The best boy I had,” he muttered. “By God, he was the best of the lot.”
And in the ticking silence they recalled him, and in the heart of each was fear and remorse, because he had been a quiet boy, and there were many, and he had gone unnoticed.
“I’ll never be able to forget his birthmark,” Eliza whispered, “Never, never.”
Then presently each thought of the other; they felt suddenly the horror and strangeness of their surroundings. They thought of the vine-wound house in the distant mountains, of the roaring fires, the tumult, the cursing, the pain, of their blind and tangled lives, and of blundering destiny which brought them here now in this distant place, with death, after the carnival’s close.
Eliza wondered why she had come: she sought back through the hot and desperate mazes for the answer:
“If I had known,” she began presently, “if I had known how it would turn out—”
“Never mind,” he said, and he stroked her awkwardly. “By God!” he added dumbly after a moment. “It’s pretty strange when you come to think about it.”
And as they sat there more quietly now, swarming pity rose in them— not for themselves, but for each other, and for the waste, the confusion, the groping accident of life.
Gant thought briefly of his four and fifty years, his vanished youth, his diminishing strength, the ugliness and badness of so much of it; and he had the very quiet despair of a man who knows the forged chain may not be unlinked, the threaded design unwound, the done undone.
“If I had known. If I had known,” said Eliza. And then: “I’m sorry.” But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot chance had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting
