"Let"s stop," said I. "This is too hard work for you."
She grasped a dead stick, like a banner staff, struck an att.i.tude, and cried, "Excelsior!"
"No, sir," she added, "I"m going to reach the top of this hill and look down the other side if I die on the summit. I know now for the first time why Annie Peck and Hudson Stuck risked their lives on Mount Something-or-other in the Andes and Mount McKinley in Alaska. It"s a grand sensation. I feel the primal urge!"
"Didn"t you ever climb a mountain?" I queried, incredulous.
"Never," she answered. "Never even a baby mountain like this. My alt.i.tude record is the top step of the Columbia University library."
"You poor child!" I cried. "Why, I"ll _carry_ you to the top! I never realized that you were such a hopeless urbanite."
We went on more slowly, for the way was very steep now, and between helping her and holding the trilliums level I had my hands full. Laughing when we had the breath, we scrambled through the last of the shrubbery, and suddenly stood on a flat rock at the summit, with the world spread out below us like a map. I set down the basket, wiped my face, and ruefully felt of my wilted collar. The girl sank, panting, on the rock, fanned herself with her wisp of a handkerchief, and gazed out over the green Bentford valley below to the far hills in the south. The sky above us was very blue and lazy afternoon clouds were floating in it. Far up here only a few birds peeped in the scrub. We seemed strangely alone in that privacy of the peak.
""Silent upon a peak in Darien!"" I heard her say, as if to herself.
Then she turned her eager face to mine. "Isn"t it wonderful!" she cried. "Look, all the world like a map below you, and all this sky to see at once, and the cooling breeze and the feeling that you are above everybody! Oh, I love it! Quick, now let me see the other side!"
She ran across the rock, and I after her. From this side we looked between the trees into the valley to the north, the next valley to Bentford, and saw a blue lake, like a piece of the sky dropped down, and several large estates, and the green and brown checkerboards of farms, and far off a white steeple above the trees, and then once more on the horizon the eternal ring of blue mountains. Even as we gazed, from somewhere below us drifted up, faint and sweet, the sound of a church bell.
"Oh, it is nice on the roof of the world!" she cried. "Think of that--here am I, a Ph. D. in philology, and the only adjective I can find is "nice"!"
"It"s all in how you say it," I smiled. "I think I understand. I called you "poor child" a few moments ago because you"d never been on a high hilltop. Now I take it back. Think of getting those first virgin impressions when you are old enough to appreciate them! I envy you. I was only five when they took me up Mount Washington."
"I should think you"d have insisted on the Matterhorn by the time you were ten," she laughed. "I should."
We hunted out some soft moss in the shade, and sat down to get cool in the summit breeze before the descent. The girl spoke little, her eyes wandering constantly off over the view with the light of discovery in them. In my own staid way, I had always fancied I enjoyed the quieter pleasures of the outdoors as much as any one, but before this rapture I was almost abashed. If I did not speak, it was chiefly because I feared to drop clumsy words into her mood.
But presently I did suggest that we must be starting down. As there was no path visible--later I have found that since the advent of motors there are never any paths where the walking is in the least strenuous!--we took the way we had come, and began the descent.
Naturally I went ahead, and helped her all I could. To one unaccustomed to hard walking, a steep descent is more tiresome than a climb, and I began to fear that I had led her into an excess. But she came bravely tumbling along behind. In some places I had to put up my arms and lift her down. In others she had to slide one foot far ahead for a secure resting-place, with a reckless show of stocking. But she laughed it all off gayly. We missed, somehow, the way we had taken up, and presently found ourselves on a ledge with a clean drop of eight feet. I prospected to right and left, found a place where the drop was only six, and jumped. Then she lowered the basket to me, sat on the edge herself, leaned out and put her arms about my neck, and I swung her off. As I set her on the ground again our faces were close together for an instant, and I could feel rather than see her eyes laughing into mine.
"This is a very pleasant hill," said I.
"But we are almost to the wood road now," she darted back, jumping into the lead.
A moment more, and we stood in the wood road, and presently we came upon a spring under a rock, and plunged our faces into it and drank.
She looked up with the water dripping from her saucy nose, and quoted: ""As rivers of water in a dry place." I"m learning lots to-day. Now it"s the elemental force of the Bible similes."
"All the wisdom isn"t in New York--and dictionaries," said I.
"There, now you"ve mentioned the Dictionary! How could you!" she cried, and suddenly, like a child, snapped water into my face.
"You"ve ruined my collar," said I solemnly.
"Your collar looks like a fat man"s at a dance in July," said she.
"Let"s give the poor trilliums a drink."
She put the basket by the spring, dipped her hands in the water, and then let palmsful drop on the wilted flowers. "How woodsy they smell!" she cried, leaning over them. "Now I"m going to wash my face again."
She was like a child. She buried her face in the water, and when she emerged the little curly hairs on her temples were dripping. "I"d like to wade in it!" she exclaimed. "I wonder if I dare!"
"Go ahead," said I. "I"ll go down the road and wait."
"That wouldn"t be daring," she twinkled.
"Well, I"ll sit here and wait."
She looked at me saucily, and laughed, shaking her head.
"Coward," said I.
But she only laughed again, sprang up, and started rapidly away.
I caught her by the arm. "Easy, easy," I cautioned. "You"re a broken-down, nervous wreck, remember. You mustn"t overdo things."
Her moods were many that afternoon. Again she looked at me, but didn"t laugh. Her eyes, instead, held a sort of startled grat.i.tude, like those of a person, unused to kindness, suddenly befriended. She was no longer the child let loose in the woods. She walked slowly at my side, and so we came down to the high-road again. At the road we looked back to the hilltop where we had been.
"How much easier the climb looks than it is," said she.
"That"s the way of hills--and other things," said I sententiously.
"I knew about the other things," she answered. "Now I"ve learned it about the hills. It seems as if I were learning all the old similes wrong end foremost, doesn"t it?--springs and--and all?"
Her tone was wistful, and it was with difficulty that I refrained from touching her hand. "Oh, there"s something to be said for that method,"
I answered cheerfully. "Think of all the pleasant things you have to learn. The other way around you get the grim realism last."
But a thought plagued her as we turned down the side road to my house.
However, her face cleared as we drew near, and as the house itself appeared she clapped her hands, crying, "Now, where are we going to put the trilliums?"
"At the edge of the pines," I suggested, "where they can talk with the brook?"
"Yes, that"s the place." Suddenly she paused, looked back up the slope, and cried, "Do you suppose this brook is that spring?"
I hastily ran over the contour of the country we had pa.s.sed through, and saw that indeed the spring must be its headwaters.
"I"m so glad!" she cried.
"Why?" I asked.
She darted a look at me, with twinkling eyes. "I shan"t tell you,"
she said.
I got a trowel, and we planted the withered trilliums in partial shade between the maples and the pines, and gave them water. Then I showed her the newly sown lawn, and we peeped in to see the Hiroshiges over the twin fires.
"Now, home and to bed for you," I cried. "I know you"ve done too much."
"I know I"ve had a wonderful time," she answered soberly.
"I"ve--I"ve--it"s hard to explain--but I"ve somehow connected up this house with the wild country about it. Do you understand? If I had a house in the country, I should want it where I could get out, this way, on a Sunday afternoon into the woods and bring home trilliums. It wouldn"t seem right, complete, if I couldn"t. I"d want my own dear garden, and then a great big, G.o.d"s garden over the fence somewhere."
"That is how I feel, too," said I. "Only I want, also, to connect up my place with my neighbours; I want myself to be a part of the human environment. I thought of that this morning, as I saw the folks going by to church. If I ever get Twin Fires done, I"m going to join the Grange!"