“The ravine was crowding with darkness, but the long road was full of light. The houses between seemed to dwindle but the distance was full of radiance—that perfect afterglow again. Not for twenty years had there been such a sunset, and now the sky was massed with gold of the purple martin’s breast, and the roof of Paul’s house was like two open leaves of beaten gold—everywhere the air filled with strange brightenings. The fragrance from the fields arose to meet the heaven falling from the sky.
“I tried to make believe, but the road was empty. The Guest would never come again, and yet on such a night as this, he had come to me—like a saint that has finished his work, like a Master coming down a last time. All the room and the house was hushed behind me.... But the long road was empty.
“The old servant at last could bear it no longer. Perhaps she thought I did not breathe. Softly she crossed the room to the cradle, lifted the Gleam and placed him in my lap—as if to call me back. Breath came quickly at the touch of him, and she must have heard a low, joyous sound as I felt the child. With one hand I held him, patting his shoulder softly, slowly, with the other, until the ecstasy of long ago flowed into my being.
“There was a moment that I should have asked her to take the Gleam from me—had I been able to speak. It was such a moment that I had run out under the stars. But as I patted the tiny shoulder, the burden of the ecstasy passed, and a durable blessedness came—the calm of great understanding.
“The road—of course it was empty—for he had come.... I thought I had told the old servant, but a second time I seemed to see her anxious face bending so near in the dusk.
“‘Why, don’t you see?’ I whispered. ‘He was looking for his mother when I found him.’”
That was the end of the story—the rest just details that an outsider might ask: How she went away with Paul for the sake of her father; how he remained with her during the long voyage to America, but as nothing to her, more and more a stranger of different ways from hers—how he gave her but a little of the money her father had put in trust for her keeping—and rushed away to dig his grave in the city.... Then just a glimpse of her need and her labour and longing for the Island life—a dream, the Jade....
5
The final morning, Bellair took the babe in his arms and let himself down the rocky way to the shore. The trail was empty behind him, and the cottage shut off by the group of little pines, pure to pass through as the room of a child. And here were rain-washed boulders warming in the morning sun, and before his eyes the blue [Pg 236]and deep-eyed sea. It rolled up to his feet, forever changing with its stories and its secrets, very cool about them all to-day, full of mastery and leisure.