CHAPTER XXIII

Summer waned.  The long hot days dragged by.  The fading rushes along the river drooped wearily over their dry beds.  The yellowing leaves of the trees hung dejected; they were mute petitioners for cool breezes and rain.  The grasshoppers chirped monotonously, the locusts screeched shrilly, both being products of the long hot summer, and survivors of the heat, inclined to voice their exultation far into the fall season.

September yielded them full sway, and burned away day by day, week by week, dusty and scorching, without even a promise of rain.  October, however, dawned, misty and dark; the clouds crept up reluctantly at first and then, as if to make amends for neglect, trooped black and threatening toward the zenith.  Storm followed storm, and at evening, after the violent crashing thunder and vivid lightning and driving torrents of rain had ceased, a soft, steady downpour persisted all night and all the next day.

The drought was broken.  A rainy fall season was prophesied.  The old danger of the river rising in flood was feared.

After the sear and lifeless color of the fields and forests, what a welcome relief to Daren Lane were the freshened green, the dawning red, the tinging gold!  The forest on the hill was soft and warm, and but for the gleams of autumn, would have showed some of the tenderness of spring.  Down in the lowlands a sea of color waved under a blue, smoky, melancholy haze.

Lane climbed high that Sunday afternoon and penetrated deep into the woods.

There was rest here.  The forest was rich, warm with the scent of pine, of arbor vitae.  There was the haunting promise of more brilliant hues.  Thoughts swept through Lane’s mind.  The great striving world was out of sight.  Here in the gold-flecked shade, under the murmuring pines and pattering poplars, there was a world full of joy, wise in its teaching, significant of the glory that was fading but which would come again.

Lane loved the low hills, the deep, colorful woods in autumn.  There he lost himself.  He learned.  Silence and solitude taught him.  From there he had vision of the horde of men righting down the false impossible trails of the world.  He felt the sweetness, the frailty, the dependence, the glory and the doom of women battling with life.  He realized the hopeless traits of human nature.  Like dead scales his egotism dropped from him.  He divined the weaving of chances, the unknown and unnamed, the pondering fates in store.  The dominance of pain over all—­the wraith of the past—­the importunity of a future never to be gained—­the insistence of nature, ever-pressing closer its ruthless claims—­all these which became intelligible to Lane, could not keep life from looming sweet, hopeful, wonderful, worthy man’s best fight.

And sometimes the old haunting voices whispered to him out of the river shadows—­deeper, different, strangely more unintelligible than ever before, calling more to his soul.