Amnesiacs -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Trials -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
All the way home the three young things were silent. They saw the dark
trees slide by, half piteously, wanting to run to them and hide their
heads in their soft branches and tell them things. All the kind earth,
the hills and the river, seemed maternal, strong to their hot hearts,
burning with scorn and contempt. Dunstan knew painfully his own part in
the miserable intrigue. Tawny and Gertrude merely revenged themselves,
and they had taken it out on little, jolly, happy Minga. As the girls
got out, Dunstan stopped his car in a kind of blare of cut-out and
racing engine; it was like getting off the blast of his own feelings.
The boy groaned "good-bye" and was gone.
Sard undressed in the moonlight. There was no other light in her room,
and so she had not pulled the shades down. The trees towered into the
white moonlit sky and she saw the orange-colored glow over the garage
where Colter sat reading. The man's curious calm life of books and
plants, the way he kept aloof yet was ready and effective, above all
his patient helplessness before the awful dark of his memory, swept
over the girl. Sard looked at her bed. "I can't sleep to-night," she
said. "I want to talk, to talk to someone--I want----" Sard went slowly
and looked up at the mountain where the organ builder's house loomed
back of the sky. She thought of Shipman and smiled a little but lightly
shook her head. "No," she said, "he's kind, kind, wonderfully kind and
strong, but----" The girl, a white crepe wrapper over her nightgown,
looked long and solemnly at Colter's light; suddenly the orange square
darkened.... The man was lying now on his narrow bed, the sweep of
hair off that forehead Sard knew so well, the long, fine hands lying
careless and relaxed, the fine sensitive face swept with its look of
suffering, perhaps already drowned in the great black waves of sleep.
Did sleep ever bring back to Colter his birthright, did he ever see in
dreams familiar faces or hear voices? Sard found herself kneeling at
the window watching the dark window, her face flushed. "I wonder, who
he is," breathed the girl, "oh, if I could only tell him who he is. If
I could bring Light to him!" Sard knelt, staring out into the dark, her
face hot, her heart pounding.
"I can't stand this," she muttered. "I--I feel desperate, queer
to-night. I might run out into the night, anywhere, to anyone. I
wonder! oh, I wonder----"
Suddenly she got up from her crouching position; with tawny hair
falling, tossing back from her forehead, she caught up a little pocket
flash and holding it before her carefully felt her way down the
tower-room stairs to Minga's room. Sard knocked softly. "May I come in?
You aren't asleep?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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