changes in two souls.
And now I cannot remember whether he is a man and I a woman,