Page:Century Magazine v082.djvu/88

it will make the day less long to know thou wilt miss me."

"But thou 'lt wait for us, then, until we come back in the evening time?"

Still Evan smiled. "I ll wait for thee, Gladdwyd," he said.

When they were gone the wood seemed very still. He had held his breath to catch every word of the revelers until they were lost in the distance. Now he rose and paced up and down the path, and the youth in him cried out in protest against his blindness. He longed to run and leap and be free, free to see the world he lived in, free to live and love like other men.

But even as these thoughts tormented him, he lifted his head to breathe more fully the warm, scented air laden with the garnered treasure of wild flowers and meadow grass, and to catch the elusive note of a distant unknown bird.

He dropped beside his harp and eagerly sought to capture the strain. It was one of his joys to think that he was giving expression to the dumb things that could not speak for themselves, that his harp spoke the meaning of the wind, the inarticulate song of the little nameless weeds and grasses that strove vainly to lift their tiny voices. So ardently did he crave the power of sight, that his heart leaped forth in instant sympathy to anything, animate or inanimate, that could not hear, and sing, and see.

What would the vision be, he wondered, could a flash of sight be given him? It was twenty years since he had seen the sun, and though memory treasured each shape and color that was left by the obliterating years, yet he longed passionately for one moment of reassurance.

As one lies in the darkness at night and dreams of the coming light, so Evan sat in the darkness and dreamed of the light that was gone.

Again and again the sound of passing feet and the dropping of a penny in the box told of the presence of a stranger, but Evan played on, unaware of the world and of the flight of time. He was lifting up his heart to God, as a child brings its gift without explanation or apology, and lays it in the lap of one it loves.

After a time he opened his small lunch basket, and ate his barley bread and cheese. A thrush fluttered to his knee, then hopped to the tips of his fingers, daintily picking the crumbs from the palm of his hand. He felt the sensitive quiver of the tiny body, and knew that the wings were poised for flight. It would go, as all else went, on, on, out into the great, free world, leaving him there alone.

All afternoon he played patiently on. The passing of the minutes and the passing of the hours were one to him, except where Gladdwyd was concerned.

He waited for her now, playing softly, lest he should fail to catch the first sound of her voice. But no shouts and noisy chatter came to tell him of the return of the merrymakers.

The twilight twitter of the sleepy birds as they settled down for the night, and the stirring of the leaves by the cool, evening breezes, might have warned Evan that the day was done. But Gladdwyd had bidden him wait and the hope of going down into the village, even that bit of a way, with the glad, noisy crowd, and of walking beside Gladdwyd, with her hand perhaps in his, made him straighten his tired shoulders, and flex his cramped fingers, and play patiently on. Hour after hour he waited, while the evening dropped into night and darkness stole over the world as it had long ago stolen over his sight. The dew fell upon the faces of the upturned flowers, and a single star shone out from the branches of a sentinel spruce, but Evan could not hear the falling of the dew nor the dawning of the star, and it was still day to him until he should hear Gladdwyd's voice coming down the mountain side.

Wearier and wearier grew the waiting, and at last his fingers faltered on the strings, and he sat with his head drooped against his harp, and his sightless eyes turned patiently toward the hillside.

Suddenly a faint cry made him turn his head to listen. It was a cry he had often heard when a child, tending the sheep with his father on the moors of Gallt-y-Foel, the cry of a young lamb in distress.

Placing his harp in the shelter and seizing his stick, he started valiantly up the hill. The path going down to the village he knew, as the chipmunk knows his, though it be covered with the leaves of many autumns: he knew where the boughs bent over the pathway, how the rocks jutted out at the turn of the hill, and when one must put a hand against the