CHAPTER XXI
THE GOLDEN HOURS
The weather was unsuitable for hunting. It snowed for a week, thawed over night, then froze, then snowed again, but the moon that night promised a perfect day.
Young Mallett supposed that he was afoot and afield before anybody else in house could be stirring, but as he pitched his sketching easel on the edges of the frozen pasture brook, and opened his field-box, a far hail from the white hill-top arrested him.
High poised on the snowy crest above him, clothed in white wool from collar to knee-kilts, and her thick cl.u.s.tering hair flying, she came flashing down the hill on her skis, soared high into the sunlight, landed, and shot downward, pole balanced.
Like a silvery meteor she came flashing toward him, then her hair-raising speed slackened, and swinging in a widely gracious curve she came gliding across the glittering field of snow and quietly stopped in front of him.
"Since when, angel, have you acquired this miraculous accomplishment?"
he demanded.
"Do I do it well, Duane?"
"A swallow from paradise isn"t in your cla.s.s, dear," he admitted, fascinated. "Is it easy--this new stunt of yours?"
"Try it," she said so sweetly that he missed the wickedness in her smile.
So, balancing, one hand on his shoulder, she disengaged her moccasins from the toe-clips, and he shoved his felt timber-jack boots into the leather loops, and leaning on the pointed pole which she handed him, gazed with sudden misgiving down the gentle acclivity below. She encouraged him; he listened, nodding his comprehension of her instructions, but still gazing down the hill, a trifle ill at ease.
However, as skates and snow-shoes were no mystery to him, he glanced at the long, narrow runners curved upward at the extremities, with more a.s.surance, and his masculine confidence in all things masculine returned. Then he started, waved his hand, smiling his condescension; then he realised that he was going faster than he desired to; then his legs began to do disrespectful things to him. The treachery of his own private legs was most disheartening, for they wavered and wobbled deplorably, now threatening to cross each other, now veering alarmingly wide of his body. He made a feebly desperate attempt to use his trail-pole; and the next second all that Geraldine could see of the episode was mercifully enveloped in a spouting pinwheel of snow.
Like all masculine neophytes, he picked himself up and came back, savagely confident in his humiliation. She tried to guide his first toddling ski-steps, but he was mad all through and would have his own way. With a set and mirthless smile, again and again he gave himself to the slope and the mercy of his insurgent legs, and at length, bearing heavily on his trail-pole, managed to reach the level below without capsizing.
She praised him warmly, rescued his wool gloves and cap from snowy furrows into which their owner had angrily but helplessly dived; and then she stepped into her skis and ascended the hill beside him with that long-limbed, graceful, swinging stride which he had ventured to believe might become him also.
He said hopelessly: "If you expect me to hunt wild boar with you on skis, there"ll be some wild and widely distributed shooting in this county. How can I hit a boar while describing unwilling ellipses in mid-air or how can I run away from one while I"m sticking nose down in a snow-drift?"
Too faint with laughter to reply, she stood leaning on her trailing-pole and looking over his shoulder as he repitched his sketching easel, squeezed the colours from the leaden tubes, and set his palette.
"I"m horribly hungry," he grumbled; "too hungry to make a decent sketch.
How cold is it, anyway? I believe that this paint is trying to freeze on my palette!"
"What are you going to paint?" she asked, her rounded chin resting on his shoulder.
"That frozen brook." He looked around at her, hesitating; and she laughed and nodded her comprehension.
"You want to make a sketch of me, dear. Why don"t you ask me? Do you think I"d refuse?"
"It"s so beastly cold to ask you to stand still----"
"Cold! Why, it"s much warmer; it"s ten above zero. I"ll stand wherever you wish. Where do you want me; here above you, against the snow and sky?"
The transcendent loveliness of the picture she made set that excited thrill quivering through every vein; but he took a matter-of-fact grip on his emotions because good work is done in cold blood, even if it sometimes may be conceived in exaltation.
"Don"t move," he said serenely; "you are exactly right as you stand.
Tell me the very moment you feel cold. Promise?"
"Yes, dear."
His freezing colours bothered him, and at times he used them almost like pastels. He worked rapidly, calmly, and with that impersonal precision that made every brush stroke an integral factor in the ensemble.
At almost any stage of the study the accidental brilliancy of his progress might have been terminated abruptly, leaving a sketch rarely beautiful in its indicated and unfinished promise.
But the pitfalls of the accidental had no allurements for him. She rested, changed position, stretched her limbs, took a long circle or two, skimming the hillside when she needed the reaction. But always she came swinging back again to stand and watch her lover with a half-smiling, half-tender gaze that tried his sangfroid terribly when he strove to catch it and record it in the calm and scientific technique which might excite anybody except the workman.
"Am I pretty, Duane?"
"Annoyingly divine. I"m trying not to think of it, dear, until my hand and heart may wobble with impunity. Are you cold?"
"No.... Do you think you"ll make a full-fledged picture from this motive?"
"How did you guess?"
"I don"t know. I"ve a premonition that your reputation is going to soar up like a blazing star from this waste of snow around us.... I wish--I wish that it might be from me, through me--my humble aid--that your glory breaks out----"
"If it ever does, it will do it through you. I told you that long ago."
"Yes."
"I"ve known it a long, long time, Geraldine. Without you there"s nothing to me except surface. You are the depths of me."
"And you of me, Duane." Sweet eyes remote, she stood looking into s.p.a.ce; at peace with her soul, dreaming, content. And it was then that he caught and imprisoned in colour the nameless beauty which was the foundation for his first famous picture, whose snowy splendour silenced all except those little critics who chirp automatically, eternally, on the ruddy hearthstone of the G.o.ds.
From the distant hill-top a voice bellowed at them through a megaphone; and, looking aloft, they beheld Scott gesticulating.
"If you two mental irresponsibles want any breakfast," he shouted, "you"d better hustle! Miller telephones that the big boar fed below Cloudy Mountain at sunrise!"
Geraldine looked at her lover, cheeks pink with excitement. He was immensely interested, too, and as soon as he could fold his easel, lock up brushes and palette, protect his canvas with a fresh one faced with cork buffers, they started for the house, discussing the chances for a shot that afternoon.
Like the most desirable and wary of most species of game, furry or finny, the huge, heavily tusked veterans of the wild-boar family often feed after dark, being too cunning to banquet by daylight and carouse with the gayer blades and the big, fierce sows of the neighbourhood.
Sometimes in the white gloom of snow-storms there is a chance for a shot; sometimes in a remoter fastness a big boar may deem himself secure enough to venture out where there are no witnesses to his solitary gastronomic revels save an Arctic owl or two huddled high in the hemlocks.
And it was in the rocky oak-ridges of the wild country under Cloudy Mountain that Miller had marked down the monarch of all wild pigs--the great, s.h.a.ggy, silver-tipped boar, hock-deep in snow, crunching frozen acorns and glaring off over the gully where mile after mile of white valley and mountain ranges stretched away, clotted and streaked with pine.
"Why don"t we all go?" asked Geraldine, seating herself behind the coffee-urn and looking cordially around at the others.
"Because, dear," said Kathleen, "I haven"t the slightest desire to run after a wild boar or permit him to amble after me; and all that reconciles me to your doing it is that Duane is going with you."
"I personally don"t like to kill things," observed Scott briefly. "My sister is the primitive of this outfit. She"s the slayer, the head hunter, the lady-boss of this kraal."