第60章

Naomi passed her fingers over it, and she did not know it.

"What is it?" she asked.

"It's blue," said the child.

"What is blue?" said Naomi"Blue--don't you know?--blue!" said the child.

"But what is blue?" Naomi asked again, holding the flower in her restless fingers.

"Why, dear me! can't you see?--blue--the flower, you know," said the child, in her artless way.

Ali was standing by at the time, and he thought to come to Naomi's relief."Blue is a colour," he said.

"A colour?" said Naomi.

"Yes, like--like the sea," he added.

"The sea? Blue? How?" Naomi asked.

Ali tried again."Like the sky," he said simply.

Naomi's face looked perplexed."And what is the sky like?" she asked.

At that moment her beautiful face was turned towards Ali's face, and her great motionless blue orbs seemed to gaze into his eyes.

The lad was pressed hard, and he could not keep back the answer that leapt up to his tongue."Like," he said--"like--""Well?"

"Like your own eyes, Naomi."

By the old habit of her nervous fingers, she covered her eyes with her hands, as if the sense of touch would teach her what her other senses could not tell.But the solemn mystery had dawned on her mind at last: that she was unlike others;that she was lacking something that every one else possessed;that the little children who played with her knew what she could never know; that she was infirm, afflicted, cut off;that there was a strange and lovely and lightsome world lying round about her, where every one else might sport and find delight, but that her spirit could not enter it, because she was shut off from it by the great hand of God.

From that time forward everything seemed to remind her of her affliction, and she heard its baneful voice at all times.

Even her dreams, though they had no visions, were full of voices that told of them.If a bird sang in the air above her, she lifted her sightless eyes.If she walked in the town on market morning and heard the din of traffic--the cries of the dealers, the "Balak!" of the camel-men, the "Arrah!" of the muleteers, and the twanging ginbri of the story-tellers--she sighed and dropped her head into her breast.Listening to the wind, she asked if it had eyes or was sightless; and hearing of the mountains that their snowy heads rose into the clouds, she inquired if they were blind, and if they ever talked together in the sky.

But at the awful revelation of her blindness she ceased to be a child, and became a woman.In the week thereafter she had learned more of the world than in all the years of her life before.

She was no longer a restless gleam of sunlight, a reckless spirit of joy, but a weak, patient, blind maiden, conscious of her great infirmity, humbled by it, and thinking shame of it.

One afternoon, deserting the swing in the patio, she went out with the children into the fields.The day was hot, and they wandered far down the banks and dry bed of the Marteel.And as they ran and raced, the little black people plucked the wild flowers, and called to the cattle and the sheep and the dogs, and whistled to the linnets that whistled to their young.

Thus the hours went on unheeded.The afternoon passed into evening, the evening into twilight, the twilight into early night.

Then the air grew empty like a vault, and a solemn quiet fell upon the children, and they crept to Naomi's side in fear, and took her hands and clung to her gown.She turned back towards the town, and as they walked in the double silence of their own hushed tongues and the songless and voiceless world, the fingers of the little ones closed tightly upon her own.

Then the children cried in terror, "See!""What is it?" said Naomi.

The little ones could not tell her.It was only the noiseless summer lightning, but the children had never seen it before.

With broad white flashes it lit up the land as far as from the bed of the river in the valley to the white peaks of the mountains.

At every flash the little people shrieked in their fear, and there was no one there to comfort them save Naomi only, and she was blind and could not see what they saw.With helpless hands she held to their hands and hurried home, over the darkening fields, through the palpitating sheets of dazzling light, leading on, yet seeing nothing.

But Israel saw Naomi's shame.The blindness which was a sense of humiliation to her became a sense of burning wrong to him.

He had asked God to give her speech, and had promised to be satisfied.

"Give her speech, O Lord," he had cried, "speech that shall lift her above the creatures of the field, speech whereby alone she may ask and know." But what was speech without sight to her who had always been blind? What was all the world to one who had never seen it?

Only as Paradise is to Man, who can but idly dream of its glories.

Israel took back his prayer.There were things to know that words could never tell.Now was Naomi blind for the first time, being no longer dumb."Give her sight, O Lord," he cried;"open her eyes that she may see; let her look on Thy beautiful world and know it! Then shall her life be safe, and her heart be happy, and her soul be Thine, and Thy servant at last be satisfied!"