And Zora sat above them on a high rich-scented pile
of logs. Her senses slept save her sleepless
eyes. Amid a silence she saw in the little grove
that still stood, the cabin of Elspeth tremble, sigh,
and disappear, and with it flew some spirit of evil.
Then she looked down to the new edge of the swamp,
by the old lagoon, and saw Bles Alwyn standing there.
It seemed very natural; and closing her eyes, she
fell asleep.
Thirty-four
Bles Alwyn stared at Mrs. Harry Cresswell in surprise.
He had not seen her since that moment at the ball,
and he was startled at the change. Her abundant
hair was gone; her face was pale and drawn, and there
were little wrinkles below her sunken eyes. In
those eyes lurked the tired look of the bewildered
and the disappointed. It was in the lofty waiting-room
of the Washington station where Alwyn had come to meet
a friend. Mrs. Cresswell turned and recognized
him with genuine pleasure. He seemed somehow
a part of the few things in the world—little
and unimportant perhaps—that counted and
stood firm, and she shook his hand cordially, not
minding the staring of the people about. He took
her bag and carried it towards the gate, which made
the observers breathe easier, seeing him in servile
duty. Someway, she knew not just how, she found
herself telling him of the crisis in her life before
she realized; not everything, of course, but a great
deal. It was much as though she were talking
to some one from another world—an outsider;
but one she had known long, one who understood.
Both from what she recounted and what she could not
tell he gathered the substance of the story, and it
bewildered him. He had not thought that white
people had such troubles; yet, he reflected, why not?
They, too, were human.
“I suppose you hear from the school?”
he ventured after a pause.
“Why, yes—not directly—but
Zora used to speak of it.”
Bles looked up quickly.
“Zora?”
“Yes. Didn’t you see her while she
was here? She has gone back now.”
Then the gate opened, the crowd surged through, sweeping
them apart, and next moment he was alone.
Alwyn turned slowly away. He forgot the friend
he was to meet. He forgot everything but the
field of the Silver Fleece. It rose shadowy there
in the pale concourse, swaying in ghostly breezes.
The purple of its flowers mingled with the silver
radiance of tendrils that trembled across the hurrying
throng, like threads of mists along low hills.
In its midst rose a dark, slim, and quivering form.
She had been here—here in Washington!
Why had he not known? What was she doing?
“She has gone back now”—back
to the Sun and the Swamp, back to the Burden.
Why should not he go back, too? He walked on
thinking. He had failed. His apparent success
had been too sudden, too overwhelming, and when he
had faced the crisis his hand had trembled. He
had chosen the Right—but the Right was
ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left
him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The
world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie
Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant
cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery.
His chance to do and thereby to be had not come.
