It was enough
thought for him to listen to the whispered stories of the sisters in the
long evenings, and, half-heard, try and make an end to them; to look
drowsily down into the garden, where the afternoon sunshine was still so
summer-like that a few hollyhocks persisted in showing their honest red
faces along the walls, and the very leaves that filled the paths would
not wither, but kept up a wholesome ruddy brown. One of the sisters had
a poultry-yard in it, which he could see: the wall around it was of
stone covered with a brown feathery lichen, which every rooster in that
yard was determined to stand on, or perish in the attempt; and Holmes
would watch, through the quiet, bright mornings, the frantic ambition
and the uproarious exultation of the successful aspirant with an amused
smile.
"One'd thenk," said Lois, sagely, "a chicken never stood on a wall
before, to hear 'em, or a hen laid an egg."
Nor did Holmes smile once because the chicken burlesqued man: his
thought was too single for that yet. It was long before he thought of
the people who came in quietly to see him as anything but shadows, or
wished for them to come again. Lois, perhaps, was the most real thing in
life then to him: growing conscious, day by day, as he watched her, of
his old life over the gulf. Very slowly conscious: with a weak groping
to comprehend the sudden, awful change that had come on him, and then
forgetting his old life, and the change, and the pity he felt for
himself, in the vague content of the fire-lit room, and his nurse with
her interminable knitting through the long afternoons, while the sky
without would thicken and gray and a few still flakes of snow would come
drifting down to whiten the brown fields,--with no chilly thought of
winter, but only to make the quiet autumn more quiet.
Pages:
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160