That"s quite enough. You have learned your geography lesson. What a busy traveler you must have been!"
"And no land can be real where you are not," he went on gravely. "I go where you go, follow you around the world and out into the stars beyond the moon, up and down and on forever, and it all seems real to me--all except you."
"Oh, I--I"m real, real enough, but this land is a sad, fearful, threatening land, so heartless." She shivered. "Let us go in!"
"That"s only because it"s closing up now for the winter; that"s why the sky is sorry. The leaves are nearly gone, and the fat old bears are slouching down from the high places to curl up in the holes, and the deer are moving down into the valleys, and pretty soon the hills will crawl under white blankets and go to sleep. And we shall have to do the same. We shall be shut in before you know it, snowed in, frozen in, like the bears. But the winter--it can"t take you from me."
"There, there!" But she could not finish. She flashed a helpless smile at him and fled indoors. He went after her, crying that winter was upon them.
And then, all in a day and a night, winter came. The wind fell to an ominous hush one midday, and a leaden quiet lay over the hills. Blurred ma.s.ses of cloud rose slowly above the peaks, shaping themselves with ponderous sloth. Below these a white mist formed. Then one tiny snow crystal fell. It was followed presently by another, and then by more, floating down with unhurried ease. Meaningless wisps they seemed, fugitive bits of wool, perhaps, from a sheep losing its fleece in some nearby shearing pen. More of them came with the same slow, loitering grace, as if they would lull suspicion of the fury they heralded.
By night the storm had shut off the hills so that the cabin might have been set in a plain, for all the eye could see. The flakes no longer came saunteringly, but swiftly now, in a slant of honest fervor, frankly threatening.
By morning the land was m.u.f.fled in white. The sun shone pale and cold through the mist, and the wind began a game with its new plaything, still light and dry, and quick to dance to any piping. Spruce and hemlock seemed to have darkened their green, and their arms drooped wearily under the white burdens they bore. The second day"s fall buried their lowest branches so that not even the circle of bare earth was left about them.
Inside the cabin they sought the peace of the earth under its cover, the trustful repose of the live things sleeping there. The days sped by almost unmarked. Scarcely ever were they certain of the day of week or month, especially after Ben forgot to mark his calendar on the days he and Ewing devoted to getting deer for their winter"s meat. There were but opinions as to the date after that.
Ben, after his work with the stock each morning, hibernated gracefully in a chair by the kitchen stove, sleeping with excited groans, like a dreaming dog. Or, awake, he stared at the wall with dulled eyes. At times he would touch his guitar to life and sing very softly, or hold it affectionately in his lap, a hand muting its strings, while he pondered dreamily of far-off matters, of cities and men, and the folly of expecting ever to receive treasure such as the advertis.e.m.e.nts promise.
Ewing and Virginia, after the snow packed, went forth on snowshoes far into the white silence; over open s.p.a.ces so glaring that the eyes closed in defense; through ravines where once-noisy streams were stilled; and under forest arches of green where the snow was darkened to hints of blue--they agreed that Sydenham would paint it blue without condescending to hints--and where the hush was so intense that they instinctively lowered their voices. They pa.s.sed long times without speech, as they would have done in a church, worshiping the still beauty about them, beauty of b.u.t.tressed peak, of snow-choked canon, of green-roofed cathedral, of pink light at sunset on endless snow-quilted slopes.
Mrs. Laithe, too, sought the open when the sun was high, and one day in midwinter she walked as far as the lake in the path beaten by the stock.
It did not occur to her then that this was no feat for a dying woman nor even on the succeeding days when this walk became her habit. It was a change for her eyes from the cabin prospect; the sun warmed her genially, despite the intense cold, and she liked the stillness, all the movements of life going on in a strange, m.u.f.fled silence. This helped her to remember her own plight. Life still abounded with all its warmth and glad clashing, but she must have only eyes for it--no heart of desire. She had been so sure of this from the first that she gave but heedless smiles to the others when they told her she was better. They had always said such things.
She slept the long nights through now, seeking bed like a tired child, and waking in strange refreshment. And milk no longer appeased her hunger as it had wholly done when she arrived. The savor of baked meats was now sweet to her. She was presently walking to the lake both morning and afternoon, breathing deep of the dry air that ran fire in her veins as she absorbed it. And the flush on her face when she returned was not that of fever.
But more eloquent than these physical symptoms was a sullen current of rebellion rising slowly within her, the old fighting instinct, a l.u.s.t for sheer living, a thing she had believed was long since extinct.
She did not lose her certainty of death all in a day. For weeks she was haunted merely by an unquiet suspicion. The cough still racked her night and morning, and the fever came each evening, but the old potency seemed to have gone from both. She tried to believe at first that this was one of those false rallies so common before the end.
The full, maddening realization came to her on a day when Ewing walked with her to the lake. He turned on her suddenly when they had mounted a slope, seized both her hands, and looked long into her eyes with a certain grave wonder.
"You are made new," he said at last. She trembled in a sudden panic, divining the truth of it, feeling, as he spoke, a great rush of life overwhelming her.
"You are living again, you are going to live. I knew you would live." He still gripped her hands. It was as if he had drawn her, warm and pulsing, out of all the wintry death about them. She could not face him, but released her hands and turned away. He had seen truly. She had relaxed utterly when she came, to waver unresistingly down into the cool abyss of her despair. But some indomitable brute thing had risen in her while she slept, to fight for life, and to fire her whole being with its triumph. While she had rested and waited in that luxury of self-abandonment she had been cheated of her victory--betrayed back to life.
Trying now to think what life would mean to her, she was overwhelmed with shame and dismay. With death so near things had been simple. But how could she live on and face Ewing, shaming herself and shaming him in the darkness of his belief about her?
They walked back to the cabin in silence. Ewing, too, she felt, saw the future to be less simple now.
"I shall know what to do," he said, as they reached the door; and there was again in his eyes that puzzling look of some fixed purpose. For the first time this vaguely alarmed her now, and she questioned him swiftly with her eyes. But he only pointed to his mother"s portrait--they had entered the studio--and said, "Do you think I"d do less for you than I would for her?"
She could endure neither his own look nor the mother"s, and fled to her room. There she studied her face in the gla.s.s. It was all true. She was going to live, and she sickened at the thought. Again it was a time for tears and laughter.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE AWAKENING
The white giant, sun-stricken, drooping languidly, crumbled and dissolved before their eyes. The air softened. The streams rushed full, the southern hillsides showed bare and gaunt.
In the lake cabin they felt aged by their imprisonment. It had been so long, so remote from the world rush. Like prisoners long confined, they were loath to leave a dungeon where life had been well ordered if not exhilarating. Benumbed in the first days of the change, they returned indoors to the soothing evenness of their six months" hibernation. They found those first changes unbelievable. Winter would surely go on forever; too mighty a jailer it was to be vanquished by a mere breath of honey and flowers. They stayed in to warn one another against false appearances.
But there came a day when, in the blaze of noontime, Ben Crider moved his chair out by the door and sang softly to the strains of his guitar.
His eyes blinked in the sunlight as he sang, yet they did not fail to detect the signs of spring so plentiful about the clearing in bud and leaf and tiny gra.s.s shoot, even though patches of snow still lay in the shaded spots.
The woman who cooked came also to the door as Ben sang. He had spoken of her the winter through as "the woman," dimly perceiving her as a spirit that mumbled endless complainings as she toiled, for she was one who had been disillusioned by much cooking. She cooked acceptably, and Ben had burgeoned in the uncanny luxury of food prepared by another hand than his own, but he had given her little attention beyond discovering her opinion that cooking was a barren performance, since people perversely ate and thereby destroyed, and the thing must be done again endlessly. He had vaguely observed that this woman was not beautiful, and now, as she faced him with a sudden joviality in the spring sunshine, he saw that she could never have been beautiful. She beamed amicably on the balladist, and he, turning casual eyes on her, was stricken to dismayed silence; the tuneful praise of young love fainted on his lips as he stared, aghast, and his startled hand hushed the vibrant strings. A moment he looked, recovering from the shock. Then, in swift recoil, he grasped his chair and went resolutely out under the big hemlock, there to resume his song and his absent contemplation of Nature"s awakening--his back to the cabin door. In this sensitive mood he wished not to incur again a vision that blighted song.
It was no longer disputable that spring was real; no baseless tradition, but an unfolding reality. Ben had divined it, and the other prisoners were not long in proving it.
One of them surveyed it in panic wonder, turning in upon herself to face the ordeal of enforced living. They wandered in the open, three of them, now, finding it good to feel the bare, elastic earth under their feet again, and prove the noiseless but sensational life of growing things all about them. They plucked buds to see their secret hearts, and exposed the roots of peeping herbs that had begun their strivings before the snow went.
When the sunny places had been dried and warmed, and were pulsing in their myriad hidden hearts, so that winter began to fade in their minds as some dream of night, they would penetrate the sunless depths of a narrow canon where the snow yet lay deep and the stream was a mere choking of ice in a gorge.
It was in the flush of this exultation over winter"s downfall that they planned camp life in a vale at the edge of the lake, where the spruces thinned to leave wide-vaulted arches, and spread the floor with yielding brown rugs of the pine needle. They began it as a play, and finished with a permanent camp into which they moved from the cabin. There were tents and beds, a table, a sheet-iron stove, chests for their stores, and hammocks in which to be fanned by the south wind.
Bartell promised his sister vast benefits from this life.
"This will put the finishing touches to you, Sis. A month here and you"ll be loping over the range, high, wide, and handsome. It"ll take an elk-high fence to hold you after you"ve slept awhile out here."
She felt the truth of what he said, and was appalled by it. Almost daily she dismayed herself by recalling some unpremeditated feat of strength or endurance. Life had crept back to her like a whipped dog, and bitterly she felt the sting of its satire. She was loath to leave the cabin in which she had so long nursed death. She had impregnated the very walls with an atmosphere of dissolution. But she understood now that that prison house could no longer suffice her. Stubborn life had prevailed over all its powers of suggestion. There she had clung stubbornly to the old solution, cherishing a hope of some sudden relapse, despite the new life that taunted her with its animal buoyance.
But once in the open, her brain was washed of that. Her mind was as clear as the fathomless blue above them at noon; and the stars at night were not more coldly luminous than the reasoning she bent upon herself, nor sharper than a certain deduction she made.
Ewing brought his drawing to the camp and spent the mornings in work. He had finished his series for the _Knickerbocker_ during the winter, and these drawings, with the ill.u.s.trations for the story previously made, had brought him enough to discharge the Teevan debt. He had reported this transaction significantly to Mrs. Laithe, and was now busy on pictures for another story for the _Knickerbocker_.
"Only a little longer," he said, with a meaning she could not fathom, and he returned to his work with a singular absorption. Not even Ben could distract him when he sauntered up for his daily criticism. Ben was respectful to the drawings after he saw the checks they brought, but his summing up of the purchaser"s ac.u.men never varied.
"Well, well--fools and their money! The idee of payin" out cash for a thing that looks as much like Red Phinney as that there does!"
When work was done for the day Ewing would turn to Mrs. Laithe with a smile of release, and they would stray along some dim trail or off into pathless, shaded silences of the wood, lingering in gra.s.sy mountain meadows, or skirting the base of bleak crags where streaks of snow in shadow still clung to the gray walls. She was conscious then of a tumult throbbing wonderfully beneath the surface of their companionship--a tumult of life aching for release. In little chance moments of silence this rumbled ominously, leaving her fearful, but curiously resigned, moved to blind flight, yet chained and submissive as were the hills themselves.
One afternoon they sought their canon of delayed winter after many days"
neglect of it. They wondered if spring might not have reached even that secret recess at last. They left the trail that skirted the edge and descended a rocky way that Ewing found, emerging at last through a fringe of the stunted cedars into the gloom of the depths.
At first glance this last stronghold of winter seemed to have remained impregnable. Snow lay deep along the bottom, enormous stalact.i.tes of ice depended from overhanging ledges, and the stream itself appeared to be still only a riven glacier. But, listening intently, they heard a steady liquid murmur, the very music of spring come at last to sing the gorge awake. As they stood, listening, there was a shivering crash; one of the huge icicles had dropped, shattering on a lower ledge and raining its fragments into the soft s...o...b..d below.
"It"s the very last of winter," said Ewing mournfully. "That snow is eaten through and through. See how those bits of ice drove into it. And hear that running water. It will be off with a rush now. It"s the very last of it--all I shall have to look back to--that winter of ours together." His tone was full of a meaning she dared not question. They climbed in silence to the summer above and traversed, still silently, the stretch of green woods that grew beyond the canon wall. Only at the first mountain meadow, a dazzle of emerald under the slanting sun, did they halt to gaze at each other. His eyes were wonderfully alight with sadness and rejoicing as she faced him, radiant in a moment of forgetfulness, flagrant in her beauty"s renewal.
"You"re wonderful again," he said, almost whisperingly, "you"re all in flower now!" She quickened under his look, feeling the glow on her cheeks. But that faded at his next words.
"I finished the last of those drawings to-day. Now I must go."
"Ah--go?" It was a little cry, half of question, half of understanding.
"Yes--I can go now. I couldn"t go before, but I have the money now."