Good Heavens! How could she carry that feather fan? How could Ella Linton hold it up to her face--hold her face down to it, flutter its fairy fluff upon her cheeks? It was the price of blood. Herbert Courtland had run a greater risk to obtain those feathers than David's mighty men had run to draw the water from the well. She had heard all about the insatiable savagery of the natives of New Guinea. Paradise?
Who had named those birds the birds of paradise? She recollected how the feathers which Ella had whirled about had held in the very center of every wonderful disc of rich purple, edged with unequal radiating lines of gold, a single spot of brilliant crimson, with a tiny star of silver in the center. The effect of the sunlight glinting over this combination on the thousand feathers that swept after the bird had caused Herbert Courtland, the first white man who had seen this glory of glories, to call it the meteor-bird. But those crimson drops: were they not the blood of the men who had perished miserably while endeavoring to wrest its marvels from the tropical forests of that great island?
Paradise?
And Ella could treat those feathers as though they had been plucked from a tame pheasant? And now she was lying in her bed with the fan on the pillow beside her!
How could she do it? That was what the girl asked herself while she lay awake on her own bed. Would Ella not see, on the white pillow beside her head, the crimson stains of the feathers that had been snatched out of the dripping red hand of death, but the man who had not feared to grapple with death itself in that hell which people called a paradise?
But the man, the man who had gripped death by the throat and had torn the feathers from his grisly, fleshless fingers,--her imagination was very vivid at night, especially after reading a thrilling chapter of Hebrew massacre,--that man had talked with her upon such trifles as books and plays, strange pageants enacted among paper and canvas unrealities of life. She had actually been leaning against some of these painted scenes while the man who had fought his way into the depths of that forest which no white man but himself had yet penetrated,--the man whose life had, day by day and night by night, been dependent upon the accuracy of his rifle aim,--had talked with her.
That was really the sum of all her thoughts. She did not try to recall the words that he had spoken; it was simply the figure of the man who had been before her that now remained on her mind. She did not stop to think whether or not he had spoken as a man with intellect would speak; whether he had spoken as a man whose orthodoxy was beyond suspicion would speak. The question of his orthodoxy, of his intellect (which may be just the opposite), did not occur to her. All she felt was that she had been talking face to face with a man.
So that the result of her evening's entertainment, after she had read her inspiring chapter in the Bible and said her bedside prayer, she might have defined in precisely the same words as she had spoken to her friend Ella when Ella had asked her, immediately on entering the carriage, what she thought of Herbert Courtland.
"He is the bravest man in the world at present."
She did not fall asleep for a considerable time.
