His mind ran dangerously on in the current of insanity. He endeavored to quiet it.
The thought of his mother came to him.
Once he had heard her crying in the night, waiting for his father to come home, not knowing where he was, wondering as women will, and fearfully crying.
Then he heard her begin to count aloud in the dark:
"One, two. One, two, three," she had counted, to quiet her brain.
He fell mechanically to counting as she had done:
"One, two. One, two, three."
He must preserve his sanity, he said to himself, for the sake of the child. Otherwise it would be good to lose all remembrance, to forget, to dream, to lapse into the nothingness of the vacant eye, the down-drooping lid and the drivel.
"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, the wind listening.
In spite of the counting, with his eyes fixed on the desolation of the prairie, his thoughts on Celia, suddenly he felt himself seized by gusts of violent rage. The desire to dash out his brains against the unyielding wall of his relentless destiny tore him like the fingers of a giant hand.
"One, two. One, two, three," he counted, and between the words came the cry of the child.
If he could only render his mind a blank until it recovered its equilibrium, a ray of sunshine must leak in somewhere.
It must for the sake of the child.
But how was it possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate had suddenly died--to the place that had held Celia but would hold her no more!
It was necessary to count very steadily here, to strangle an outcry of despair.
"One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three, four, five."
He could count no further.
The wind, seeing his distress, soughed with a weird sweet sound like aeolian harps in the effort to comfort him, but he dropped the reins and laid his face in the hollow of his arm.
It was the att.i.tude of a woman, grief-stricken.
He had evidently fallen into a lethargy of grief from which he must be aroused.
So thought the wind. It blew a great blast. It whistled loudly as if calling, calling, calling!
Was it the wind or his heart? Was it his Mother Nature, his Guardian Angel, or G.o.d?
Again pitifully, distinctly, wailingly, came the cry of the child.
He raised his head, grasped the reins and hurried.
On he went, on and on, faster and faster, until at last he came to the door of the tomb.
He descended into it. He took the child from the arms of Cyclona, who sat by the fire cuddling it, and held it close to his heart.
"He has been crying," she told him, "every single minute since you have been gone. Crying! Crying! No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn"t quiet him."
CHAPTER X.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
On the following day Cyclona sat in the low rocking chair, rocking the baby, singing to it, crooning a lullaby, a memory of her own baby days when some self-imposed mother, taking the place of her own, had crooned to her.
"Sleep, baby, sleep, The big stars are the sheep.
The little stars are the lambs, I guess, The moon is the shepherdess, Sleep, Baby, Sleep."
But the baby sobbed, looking in bewilderment up at the dark gypsy face above it in search of the pale and beautiful face of his mother.
Finding it not, he hid his eyes upon her shoulder, and sobbed.
The wind sobbed with him. Outside the window it wailed in eerie lamentation. It dashed a near-by shrub, a ragged rosetree that Seth had planted, against the window. The twigs tapped at the pane like human fingers.
"There, there!" soothed Cyclona, and she changed the baby"s position, so that his little body curled warmly about her and his face was upturned to hers to coax him into the belief that she was Celia.
Once more she drifted into the lullaby, crooning it very softly in her lilting young voice:
"Sleep, baby, sleep.
The big stars are the sheep, The little stars are the lambs, I guess, The moon is the shepherdess, Sleep, Baby, Sleep."
But the wind seemed to oppose her efforts at soothing the child whose startled eyes stared at the window against which tapped the attenuated fingers of the twigs. The wind shrieked at him. His sobs turned into cries.
Cyclona got up and going to the bed laid him on it, talking cooing baby talk to him. She prepared his food. She warmed the milk and crumbled bread into it.
Taking him up again, she fed it to him spoonful by spoonful, awkwardly, yet in a motherly way.
Then she patted him on her shoulder, and tried to rock him to sleep, singing, patting him on the back cooingly when the howl of the wind startled him out of momentary slumber.
The wind appeared to be extraordinarily perverse. It was almost as if, knowing this was Celia"s child, that Celia whose hatred it had felt from the first, it took pleasure in punctuating his attempt to sleep with shrieks and wailings, with piercing and unearthly cries.
Once it tossed a tumbleweed at the window. The great round human-like head looked in and the child, opening his eyes upon it, broke into piteous moaning.
The wind laughed, s.n.a.t.c.hed the tumbleweed and tossed it on.
"The wind seems to be tryin" itself," complained Cyclona, getting up once more and walking about with the child in her arms, singing as she walked:
"Sleep, baby, sleep, The big stars are the sheep, The little stars are the lambs, I guess, The wind is the shepherdess, Sleep, Baby, Sleep."
The wind grew furious.