Adventure stories; Automobile travel -- Fiction; Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak,
And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke
Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low,
And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know,
And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within,
That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn
Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore
When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitterness sore,
And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnameable pain
Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain."
Lanier, dying of heartbreak! How well he had understood!
"Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of Fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn."
And Keela too had guessed.
"In the rose-and-silver evening glow,
Farewell--"
Keela broke off and laid aside the book.
"I may not read more," she said, bending to the pottery with wild color
in her face. "I--I am very tired, Carl. You go in the morning?"
"Yes."
"You are strong--and sure?"
"Yes. Quite. I've promised Mic-co not to lose my grip again."
"And sometime you will come here again?"
"Often!"
A little later she went quietly away to the Room of Books with Mic-co.
When the evening star flashed silver in the lilied pool, Carl sat
alone. Mic-co had been summoned away by an Indian servant. A soft
light gleamed in the corner of the court in a shower of vines. Its
light was a little like the soft rays of the Venetian lamp that had
shone in the Sherrill garden, but Carl ruthlessly put the memory aside.
It had grown once into a devouring flame of evil portent. It must not
do so again.
His thoughts were so far away that a soft footfall behind him and the
rustle of satin seemed part of that other night until turning
restlessly, he caught the sheen of satin, brightly gold in the
lantern-glow. The dark, vivid skin, the hair and eyes that were
somehow more Spanish than Indian--the golden mask--Carl's face went
wildly scarlet.
"Keela!" he cried, springing toward her, "Keela!"
There was much of his old intolerance, much of his impudent immunity to
the world's opinion in the curious flash of adjustment which leveled
barriers of caste and convention and bridged, for him, in the fashion
of a willful uncle, the gulf of race and breeding.
The golden mask dropped.
"Is it not a pretty farewell?" she faltered, with a wistful glance at
the shimmering gown. "Diane gave it all. As you saw me first,
so--now!"
Some lines of Lanier's poem of the morning were ringing wildly in
Carl's ears.
"The blades of the marsh grass stir;
Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whir;
Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run;
And the sea and the marsh are one."
"Why do you look at me so?" asked Keela.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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