"THE MARSHES OF GLYNN"
For the rides over the sun-hot plains, the poling of cypress canoes,
the days of hunting and the tanning of hides, there was now a third of
fearless strength and endurance. Keela had come with the Mulberry Moon
to the home of her foster father, a presence of delicate gravity and
shyness which pervaded the lodge like the breath of some vivid wild
flower.
"Red-winged Blackbird," said Carl, one morning, laying aside the flute
which had been showering tranquil melody through the quiet beneath the
moss-hung oaks, "why are you so quiet?"
"I am ever quiet," said Red-winged Blackbird with dignity. "Mic-co
says it is better so."
"Why?"
"Mic-co only understands, and even to him I may not always talk." She
went sedately on with the modeling of clay, her slender hands swift,
graceful, unfaltering. Mic-co's lodge abounded in evidences of their
deftness.
"You have more grace," said Carl suddenly, "than any woman I have ever
known."
"Diane!" said Keela with charming and impartial acquiescence.
"Yes, Diane has it, too," assented Carl, and fell thoughtful, watching
Mic-co's snowy herons flap tamely about the lodge.
"Play!" said Keela shyly.
Carl drew the flute from his pocket again and obeyed.
"Like a brook of silver!" said the Indian girl with an abashed
revealment of the wild sylvan poetry with which her thoughts were rife.
"The one friend," said Carl, "to whom I have told all things. The one
friend, Red-winged Blackbird, who always understood!"
"I," said Keela with majesty, "I too am your friend and I understand."
Carl reddened a little.
"What do you understand, little Indian lady?" he asked quietly.
He was totally unprepared for the keenness of her unsmiling analysis.
"That you have been very tired in the head," she nodded, her delicate,
vivid face quite grave. "So tired that you might not see as you
should, so tired that the medicine of white men could not reach it, but
only the words of Mic-co, who knows all things. So tired that a moon
was not a moon of lovely brightness. It was a thing of evil fire to
scorch. Uncah? Mic-co would say warped vision. I must talk in
simpler ways for all I study."
They fell quiet.
"Read me again that live oak poem of Lanier's," said Carl. "After a
while Mic-co will be back to spirit you away to his Room of Books."
She read, as she frequently read to Carl and Mic-co in the long quiet
afternoons, with an accent musical and soft, of the immortal marshes of
Glynn.
"Glooms of the live oaks, beautiful-braided and woven
With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven
Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs,--"
What vivid memories it awoke of the morning the swamp had revealed to
him the island home of Mic-co!
"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.
"I have been a fool," said Carl steadily, "a very great fool--and
blind."
Keela's lovely, sensitive mouth quivered.
"Is it--" she raised glistening, glorified eyes to his troubled face,
"is it," she whispered naïvely, "that you care like the lovers in
Mic-co's books?"
"Yes. And you, Keela?"
"I--I have always cared," she said shyly, "since that night at
Sherrill's. I--I feared you knew."
Trembling violently the girl dropped to her knees with a soft crash of
satin and buried her face in her hands. She was crying wildly.
Carl gently raised her to her feet again and squarely met her eyes.
"Red-winged Blackbird," he said quietly, "there is much that I must
tell you before I may honorably face this love of yours and mine--"
Keela's black eyes blazed in sudden loyalty.
"There is nothing I do not know," she flung back proudly. "Philip told
me. And for every wild error you made, he gave a reason. He loves and
trusts you utterly. May I not do that too?"
"He told you!"
"Some that night in the storm when he and I were saddling the horses to
ride to Mic-co's. Some later. He pledged me to kindness and
understanding."
For every break in the thread there had always been Philip's strong and
kindly hand to mend it. A little shaken by the memory of the night in
Philip's wigwam, Carl walked restlessly about the court.
"But there is more," he said, coloring. "There was passion and
dishonor in my heart, Keela, until, one night, I fought and won--"
"Is it not enough for me that you won?" asked Keela gently and broke
off, wild color staining her cheeks and forehead.
Mic-co stood in the doorway.
"Mic-co," she said bravely, "I--I would have you tell him that he is
strong and brave and clean enough to love. He--he does not know it."
She fled with a sob.
"Have you forgotten?" asked Mic-co slowly.
"I care nothing for race!" cried Carl with a flash of his fine eyes.
"Must I pattern my life by the set tenets of race bigotry. I have
known too many women with white faces and scarlet souls."
"If I know you at all," said Mic-co with a quiet smile, "there will be
no pattern, save of your own making."
"I come of a family who rebel at patterns," said Carl. "My mother--my
uncle--my cousin. Let me tell you all," and he told of the night in
the Sherrill garden; of the brutal desire that had later come with the
brooding and the wild disorders of his brain, to drive him deeper and
deeper into the black abyss until he fought and won by the camp fire;
of his consequent panic-stricken rebound of horror and remorse when he
had put it all aside, fighting the call with reason, seeking
desperately to crush it out of his life, until the sight of Keela in
the satin gown had sent him back with a shock to that finer, cleaner,
quieter call that had come in the Sherrill garden. Then the disordered
interval between had fled to the limbo of forgotten things.
Mic-co heard his story to the end without comment. He was silent so
long that Carl grew uncomfortable.
"Since Keela was a little, wistful, black-eyed child," said Mic-co at
last, "I have been her teacher. We have worked very hard together.
Peace came to me through her." He broke off frowning and spoke of the
alarming mine of inherited instincts from the white father which his
teaching had awakened. Keela had been restless and unhappy,
fastidiously aloof with the Seminoles, shy and reticent with white men.
He must not make another mistake, he said, for Keela was very dear to
him.
"The white father?" asked Carl curiously.
"An artist."
"She has a marvelous gift in modeling," said Carl. "I know a famous
young sculptor whose work is nothing like so virile. Might not
something utterly new and barbaric come of it with proper direction?
If she could interpret this wild life of the Glades from an Indian
viewpoint--"
"I have frequently thought of it," agreed Mic-co. "You would help her,
Carl?"
"Yes."
"It would give a definite and unselfish direction to your own life,
would it not, like those weeks at the farm with Wherry?"
"Yes. You trust me, Mic-co?"
"Utterly."
Carl held out his hand.
"One by one," said Mic-co, "fate is slipping into the groove of your
life people who are destined to care greatly--"
"You mean--"
"It shall be Keela's to decide."
"Mic-co, I--cannot thank you. You and Philip--"
But he could not go on.
A little later he went to bed and lay restless until morning. He was
up again at sunrise, tramping over the island paths with Mic-co.
The quiet of the early morning was rife with the chirp of countless
birds, with the crackle of the camp fire where the turbaned Indians in
Mic-co's service were preparing the morning meal. There was young corn
on the fertile island to the east. Over the chain of islands lay the
promise of early summer.
There was a curious drone overhead as they neared the lake.
"Look!" exclaimed Carl. "A singular sight, Mic-co, for these island
wilds of yours."
An aeroplane was whirring noisily above the quiet lake, startling the
bluebills floating about on the surface.
"A singular sight!" nodded Mic-co, "and a prophetic one. Symbolic of
the spirit of progress which hangs now above the Glades, is it not?
The world is destined to reap much one day from the exuberant fertility
of this marshland of the South."
The aeroplane glided gracefully to the bosom of the lake, alighted like
a great bird and came to shore with its own power.
The aviator swept off his cap and smiled.
It was Philip.