Then, betimes, she would catch up the child and strain it to her breast, even though it awakened. Its cries would mingle with her anguished weeping; and in the firelit gloom of the cave they two--she who knew, and he who knew not--would in some measure comfort one another.
On the eighth day she sustained a terrible shock, a sudden joy followed by so poignant a despair that for a moment it seemed to her human nature could endure no more and she must die.
For, eagerly watching the cloud-patched sky with the telescope, from the cliff-top--while on the terrace old Gesafam tended the child--she thought suddenly to behold a distant vision of the aeroplane!
A tiny spot in the heavens, truly, was moving across the field of vision!
With a cry, a sudden flushing of her face, now so wan and colorless, she seemed to throw all her senses into one sense, the power of sight. And though her hand began to shake so terribly that she could only with a great effort hold the glass, she steadied it against a fern-tree and thus managed to find again and hold the moving speck.
The Pauillac! Was it indeed the Pauillac and Allan?
"Merciful Heaven!" she stammered. "Bring him back--to me!"
Again she watched, her whole soul aflame with hope and eagerness and tremulous joy, ready to burst into a blaze of happiness--and then came disillusion and despair, blacker than ever and more terrible.
For suddenly the moving speck turned, wheeled and rose. One second she caught sight of wings. She knew now it was only some huge, tropic bird, afar on the horizon--some condor, vulture, or other creature of the air.
Then, as with a quick swoop, the vulture slid away and vanished behind a blue hill-shoulder, the woman dropped her glass, sank to earth, and--half-fainting--burst into a terrible, dry, sobbing plaint. Her tears, long since exhausted, would not flow. Grief could pass no further limits.
After a time she grew calmer, arose and thought of her child once more. Slowly she returned down the via dolorosa of the terrace-path, the walk where she and Allan had so often and so gaily trodden; the path now so barren, so hateful, so solitary.
To her little son she returned, and in her arms she cherished him--in her trembling arms--and the tears came at last, welcome and heart-stilling.
Old Gesafam, gazing compassionately with troubled eyes that blinked behind their mica shields, laid a comforting hand on the girl's shoulder.
"Do not weep, O Yulcia, mistress!" she exclaimed in her own tongue. "Weep not, for there is still hope. See, all things are going on, as before, in the colony!" She gestured toward the lower caves, whence the sounds of smithy-work and other toil drifted upward. "All is yet well with us. Only our Kromno is away. And he will yet come! He will come back to us--to the child, to you, to all who love and obey him!"