“Strength returns,” she said, with a wan smile.
He trembled and turned toward the forest, consumed by impatience of the soul. “Manteo hath gone for healing herbs,” he said. “O God, spare her to me!”
Long he stood with head bowed and eyes gazing into her face; long he stood, a bleak rock of the shore, stern, rigid, fixed, striving to force upon himself the utter calm of self-surrender and finality.
But at the last she stretched out her arms and drew him closer to her. “God is good,” she said. “In my heart he tells me I shall live.”
Yet even now, as the spirit of promise seemed to be breathed into their souls, Eleanor, reading Vytal’s face, realized that beneath all his silent hope that word “failure” had not been obliterated from his great masculine heart. For the colony of Roanoke was no more.
“Dost not see,” she asked, brokenly, “that success is ours?… Of a surety, never again will Spaniards seek to land on this Virginia shore.” Her words were scarcely audible. “Their leader is dead, their lesson learned.… Future generations will find here a perfect security … because we, the first, have suffered … and yet won.” She raised herself to one elbow, bravely subduing her faintness, and pointed toward the headland. “Look.”
The two mists—the mist of ashes and of the ocean—were gray no longer. The first flush of morning suffused itself over sea and land.
Eleanor’s eyes sought Vytal’s, but now from the light he turned and looked steadfastly at the broad, deep forest of the west, with prophetic resignation in his gaze, as at a world not wholly lost, yet only by others to be won.
Her hand touched his gently.
“I am not alone,” he said; “nay, not alone.”