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"Work for posterity," says he of the skyless philosophy; answers the man, "How can I work without hope? Little heart have I to labour, where labour is so little help. What can I do for my children that would render their life less hopeless than my own! Give me all you would secure for them, and my life would be to me but the worse mockery.
A soulless, skyless, catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth what with match-making in spring, and fetes champetres in summer, and dinner-giving in autumn was fairly worn out, and put to bed with the influenza, under wet blankets and the cold-water cure.
It was, a breathless quiet; the great streets of the town behind them were shrouded in snow; the hills, the moors, the prairie swept off into the skyless dark, a gray and motionless sea lit by a low watery moon. "The very earth listens," he said. "Listens for what?" said the literal old Doctor. "I think it listens always," said Vandyke, his eye on fire. "For its King that shall be.
Yes, he had known someone who might well have paced thus beneath spreading trees, with her eyes upon a book of poetry; not unlike this stranger, outwardly. In what black, skyless, leafless town was she pursuing her lonely life? Lonely? why should it be so?
There needed courage yes, there needed courage on a morning such as this, when the skyless atmosphere weighed drearily on heart and mind, when hope had become a far-off thing, banished for long months from a grey, cold world, to go through with the task which Irene had set herself.
She went on indifferently. The night was breathless and dark. Black, wet gusts dragged now and then through the skyless fog, striking her face with a chill. The Doctor quit talking, hurrying her, watching her anxiously. They came at last to the railway-track, with long trains of empty freight-cars. "We are nearly there," he whispered. "It's time you knew your work, and forgot your weakness.
"'Bhishma said, "Hear the truth, O son of Madri, about what thou hast asked me. I am excited by this question of thine, like a hill of red-chalk. In ancient times the universe was one vast expanse of water, motionless and skyless, and without this earth occupying any space in it. Enveloped in darkness, and intangible, its aspect was exceedingly awful.
So I retraced my steps, hurriedly, as the business urged; and saw no more shadows in the ancient wood in truth, had much ado to see the single step ahead, so thickly did the darkness gather in those skyless depths.
Up from the solitary street of the slate-roofs, she mounted a big hill and had the life of high breathing. A perpetual escape out of the smoky, grimy city mazes was trumpeted to her in the winds up there: a recollected contrast lightened the skyless broad spaces overhead almost to sunniness. Having air of the hills and activity for her limbs, she made sunshine for herself.
It kept the boys straight and strong. Close after came a month or so on the Yorktown peninsula with that master of strategic ruse, Magruder, but solely in the dreariest hardships of war, minus all the grander sorts that yield glory; rains, bad food, ill-chosen camps, freshets, terrible roads, horses sick and raw-boned, chills, jaundice, emaciation, barely an occasional bang at the enemy on reconnoissances and picketings, and marches and countermarches through blistering noons and skyless nights, with men, teams, and guns trying to see which could stagger the worst, along with columns of infantry mutinously weary of forever fortifying and never fighting.
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