第73章

"Ah yes," she said meekly, looking into her father's eve, with a smile, "they are only that after all." And then she said very quietly, as if speaking to herself, "What a long time it is before you learn to see!"It was partly due to the isolation of her upbringing in the company of Israel that nearly every fresh wonder that encountered her eyes took shapes of supernatural horror or splendour.One early evening, when she had remained out of the house until the day was well-nigh done, she came back in a wild ecstasy to tell of angels that she had just seen in the sky.They were in robes of crimson and scarlet, their wings blazed like fire, they swept across the clouds in multitudes, and went down behind the world together, passing out of the earth through the gates of heaven.

Israel listened to her and said, "That was the sunset my child.

Every morning the sun rises and every night it sets."Then she looked full into his face and blushed.Her shame at her sweet errors sometimes conquered her joy in the new heritage of sight, and Israel heard her whisper to herself and say, "After all, the eyes are deceitful." Vision was life's new language, and she had yet to learn it.

But not for long was her delight in the beautiful things of the world to be damped by any thought of herself.Nay, the best and rarest part of it, the dearest and most delicious throb it brought her, came of herself alone.On another early day Israel took her to the coast, and pushed off with her on the waters in a boat.The air was still, the sea was smooth, the sun was shining, and save for one white scarf of cloud the sky was blue.They were sailing in a tiny bay that was broken by a little island, which lay in the midst like a ruby in a ring, covered with heather and long stalks of seeding grass.

Through whispering beds of rushes they glided on, and floated over banks of coral where gleaming fishes were at play.Sea-fowl screamed over their heads, as if in anger at their invasion, and under their oars the moss lay in the shallows on the pebbles and great stones.

It was a morning of God's own making, and, for joy of its loveliness no less than of her own bounding life, Naomi rose in the boat and opened her lips and arms to the breeze while it played with the rippling currents of her hair, as if she would drink and embrace it.

At that moment a new and dearer wonder came to her, such as every maiden knows whom God has made beautiful, yet none remembers the hour when she knew it first.For, tracing with her eyes the shadow of the cliff and of the continent of cloud that sailed double in two seas of blue to where they were broken by the dazzling half-round of the sun's reflected disc on the shadowed quarter of the boat, she leaned over the side of it, and then saw the reflection of another and lovelier vision.

"Father," she cried with alarm, "a face in the water! Look! look!""It is your own, my child," said Israel."Mine!" she cried.

"The reflection of your face," said Israel; "the light and the water make it."The marvel was hard to understand.There was something ghostly in this thing that was herself and yet not herself, this face that looked up at her and laughed and yet made no voice.She leaned back in the boat and asked Israel if it was still in the water.

But when at length she had grasped the mystery, the artlessness of her joy was charming.She was like a child in her delight, and like a woman that was still a child in her unconscious love of her own loveliness.Whenever the boat was at rest she leaned over its bulwark and gazed down into the blue depths.

"How beautiful!" she cried, "how beautiful!"She clapped her hands and looked again, and there in the still water was the wonder of her dancing eyes."Oh! how very beautiful!"she cried without lifting her face, and when she saw her lips move as she spoke and her sunny hair fall about her restless head she laughed and laughed again with a heart of glee.

Israel looked on for some moments at this sweet picture, and, for all his sense of the dangers of Naomi's artless joy in her own beauty, he could not find it in his heart to check her.He had borne too long the pain and shame of one who was father of an afflicted child to deny himself this choking rapture of her recovery."Live on like a child always, little one," he thought; "be a child as long as you can, be a child for ever, my dove, my darling!

Never did the world suffer it that I myself should be a child at all."The artlessness of Naomi increased day by day, and found constantly some new fashion of charming strangeness.All lovely things on the earth seemed to speak to her, and she could talk with the birds and the flowers.Also she would lie down in the grass and rest like a lamb, with as little shame and with a grace as sweet.

Not yet had the great mystery dawned that drops on a girl like an unseen mantle out of the sky, and when it has covered her she is a child no more.Naomi was a child still.Nay, she was a child a second time, for while she had been blind she had seemed for a little while to become a woman in the awful revelation of her infirmity and isolation.Now she was a weak, patient, blind maiden no longer, but a reckless spirit of joy once again, a restless gleam of human sunlight gathering sunshine into her father's house.

It was fit and beautiful that she who had lived so long without the better part of the gifts of God should enjoy some of them at length in rare perfection.Her sight was strong and her hearing was keen, but voice was the gift which she had in abundance.So sweet, so full, so deep, so soft a voice as Naomi's came to be, Israel thought he had never heard before.Ruth's voice? Yes, but fraught with inspiration, replete with sparkling life, and passionate with the notes of a joyous heart.All day long Naomi used it.