"Herriott, you sang life into me that awful night after you carried me
in your arms behind a snow drift, rubbed my frozen hands, and tied our
last dog to my legs to keep me warm. 'It shall be light, it shall be
light!' How the song soared and echoed in the terrible silence of the
ice desert, as if spirits of the snow caught up the refrain! Do you
remember that ghastly red thread of a moon on the glacial line above us,
like a swooping bloody sickle? Even in my blindness that infernal moon
haunts me still. Just then, as the echo died, out of the blackness, as
if an answer to a prophet's prayer, the swift glory of the aurora swept
down and enveloped us. You saved my life, and before you leave me here I
should like to hear that song once more. I suppose I am childish yet,
but in my blindness you might humor me. Who wrote that song?"
"You are such a hopeless pagan you do not recognize the Bible? It is an
arrangement of two verses in the Old Testament: 'And it shall come to
pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear. But it shall come
to pass that at evening time it shall be light.' When I was attending
lectures in Germany, one of the professors set the words to the tune of
an old Latin hymn, and the students began to chant it. That night when I
was obliged to keep you awake, it occurred to me. Roy, I can't humor you
now, but I intend to take you and an old man at home down to Arizona to
thaw the Arctic poison out of you. When we are stretched on a sunny mesa
where the air quivers with heat, if you feel the need of more light, I
promise to chant your song. I am not willing to abandon the goal that we
were so near. If you had not broken down, we should have found those
stone ruins with the inscriptions, and I intend to see them. After a
while I shall fit out an expedition to suit myself, and if you can get
rid of your horror of that baby moon that in your delirium you swore was
a bloody scythe coming to cut your throat, I hope to number you among my
impedimenta."
The purple curtain, caught back only during service, hung over the arch;
but at one side a narrow aperture, close to the gilt organ pipe in the
oratory, admitted outside light.
Irresistibly drawn by the voice that set her pulses surging, Eglah had
gone to the arch, and grasping the velvet folds looked cautiously
through the cleft between organ and curtain, across the small oratory
and down the cloister. On a cot lay an emaciated man whose eyes were
bandaged. By his side and fronting the oratory stood Mr. Herriott, his
hands in his pockets.
He looked taller, rather gaunt, somewhat bleached in complexion, and the
absence of mustache showed the fine curves of his peculiarly firm, thin
lips. His eyes were lowered to the sick man's countenance, and the thick
black lashes veiled their grey-blue depths, but over the handsome face
had come a subtle change, etched by corroding memories. It was graver,
colder, less magnetic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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