The Keeper of the Bees/Chapter 11

by Gene Stratton-Porter

CHAPTER XI

The Aroma of a Spirit and a Flower

 

AFEW days later Margaret Cameron came to Jamie with a pair of jackets that she had fashioned from unbleached muslin. A broad band fitted neatly around his chest and fastened with flat buttons. A pair of straps, easy when sitting, sufficiently close fitting to keep the bandages in place when moving around, crossed the shoulders. When his wound was dressed and he slipped on one of these contrivances and buttoned it, he felt like a man who had just been redeemed. The bandage was so much lighter in weight, so much easier to wear than what he had carried for two years. Above all, it served his purpose and did not constantly remind him by its weight and the ceaseless chafing across his shoulders and under his arms of the fact that it was there.

For a week he and Margaret worked together, “fixing their fences,” they called it. They planned the best time of day to do the sprinkling. To the extent of the knowledge of either of them, they watched over the bees. As slowly and easily as possible Jamie went about everything that week. He kept religiously to the diet that they were working out, and every morning at ten o’clock he put on the Master’s bathing suit, and armed with an old blanket to cover his feet and towels for his head and arms, went down and boldly marched into the Pacific Ocean. After the first few ventures, he discarded fear and walked in until the waves broke over him, and before a week had passed he discovered that by lying on his right side, stroking with his right hand and using his feet, he could trail his left arm and swim a few strokes. This fact so delighted him that merely the feeling of exhilaration helped the circulation of his blood. When he was thoroughly chilled from the tingle of the cold salt water, then, in a spot he had selected beginning in a mound of gold primroses and sloping down to the sands of the beach facing directly to the southwest, he stretched his long frame on the hot sand, disposed of the blanket and towels to his comfort, and fell sound asleep. When he awoke he would be thoroughly warm from the heat of the sands beneath him and his body would have dried while coated with the salt water.

Then he went through the quaint gate and slowly climbed the winding stairway that led to the back door. During these climbs he discovered that he was developing a familiarity with every flower that grew on either side of the path. Those that he did not know, Margaret Cameron did, from her years of work that she and the Bee Master had put upon their gardens together. He found himself studying the flowers, watching which bees went most frequently to which flowers, and when he discovered that the Black Germans were paying more frequent visits to the nasturtiums than to any other flower, Jamie sneered. He remembered from botanical days Nasturtium officinale. That was cress, but nasturtiums were of the same family. The boys in the classes had always called nasturtiums the “official nose twister” and wasn’t it like anything doing business under the title of Black German to select for an especial favourite an “official nose twister”? This and other whimsies began to occupy his mind.

When he reached the house, he went straight to the bathroom for a shower, applied fresh dressings, and clothed himself, and by that time Margaret had brought his lunch. After he had eaten he wandered about the grounds for the twenty minutes prescribed and then deliberately lay down on the Master’s bed and to the music of the rhythmic breaking of the waves he slept another hour. From that hour he came to a brimming glass of cold orange juice. As regularly he took the tomato juice in the morning, and instead of either tea or coffee, he drank milk with his meals. When he had finished his nap, he did as much work in the garden as he could do without tiring himself. Then he went to the bookshelves, but in his new resolve to fight to be of some good in the world, he passed by the tempting volumes of romance and Ancient Natural History. He laughed at them and talked to them and repeated in their faces rich phrases from their unique pages.

“The bees pluck their young from the air and place them in cells, do they? The honey falls from the heavens, does it? The best bees are small, round and variegated, are they?”

So Jamie had his joke with the ancient naturalists and then he advanced on the moderns and sat down with a book of rules for men who would be the keepers of bees.

Back in the depths of his mind, Jamie decided that when the Bee Master returned he would be so weakened that it might be a year at least before he would be able to go on with his work, and during that time he would stay on the job, if the Master wanted him, and he would learn everything there was to know about bees. The more he thought of it, the more it appealed to him that, since there was not the chance for forestry in California that there was in the East, he would do better and extract fully as much enjoyment out of life working with bees as he would with trees.

It was after ten days of religious following of this schedule that Jamie awoke one morning, and instead of arising immediately, lay still to take stock of himself. He stretched his right leg as far down in the bed as it would go and wiggled his toes. Fine! There was not a hint of soreness He tried the left leg with the same results. Then he tried the right arm and then the left and then he stretched his whole body and threw his weight on the back of his head and his heels and drew up his shoulders and eased them down, and the result of the exercise so delighted him that he tried it over again. He decided that it might not be a bad thing to work out a form of exercise and put himself through it every morning on awakening.

So for himself, and merely of his own volition, he began a practice which a very great doctor of health recommends for all men and women who would be physically strong. It was considerably a matter of stretching and squirming the first morning, but during the days that followed there developed a sort of rhythmic exercise that stretched and twisted every muscle in his body. After it he lay resting half an hour or so and went to the work of the day with a feeling in his body and an uplift in his heart and brain that a few short weeks before he had never expected again to experience. He was beginning to realize that the heat and the nerve strain were in some way being eliminated from his system. He was beginning to experience a calm satisfaction in the pit of his stomach as if there were cooling streams running through his veins instead of torturing poisoned blood. The result of this feeling was that he could accomplish very much more in a day among the bees and with the flowers than he had been doing.

At that he realized that the time was coming speedily when he must have help. When it came to examining the hives and ascertaining for sure that each hive had a healthful and happy queen, that no disease had crept in, he would need help. There was the question becoming imminent of removing the honey, and it seemed that there might be too many queens. So the next time he went to the hospital for a visit with the Bee Master, he asked where he could secure help when the day came that he would need it, and the Bee Master gave him the address of John Carey, another keeper of bees with whom had occasionally exchanged work in times of honey collecting and swarming.

As Jamie sat beside the Bee Master’s bed and watched him, it seemed to him that each day that passed marked a distinct point in the ravages of the disease that was devastating the lean frame before him. Each time he went, he could see that the Bee Master had not quite his old strength of voice, that he was slightly weaker in the clasp of his hands.

When he had finished copying the address and listened to the instructions that the Master gave him, Jamie sat looking at the fine old face on the pillow, the skin like parchment, the silken hair, and it seemed to him that daily a great peace and a quietness were growing on the brow and in the eyes, and he thought of what the little Scout had said about the beautiful kind of death that came softly in the night, and he wondered if any night now that experience might not befall the Bee Master.

It was while these thoughts were dominant in Jamie’s mind that the same thought must have been passing in the brain of the Bee Master. His voice was very low and quiet and his eyes seemed unusually tired as he said: “Jamie MacFarlane, suppose you begin away back at the beginning and tell me all about the mother who bore you and your father and what kind of home you were reared in.”

Now, these were subjects upon which Jamie MacFarlane could speak eloquently on slight provocation, because he had loved his father and mother with good reason. They had been full Scot stern, but they had also been overflowingly Scot gentle and loving and tender, and his memories of his home and his childhood were something beautiful. Jamie, seated beside the bed with the light from the window falling on his face, spoke slowly with the deliberation that searches for the salient points, with the loving impulse that puts in the small details that round out the full picture. When he had finished with the final description of how he was brought home from the war to the shock of the knowledge that both of them were gone, and there was nothing whatever, he sat very still, looking through the window, and it was the voice of the Bee Master that called him back.

“And from there on?” he suggested.

So Jamie began again and finished the story. He told it truthfully, with no deviation whatever except that he omitted the night of the storm and its subsequent results.

When he had finished, the Bee Master smiled at him, and then he said: “And what about the bees and the weeks that you have been among them in the blue garden?”

Jamie answered: “As far as my mind is concerned, the time I have spent in your home trying to take care of your bees and your flowers and your trees has been the most beautiful time of my whole life. I began with a gnawing fire in my breast and a bitter blackness in my heart and brain; but some way, owing to some things the little Scout said to me and the clean air and the crisp sunshine and the beauty all around me, there is a sort of corresponding beauty that’s crept into my heart and my brain, and I think it’s smothered a large part of the bitterness. I was so desperately tired when I staggered across the road to you to try to help you reach the hospital that I am in no position to say what my physical or mental condition was when I came. But I know that to-day I have done about twice the work in the garden that I could manage the first day I really tried to look after your interests.”

The Bee Master moved his lean hands over the coverlet. A rare smile illumined his face.

“That’s fine!” he said. “Fine! And would you feel, then, that if they carry me out of here some of these days and bring me home, a wreck of a man unable to stand on my feet and carry on my work, would you feel that you would care to remain with me, that you would try learning bees from the egg onward?”

“I’d love it,” said Jamie. “I’d love to wait on you and help you back to health over the same path that I’ve laid out for myself.”

Then he explained to the Master what path he had laid out for himself, and again the gentle old voice cried: “Fine! Couldn’t be better, and what’s more, I can see that you are making it. Each trip you make to cheer the old man up a little, I can see that your skin is taking on a healthier hue, that the blue lights of pain and discouragement are fading out of your eyes. You even speak with a stronger voice, with the assurance of a man who is captaining his own soul. I am staking my money that you’re going to win through to health and happiness in the garden that has come the nearest to bringing me consolation of anything I ever have tried.”

The Bee Master lay still and waited a long time. Then he said to Jamie: “It may seem to you that such confidence as I asked from you should be met with equal confidence, but I find that my weakness has made a coward of me. Some day, if you ever want to know what there is to know concerning me, ask my little side partner. There was an hour of exceeding blackness in which the little Scout Master swung over my side fence and walked into my heart and into my life so securely that when this bitter hour came, almost before I knew what I had done, I had laid the whole of my burden on the shoulders of a child, only to learn that however keenly a child may think, however deeply a child may feel, there does not seem to be a large capacity for shouldering burdens. Children are so occupied with growing, with amusing themselves, with exploring the wonderful world around them, with following their impulses to explore and to fight, that there isn’t much possibility of weighting their young shoulders with responsibility for any one else unless, by chance, you take them from their companions, from their play, and load them with sickening burdens of heavy responsibilities that are unnatural and that often breed rebellion in their young hearts. The little Scout knows why I left my home and a goodly circle of friends and came out here alone, and from two acres of rocky land and a few hives developed two acres of beauty and made homes for millions of little denizens that swarm in the garden. The little Scout knows my troubles, but, God knows, I don’t believe I am equal to telling that story again! If the day ever comes when you feel that you need to know, tell the little Scout that I said you were to be told and you will get an accurate account of what brought me here, of the bitter pain I have endured, and of the surcease I have found in the glory of the sunshine and the song of the sea, in the healing of the lilies and the consolation of the roses, in absorbing work with as interesting a branch of the evolution of life as the whole world affords. I have investigated rather deeply. I will guarantee you that in the evolution of any living species, in the whole world, there can be found no life processes more complicated, more absorbingly interesting, more nearly human than in just the development of bees. I hope that you are making good use of the bee books.”

“Yes,” said Jamie, “to the exclusion of everything else. The little Scout started me on the books that, to quote literally, contained the ‘jokes about the bees.’ The jokes were so absorbingly interesting that they held me. But if I would render honest service for the wage I accepted, I realized that I must work intelligently. So I soon dropped the jokes and went on to the reality. I have advanced to the place where I can recognize a queen, and I know an Italian queen from a German queen. I am also able to distinguish a nurse from a drone and a drone from a worker. Through long hours of studying the observation hive, I’ve pretty thoroughly familiarized myself with what must be going on inside of each of the hives in those other long rows. As I told you, I had intended to study tree surgery, but I figure that if there is such a possibility as that I may become a well man, and since I have no ties, I had better remain in the same kind of air and sunshine that seems to be working the miracle that I need to make a whole man of me.”

Slowly the Bee Master assented.

“Yes,” he said, “I think you’re right. I think you’re right. I think you can find even a greater amount of interest in the intricate and delicate life processes of a bee than in work with the insensate trees that grow because they must, for however interesting they may be, and however beautiful they may be, the fact remains that they are not carrying out life processes that border so nearly on thinking and on reasoning as do the bees.”

“I have quite decided,” said Jamie, “that I am going to study hard. I am going on carefully and if you give me the opportunity, I will make my work among the bees.”

“About the location, now,” said the Bee Master. “How do you feel about my location?”

Jamie smiled.

“I know the Atlantic seaboard and quite a bit abroad. I’ve seen the coasts of England and France, and I’ve gone all the way across this continent. The bay below your place constitutes my whole experience with the Pacific, but I am fairly sure that in all this world there is nothing to be found much lovelier than your garden of perfect blue. You remember that the ancient Chinese called blue the ‘perfect colour’?”

The Bee Master nodded corroboratively.

“There have been days in that azure garden, laddie,” he said, “when God has really given me surcease, when for a minute a gold-haired vision of childhood has dropped from my mind, when for a minute the pain of the sin I committed against the woman I loved has been obliterated. If it can do that for a man carrying the burden that has been my portion, there is a prospect that a young man with health in his body and a heart without secrets might find the same great blessing in daily beneficence.”

Jamie looked at the Bee Master and winced. For one second he sat with his lips open and his tongue ready to fashion words, and then he reflected that he had no right to tell a secret unless it were his secret alone. He had no right to describe the Storm Woman. He had no right to tell any man of the shame baby he had covered with his name. If there had been anything magnanimous in his deed, it would lose the fine flavour, the beauty that such a deed might have, if he talked about it. If he lived, there might possibly be something more to that phase of his adventure. If he died, he would face his Maker more of a man if he kept his mouth shut concerning a subject. that drove so noble a specimen of womanhood as the woman he had married to the course she had taken.

“The next time you come,” said the Bee Master, “make it on Saturday and bring the Scout Master with you. That little Scout gets under my cuticle so deeply that I am hungry for the odour of horse and the tang of dog, and all the outdoors that carries wherever the Scout Master goes.”

Jamie leaned forward with a broad grin on his face.

“Just between us,” he said, “could you give me any accurate information as to the sex of the Scout Master?”

The Bee Master leaned back.

“I could go no farther than my own conclusions,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be fair to the Scout Master to deal in surmises. Did you ever have any conversation on the subject?”

“I asked point blank,” said Jamie.

“And what were you told?” inquired the Bee Master.

“That if I could not tell, it didn’t make any difference.”

The Bee Master’s head rolled back on the pillows. He laughed until a nurse came racing. As he wiped his eyes with the handkerchief she gave him, he said: “Well, really now, isn’t that about the truth? Does it make a particle of difference?”

“I don’t know that it does,” said Jamie. “I’m sure it doesn’t seem to have made any with you. I see no reason why it should with me.”

He rose to go.

“We’ll make it Saturday,” he said, “and I think you’ll be asked if I got your hot dog right.”

The Bee Master reached under the pillow and pulled out a small envelope, a tiny prescription envelope.

“In case I am,” he said, “the one thing I’ve never done is to lie to my little partner. I’ll tell the truth. I’ll show the money waiting under the pillow until the doctor says I may have the treat.”

“I see,” said Jamie, “and I think you’re right. I don’t believe we get very far with the lies we tell children.”

“We get nowhere,” said the Bee Master, sternly. “We get nowhere. They see through us or discover our deception later every time.”

Jamie arose and went over to the side of the bed and took the Bee Master’s hand, and suddenly he bent down and laid his lips on his forehead and before he realized what he was doing, he found that he was on his knees beside the bed. He heard his voice saying: “When I was a youngster, my father and mother taught me to pray. In the intervening years I got so sure of my own sufficiency and efficiency that I grabbed the bait and ran, but lately, when I got to the place where I could truthfully say, in the language of the old hymn, ‘Other refuge have I none,’ I’ve been on my knees creeping back toward the foot of the throne. I am asking, if it’s consistent with the divine plan, that I may be given back my strength and my youth, that I may be of some help in making my country a good place wherein to live, to work, and to love. I am going home, and I am going to kneel beside your bed, and I am going to ask God, if it is the best thing for you, to let you come home, to let you have more of life, more time to enjoy the beauty that you have created; and if that is not His plan, then I am going to ask Him to give you the surcease that the little Scout Master says was vouchsafed to little old Aunt Beth.”

The Bee Master smiled.

“I heard that story,” he said. “I was told about it when it happened. It was a very wonderful thing that those two children could have gotten such a lovely conception of the journey to the Far Country, and I am very sure it is the right conception.”

Jamie kissed the Bee Master on the forehead, and then he lifted to his lips the slender hands of the sick man and, turning, went quietly from the room. As he went, he passed a beautiful blue bowl filled to overflowing with more of the yellow roses that he had seen growing only in the garden of Margaret Cameron.

All the way home Jamie rode in deep thought. Would the Bee Master ever be able to come back to the house with the gracious face turned to the roadway, with the luring garden looking to the sea? Would he ever again sit in his great chair by his fireside and read from his loved books? Jamie realized that he was not waiting to reach home and the side of the Bee Master’s bed to offer up his petition. He was asking God as he rode through the turmoil of the streets of the city, crowded on either hand by people absorbed in the affairs of life, to grant even a short respite to the man he was rapidly learning to idolize.

When he left the car, he walked slowly up the roadway to the house of the Bee Master. He entered it and stood irresolute for a minute and then he walked to the telephone and from a list he had made, selected the number that the little Scout had given him. When he called it, the rich, sweet voice of a woman answered.

Then said Jamie, “This is James MacFarlane of the Sierra Madre Apiary. Is the Scout Master at home?”

“Not at this minute,” came the reply.

“Would you contract,” asked Jamie, “to deliver this message? I’ve been to the hospital for a visit with the Bee Master. He is homesick to see his little partner. He has asked particularly for a visit the coming Saturday. I thought I had better tell you about it before arrangements were made with the boys for a scouting party or some kind of a hike.”

“Yes, that’s a good idea,” said the voice at the other end of the line. “I’ll make a note of the message and I’ll see that it is delivered. I should be interested in knowing how you found the Bee Master.”

“It is difficult to say,” said Jamie. “He seems so frail that a strong draft of air coming in the window beside him might carry his breath away.”

“Too bad,” said the gentle voice. “That is too bad. The children dearly love him. Any one can see that he is a noble specimen of manhood.”

“Yes, I think that, too,” said Jamie. “His home here, his library, his room, the pictures on his walls, the furniture he uses, everything seems to indicate that he could not be finer.”

“I’ve heard about you,” said the voice over the wire. “If you’re fine enough to appreciate the Bee Master to the fullest extent, it means that you are pretty fine yourself. We’d be glad to have you come in with our little person some day and take dinner with us.”

“Why, thank you,” said Jamie. “That’s awfully kind. I’ve been pretty seedy and I’ve been shunning people for quite some time, but I think, if there’s an evening when you would not be having guests, I’d enjoy coming with the Scout Master and sharing your fireside for an hour.”

“All right, then. Come any time you choose,” said the voice whose every cadence Jamie liked. “There never was a time when there wasn’t enough food on our table for one more and room to squeeze in one more chair. Come right along any time you’d like!”

Jamie hung up the telephone and looked around him. He was not in the mood for reading. He stepped into the kitchen and drank his daily quota of orange juice and when he reached the back door there was a call in the air, a call that he answered with his blood. He went down the back walk and out of the gate and to his particular mound of beach primroses. He stretched himself on the sand, pulled his hat over his eyes to shade them from the sun, fitted his figure into the curves of the mound, and presently he was unconscious in the unconsciousness of deep, sound, refreshing sleep.

By and by he awoke, and even before he was fully conscious, sniffed the air with questing nostrils. “That’s strange!” said Jamie to himself. “I chose this mound for its particularly inviting curve, but I didn’t see any sand verbena on it.”

Jamie drew a deep breath to be sure that he had not been mistaken as to the odour that was mingling with the primroses around him. He realized that so near to evening the verbenas would be opening to distill their sweetest fragrance. Then he opened his eyes and straightened up to look around him, and he discovered that his right hand was full of verbena blooms. He stared down at it; then he whirled to his knees and took a long survey up the beach and down the beach, and then he shifted over and scanned the sand with eager eyes.

There it was. The footprint of a woman—not the peaked toed, pointed heel that he sometimes saw tilting over the sand. The imprint of a foot intended for business, shod in a shoe reasonable in width, unusual in length, with decidedly a common-sense heel. Jamie sprang up, and clasping his flowers followed that row of footprints straight down the beach to the throne. With wildly beating heart and head awhirl, he climbed the throne and peered over and he found that he was sickeningly disappointed that it was vacant. He took his own seat to the far south to think. He remained there, carefully sniffing the rock beside him. The tang of sage, the odour of verbena, a whiff of primrose, were distinctly discernible. Not to lose time, he made his way down the rock. But the track that led to it did not lead from it. Gravel and fine stone and rock over which footsteps could not be distinguished formed the way from the throne to the road-way above. She must have gone that way. So Jamie followed. But when he reached the road he could not see a trace of any one that looked in the very least like the figure of the girl whom he was seeking. He went back to the throne and over the path he had come, and at the primrose mount he took up the trail and followed it south along the beach until he lost it among the entangling primroses and verbena, among the sea figs. Just at the point where he lost it, Jamie discovered the reason why he had lost it. It had become obliterated by the tramping of dozens of little feet, funny little tracks, all of them the footprints of children. Blindly Jamie followed down the beach, and once he found a spot where the footprint he was searching for stood plain in the sand beside a spot where the sand verbena grew, and all around it there came again the obliterating fleet of childish footprints.

Then Jamie went home. He opened the gate and carefully closed it after him. Half the length of the steps he sat down. For the first time he brought the little bunch of flowers he held around to the range of his vision.

“Can you beat it!” said Jamie to himself. “Can you beat it? That close, and I slept! I must be more of a log than I am of a man!”

He sat staring at the delicate pinkish purple flowers that, as was their wont in the evening, were opening wide with the heat of his hand and distilling all around him the exquisitely subtle and delicate odours of their particular perfume. Once Jamie looked out toward the sea.

“Then I’m right,” he said. “She does live somewhere near here. At least, she haunts this beach. And she knew me, even with my face covered. For that matter, at a pinch I might know her form better than I do her face! But what’s the object in filling my hand with the most appealing little flowers in all the world if she hasn’t any use for me in any other way?”

Jamie thought that over carefully, and then he told the Pacific Ocean about it.

“Come to think of it,” he said, “I’ve filled my purpose with her. She has the name she asked for. She has the ring and she has the certificate. She hasn’t any further use for me, but this does prove that she has me on her mind, that at least she didn’t use me and forget me.”

Then Jamie dropped the Pacific as being rather impersonal and confined himself to the flowers. He held them daintily in his slender fingers and looked at them with absorbed, questioning eyes.

“I wish,” he said, “that you could talk. I wish your little faces could tell me what you saw in her face when she gathered you. I wish that I knew exactly what was in her heart. I wish I knew whether she is very sure that she has finished with me, or whether there’s something more that I could do for her.”

Then Jamie shook himself and sat straight.

“By gracious!” he said, and this time he addressed a particularly tall, particularly straight, unusually handsome yellow hollyhock growing beside the pergola. “By gracious! I’m not so sure that she’d get me any farther if she did want me! It’s one thing to offer a name you haven’t any use for and a body that’s not going to last so very long as a sop to dry a woman’s tears, not of repentance, but of fear, a fear that the world is going to shun the leper of disgrace, fear that the accusing eyes of a child are going to look into her face and find her wanting—it’s one thing to do what you can when your time for doing anything is strictly limited. It’s only a few days now until this month is going to be passed, and if Margaret Cameron looks at my breast and can truthfully say that the fire is dying out of the wound there, if I am not deceiving myself in thinking that I am infinitely more of a man than I was thirty days ago, that’s another proposition. That’s a proposition that I hadn’t figured on when I essayed the bridegroom stunt. And that’s a proposition that’s going to take a lot of thought. It doesn’t behoove any man to assume a ‘I am holier than thou’ attitude, but at the same time, a man certainly has to do considerable thinking before he makes up his mind as to whether he wants to assume the rearing of a child fathered by a man who had the streak of yellow in his make-up that made him neglect to give his child honourable parentage.”

Jamie thought that over. He thought for a long time. He thought deep and hard. He thought from the background of Scottish prejudice. He remembered personal pride. He thought from the background of public opinion. Then he cast them all aside and thought straight from the shoulder. From somewhere a legal phrase crept into his brain. “Mitigating circumstances.” He could not think of the form of the Storm Girl as he had held it tight in his arms, he could not think upon the silkiness of her hair and the perfume of her breath and the wild odours that clung about her, he could not force himself to think that she was anything but fresh and young and healthful both of body and of mind. It was not compatible with ordinary reason that she should have polluted her body and smirched her soul, that she had broken the laws of God and broken the laws of man, and risked, not only for herself, but for the life that was to come, that blinding, blighting thing which has been so comprehensively designated as the finger of scorn.

“Whoever,” said Jamie to a particularly intelligent mocking bird that happened at that minute to be perched on a brace of the pergola near him, “whoever invented that little phrase about the ‘finger of scorn’ didn’t make it half strong enough. What they should have called it was the red-hot poker of scorn, the iron that can be thrust against the breast of a woman and that all her days can sear her soul and be set scorching anew at any unforeseen moment, and all because for a minute she probably loved a man so infinitely better than she loved herself that she risked her soul and lost it, so far as the world is concerned. It is a blessed thing that she did not lose it with God, for there was the Magdalene whom He forgave, and the Magdalene was an old-timer who perhaps deserved what the mob gave her. But after all, God did forgive her, and it wouldn’t do to allow God to be kinder to a woman than a Scotsman would be.”

The mocking bird flirted his tail and cocked his eye and said, quoting an oriole on a plum tree in the garden, “Once more now! Once more now!”

Jamie grinned.

“Have I got to do better than that?” he said. “Well, how would it do if I said that I’d break my word not to try to find the Storm Girl, and start out with the deliberate intention of finding her? And how would it do if I said that I honestly and truly felt the ‘mitigating circumstances’ to be mitigating, and if I really turned out, say in about a year from now, to be a sound man, maybe she could overlook my scars and maybe she could explain, and maybe we could find something really beautiful in life together?”

Then the mocking bird remembered a particularly brilliant performance he had heard on a date palm down in Mexico from a bloody red bird and threw a repetition straight at Jamie’s head, “Good cheer! Good cheer! Good cheer!”

So Jamie looked at his flowers again and saw that they were beginning to droop their lovely heads. He got up and hurried to find the little copper bowl in order to put them in water. When he had very carefully arranged them in the bowl, he carried it to the bedroom and set it on the stand beside the bed that could be drawn close to his pillow.

All the rest of that day, Jamie stumbled as he walked, not because of weakness, but because he was dreaming a peculiarly absorbing dream.

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