Chapter 35: The Afterglow

Evening!

Far in the west, beyond the canyon of the New Hope River--now a beautifully terraced park and pleasure-ground--the rolling hills, fertile and farm-covered, lay resting as the sun died in a glory of crimson, gold and green.

The reflections of the passing day spread a purple haze through the palm and fern-tree aisles of the woodland. Only a slight breeze swayed the branches. Infinite in its serenity brooded a vast peace from the glowing sky.

A few questing swallows shot here and there like arrows, blackly outlined with swift and crooked wing against the vermilion of the west.

Over the countryside, the distant farms and hills, a thin and rosy vapor hovered, fading slowly as the sun sank lower still.

Scarcely moved by the summer breeze, a few slow clouds drifted away--away to westward--gently and calmly as the first promises of night stole up the world.

An arbor, bowered with wistarias and the waxen spikes of the new fleur de vie, stood near the woodbine-covered wall edging the cliff. Among its leaves the soft air rustled very lovingly. A scent of many blossoms hung over the perfumed evening.

Upon the lawn one last, belated robin still lingered. Its mate called from a sycamore beyond the hedge, and with an answering note it rose and winged away; it vanished from the sight.

Allan and Beatrice, watching it from the arbor, smiled; and through the smile it seemed there might be still a trace of deeper thought.

“How quickly it obeyed the call of love!” said Allan musingly. “When that comes what matters else?”

She nodded.

“Yes,” she answered presently. “That call is still supreme. Our Frances--”

She paused, but her eyes sought the half-glimpsed outlines of another cottage there beyond the hedge.

“We never realized, did we?” said Allan, voicing her thought. “It came so suddenly. But we haven’t lost her, after all. And there are still the others, too. And when grandchildren come--”

“That means a kind of youth all over again, doesn’t it? Well--”

Her hand stole into his, and for a while they sat in silence, thinking the thoughts that “do sometime lie too deep for tears.”

The flaming red in the west had faded now to orange and dull umber. Higher in the sky yellows and greens gave place to blue as deep as that in the Aegean grottos. The zenith, a dark purple, began to show a silver twinkle here and there of stars.

A whirring, roaring sound grew audible to eastward. It strengthened quickly. And all at once, far above the river, a long, swift train, its windows already lighted, sped with a smooth, rapid flight.

Allan watched the monorail vanish beyond the huge north tower of the cable bridge, sink through the trees, and finally fade into the gathering gloom.

“The Great Lakes Express,” said he. “In the old days we thought seventy miles an hour something stupendous. Now two hundred is mere ordinary schedule-time. Yes--something has been accomplished even now. The greater time still to be--we can’t hope to see it.

“But we can catch a glimpse of what it shall be, here and there. We must be content to have built foundations. On them those who shall come in the future shall raise a fairer and a mightier world than any we have ever dreamed.”

Again he relapsed into silence; but his arm drew round Beatrice, and together they sat watching the age-old yet ever-new drama of the birth of night.

Half heard, mingled with the eternal turmoil of the rapids, rose the far purring of the giant dynamos in the power-houses below the cliff. Here, there, lights began to gleam in the city; and on the rolling farmlands to northward, too, little winking eyes of light opened one by one, each one a home.

Suddenly the man spoke again.

“More than a hundred thousand of us already!” he exulted. “Over a tenth of a million--and every year the growth is faster, ever faster, in swift progressions. A hundred thousand English-speaking people, Beta; a civilization already, even in a material sense, superior to the old one that was swept away; in a spiritual, moral sense, how vastly far ahead!

“A hundred thousand! Some time, before long, it will be a million; then two, five, twenty, a hundred, with no racial discords, no mutual antipathies, no barriers of name or blood; but for the first time a universal race, all sound and pure, starting right, living right, striving toward a goal which even we cannot foresee!

“Not only shall this land be filled, but Europe, Asia, Africa and all the islands of the Seven Seas shall know the hand of man again, and own his sovereignty, from pole to pole!”

His clasp about Beatrice tightened; she felt his heart beat strong with deep emotion as he spoke again:

“Already the cities are beginning to arise from their ashes of a thousand oblivious years. Already a score of thriving colonies have scattered from the capital, all yet bound to it with monorail cables, with electric wires and with the ether-borne magic of the wireless.