Also, I heard the cry of the
wild fowl going South, and they wouldn't have made a sound if it hadn't
been a fine day. And also, and likewise, and besides, and howsomever, I
heard Jim singing, and that nigger never sings in bad weather. Jim's a
fair-weather raven, and this morning he was singing like a 'lav'rock in
the glen.'"
Being blind, he could not see that, suddenly, a storm of emotion swept
over her face.
His cheerfulness, his boylike simplicity, his indomitable spirit, which
had survived so much, and must still face so much, his almost childlike
ways, and the naive description of a blind man's perception, waked in her
an almost intolerable yearning. It was not the yearning of a maid for a
man. It was the uncontrollable woman in her, the mother-thing, belonging
to the first woman that ever was-protection of the weak, hovering love
for the suffering, the ministering spirit.
Since Ingolby had been brought to the house in the pines, Madame Bulteel
and herself, with Jim, had nursed him through the Valley of the Shadow.
They had nursed him through brain-fever, through agonies which could not
have been borne with consciousness. The tempest of the mind and the pains
of misfortune went on from hour to hour, from day to day, almost without
ceasing, until at last, a shadow of his former self, but with a wonderful
light on his face which came from something within, he waited patiently
for returning strength, propped up with pillows in the bed which had been
Fleda's own, in the room outside which Jethro Fawe had sung his heathen
serenade.
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