CHAPTER X
Thenight was so still and hot that no one proposed to try for sleep in close chambers. They sat in the garden watching the little villages go out into darkness, snuffed out like candles over the plain and hills. Only Fiesole, solitary on its lonely pinnacle, sent one stream of steady light across the valley. The gloomy palaces below them were utterly quiet, as if empty and desolate. The stars in the heavens shone distantly in the immense blackness. At last the men strolled down to the gate, smoking and talking.
“I am so very, very happy!” Molly Parker whispered, crouching down by her friend’s chair.
“I was thinking that I am so very sad,” Mrs. Wilbur replied dreamily. “But I was wrong. I have sloughed off a delusion, and I am alive again. I have broken with myself. But what has happened to Molly? Is she at last in love?”
For an answer the younger woman put her arms about Mrs. Wilbur and rested her head upon her shoulder.
“So it is all right, Molly, at last!”
“Yes, I knew it must be, though I was afraid and sad when I came away from Chicago.”
“And you are sure?” Mrs. Wilbur asked, as if doubtful whether human hearts were to be trusted.
“There is nothing to tell you, nothing. But you areso sure! A word, a look, and then, O Adela! there is such peace!”
Mrs. Wilbur stroked her face silently. The heart of a child had lived on into maturity in this woman, at least.
“And you don’t mind the poverty and the small future?”
“Adela!”
“And you think it will always be enough for him to put his arm there where mine is?”
“I don’t think.”
“Yes, that is better, dear. You have all that I have striven for. It has come to you unconsciously and naturally, like sleep when you are tired, or food when you are hungry.”
“Poor Adela!”
“Oh, no. I am content. I have found out, after all my blundering, what kind of a world it is. A big place! One must not shiver in it. The really foolish people are those who struggle, like me, for what is only an idea.”
They continued to hold one another silently. At last Molly Parker spoke mischievously. “Perhaps there won’t be niggers always!”
Mrs. Wilbur laughed. “You will be anxious to leave me, to go back to America soon?”
“Yes, but no, not leave you—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Wilbur repeated with a sad smile. “Perhaps I shall go with you, after all. They have my blood, the self-same inheritance with me. In them andwith them must I make my life, if it is to be anything.”
Molly kissed her again tearfully.
“There are some whom I have made to suffer,” Mrs. Wilbur mused, “and especially my mother. I must learn how to live.”