PAGE 5
When The Swallows Homeward Fly
by
The thing had seized him. Conviction was upon him, and he watched the other’s anguished face with anguish and excitement in his own. But–but it might be, it might be her father–the eyes, the forehead are like hers; the hands, the long hands, the pointed fingers. “Dear old man, did you have a wife and child, and were they both called Alice–do you remember? Franklin!–Alice! Do you remember?”
The old man got slowly to his feet, his arms outstretched, the look in his face changing, understanding, struggling for its place, memory fighting for its own, the soul contending for its mastery.
“Franklin–Alice–the snow,” he said, confusedly, and sank down.
“God have mercy!” cried Bickersteth, as he caught the swaying body and laid it upon the ground. “He was there–almost.”
He settled the old man against the great pine stump and chafed his hands. “Man, dear man, if you belong to her–if you do, can’t you see what it will mean to me? She can’t say no to me then. But if it’s true, you’ll belong to England and to all the world, too, and you’ll have fame everlasting. I’ll have gold for her and for you, and for your Alice, too, dear old man. Wake up now and remember if you are Dyke Allingham, who went with Franklin to the silent seas of the Pole. If it’s you, really you, what wonder you lost your memory! You saw them all die, Franklin and all, die there in the snow, with all the white world round them. If you were there, what a travel you have had, what strange things you have seen! Where the world is loneliest, God lives most. If you get close to the heart of things, it’s no marvel you forgot what you were, or where you came from; because it didn’t matter; you knew that you were only one of thousands of millions who have come and gone, that make up the soul of things, that make the pulses of the universe beat. That’s it, dear old man. The universe would die, if it weren’t for the souls that leave this world and fill it with life. Wake up! Wake up, Allingham, and tell us where you’ve been, and what you’ve seen.”
He did not labor in vain. Slowly consciousness came back, and the gray eyes opened wide, the lips smiled faintly under the bushy beard; but Bickersteth saw that the look in the face was much the same as it had been before. The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity and a great weariness filled the countenance. He had come back to the verge, he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door had shut fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, the incompanionable night of forgetfulness.
Bickersteth saw that the travail and strife had drained life and energy, and that he must not press the mind and vitality of this exile of time and the unknown too far. He felt that when the next test came the old man would either break completely, and sink down into another and everlasting forgetfulness, or tear away forever the veil between himself and his past, and emerge into a long-lost life. His strength must be shepherded, and he must be kept quiet and undisturbed until they came to the town yonder in the valley, over which the night was slowly settling down. There two women waited, the two Alices, from both of whom had gone lovers into the North. The daughter was living over again in her young love the pangs of suspense through which her mother had passed. Two years since Bickersteth had gone, and not a sign!
Yet, if the girl had looked from her bedroom window, this Friday night, she would have seen on the far hill a sign; for there burned a fire beside which sat two travellers who had come from the uttermost limits of snow. But as the fire burned–a beacon to her heart if she had but known it–she went to her bed, the words of a song she had sung at choir-practice with tears in her voice and in her heart ringing in her ears. A concert was to be held after the service on the coming Sunday night, at which there was to be a collection for funds to build another mission-house a hundred miles farther north, and she had been practising music she was to sing. Her mother had been an amateur singer of great power, and she was renewing her mother’s gift in a voice behind which lay a hidden sorrow. As she cried herself to sleep the words of the song which had moved her kept ringing in her ears and echoing in her heart: