She said nothing, and so he repeated, "Isn"t it beautiful?" And then, curious of her silence, he turned to her. She was looking about her, at the trees, at the lake, and the great crags above, and as she looked, with an unconscious movement, she withdrew closer to him. "It"s awfully big," she said, and her voice was almost a whisper.
"It"s big with beauty," he said. "Look at the lake," he went on, detailing with the pride of a suburban proprietor; "isn"t it silvery and fresh and clean!"
"It"s cold, isn"t it?" said Dolly.
"And the crest up there. Look at it. It is sculptured--domes, spires, castles. And those gothic arches. They are like joined hands; the granite prays. And see the glisten of that glacier in the haze, like a star in the veil of a bride! It"s all beautiful!"
"They"re terribly big mountains, aren"t they?" said Dolly.
"See the plain away down there. It seems to heave slowly, like the flood after the rain had ceased."
"Do people live there?" asked Dolly.
"And the sky; did you ever see such sky! And the meadow here, how fresh and lush; and the pines, and the cabin, and the lake--isn"t it all quiet and peaceful?"
She was silent, and after a while he turned to her. A tear was trembling at the end of one of her long lashes. "Goosie," she whispered, and she snuggled up against him; "Goosie, isn"t it a bit--lonely here?"
"_We_ won"t find it lonely," he answered stoutly, and drew her close within his arms.
The day drawled on, slowly and deliciously. "Let"s take a little walk,"
said Dolly, after a while.
"All right," said Charles-Norton, "I guess I still know how. I haven"t walked much lately."
"I suppose not," said Dolly, hesitatingly. They were going side by side across the meadow, and Charles-Norton could feel her looking at him out of the corner of her eye. "I suppose--you have been--doing something else."
"Yes," laughed Charles-Norton, flushing a bit; "yes--something else."
Somehow they did not look at each other for a time after that, and walked a bit apart.
They drew together again little by little as they wandered over the clearing, in a close examination of their domain, which Charles-Norton, with his pa.s.sion for big flights and sweeping outlooks, had up to now neglected. They found a miniature cascade that purled over a mossy log; a cave, so small and clean and regular that it seemed not the work of the big Nature about them, but of delicate, elfin hands; and then, on the edge of forest and gra.s.s, a flower, a trembling white chalice upon the virginal bosom of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. And thus, little step after little step, they went from little wonder to little wonder. Dolly liked small things; it was the microscopic aspect of Nature that touched her heart; she had an adjective all her own for such: they were "baby" things--baby flowers, baby brooks, baby stars. This appealed less to Charles-Norton, hungry for big sweeps. And even now, he caught himself yawning once, and casting a look at the crest far away.
In the afternoon, in the full warmth of the clear sun, he inveigled her into the lake for a swim. They splashed in the silver waters like merman and mermaid; and when, after a glistening disappearance within the cabin, Dolly emerged again, she was tucked in a fuzzy bathrobe that made her look like a little bear.
They sat long afterward on a warm slope in the sun. Crickets hopped about them; Charles-Norton at intervals heard by his side Dolly"s musical giggle as one of them struck her. A bird on a long twig balanced above them, and for a time a squirrel chattered at them in mock scolding from the top of a pine. Little by little Charles-Norton sank into a profundity of well-being. He could see ahead, now, his life stretching placid and colored, solved at last, with both Dolly and the wings, uniting love and freedom, the ecstasies of flight with the tenderness of home----
"Goosie," said Dolly; "let"s go in."
The sun was gone. It had sunk into the plain, far off. "Wait," he whispered, looking toward the crest, inflamed with living light. The peaks gleamed, the domes glowed, the glaciers flashed, the whole sky-line crackled with a great band of color. Then swiftly from the plain a shadow ran up the mountain sides, extinguished, one after the other, peak, and dome, and glacier; it went up toward the clouds with its long swift lope: the clouds became burned rags.
"Let us go in," said Dolly.
"Wait," he said.
The night was pouring in over the crest, filling the meadow, the dome above; a velvety blueness palpitated vaguely about them; a star, as if touched by an unseen torch, suddenly sprang to light.
"Wait," murmured Charles-Norton; "it is beautiful at this hour."
But Dolly pressed against him with a little shiver. "I"m cold, Goosie,"
she cried; "let us go in."
They rose, went down the slope and across the meadow. Along the gra.s.s a frigid little haze was forming; it was true that it was cold. If Charles-Norton had been a practical man he would have observed that for the last two weeks, in fact, the nights had been growing more and more cold--which might have introduced a disturbing factor in his dream of the coming days. But Charles-Norton, as has been seen, was not a practical man.
They sat within, by a glowing fire. "It"s nice to be home," said Dolly.
"It"s fine," said Charles-Norton, stoutly.
CHAPTER XV
For three days Charles-Norton remained on earth sedulously. It was a pleasant earth. They wandered together in the small area about the cabin; they walked, swam, fished, picked flowers, and spent hours concocting, on the fire before the cabin, nice little dishes which they negotiated gourmandly, like children. On the second day Nicodemus, furry and fat with idleness, was saddled, and they three went down the trail toward the camp. Charles-Norton hid on the fringe of the forest while Dolly shopped sagely in the general store, to the general approval of the somnolent inhabitants who, by this time, had diminished to five; and then they returned in the twilight, Nicodemus a bit wistful with the weight of the many useful and good things within his bags. They worked about the cabin the next day, and Dolly performed wonders with burlap and chintz.
Curtains draped the three small windows, a carpet spread upon the floor, and on the big tree-trunk which, sawed off evenly in the center of the cabin, served as a table, a shining lamp was set, promising of calm evenings.
"We"ll live here forever!" cried Charles-Norton, enthusiastically.
Dolly did not answer; her back was turned and she was busy tacking chintz along one of the bunks.
On the fourth morning Charles-Norton felt a vague hunger which breakfast did not satisfy. It was with him all day as he wandered on the ground, the tips of his long wings stained with gra.s.s. It was with him stronger the following morning; and after breakfast, he sprang suddenly into the air. "Look!" he cried to Dolly.
And before her, above the meadow, he went through his flying repertory.
He cut clashing diagonals through the air; he rose and fell in undulations like music; he shot about, gleaming white against the blue sky; and finally he came down to her from the very zenith of the dome in a sizzing straight line which opened, almost at her feet, in a white explosion of suddenly extended wings.
"You baby!" said Dolly, as once more he stood before her, panting slightly, and his eyes dilated; "you baby!" she said, indulgently.
Charles-Norton, shifting his position to one foot, scratched his head.
Somehow, this was not quite what he had expected. He had thought Dolly more changed about this flying business; and here she seemed--well, not so very much changed. Within him he felt something vaguely bristle. It was still bristling there the next morning, and gave to his voice a certain brusqueness when, kissing Dolly on the forehead after breakfast, he said: "Well, so long, Dolly!"
"So long," he said; and Dolly, from her seat on the sward, saw him leap from her and wing away in powerful flight. He made straight for the crest; she saw him, flitting up there, a little white confetti in the eddy of a breeze. Rising, falling, darting capriciously, he gradually slid off down the range, and was gone.
Dolly rose. The meadow suddenly had become very quiet. A tree, sap-bursting, cracked resoundingly; the sound went through her like a sliver. She stood there, poised as if for flight, feeling upon her from every tree, rock and bush, the hostile eyes of peering things; and she was mighty glad when Nicodemus came running to her resonantly across the clearing, demanding a pancake.
Somehow, Charles-Norton did not enjoy his flight as much as he had expected. He bore with him a vague uneasiness which no amount of speeding could quite lose. He could feel, all the time, Dolly away down there alone in the deserted meadow. He returned much earlier than usual.
Dolly was cooking by the fire in the clearing, and she greeted him cheerfully, without the slightest sign of reproach. After a while, though, he noted upon her right cheek a little smudge. It was shaped like a miniature comet; it was, rather, like the slight sediment left upon a window-pane by a drop of rain. Charles-Norton, determinedly, refused to see it. But it was there all the same.
And it was there the next day when he returned, and the next, and the next. Each night, as he lit again upon earth after his long voyaging of the air, Dolly greeted him with an ostentatious cheerfulness beneath which could be felt something subtly plaintive, and on her cheek--sometimes the right, sometimes the left--always would be the little accusing smudge.
It spoiled his flights. Following the three days spent on earth, the hunger of the s.p.a.ces had come back to him, gnawing at his vitals; each morning he was leaving earlier, each evening he was returning later. But all the time, in his wildest soarings, there went with him ... a leaden pellet, a little leaden pellet, very stubborn and indissoluble, there in his heart ... the knowledge that, alighting, at the end he would have to face that little black smudge; that he would have to meet Dolly"s cheerful greeting with its subtle, plaintive undercurrent, and the faint smudge upon her cheek.
Dolly, as a matter of fact, was not weeping all the time, down there in the meadow. The care of the cabin, the preparation of the meals, gave her each day several hours of humming content; and in the afternoon she would have several good romps with Nicodemus. But there were also heavy hours during which the solitude of the land seemed to draw nigh from all sides; when she panted, almost, to its pressure, and felt very little and miserable indeed. So that Charles-Norton, dropping like an archangel out of the sky, found always upon her cheek the trace of an erasure made completely enough to show a determination to hide tears, but not quite enough to obliterate the determination; and leaving in the morning, he felt her eyes wistful upon him in a humble and unspoken reproach which all day followed him, stubborn as his own shadow, the shadow which he could never escape. He fought well, did Charles-Norton. He tried hard not to see the little black smudge, not to think about it; and above all, not to let her know that he saw it. But all the time the weight was there within him, spoiling his flights.
One morning, seeing in a sudden flash of nave hope a solution of their problem, he tried to take her with him. Making a sling out of a strip of blanket, he pa.s.sed it about his waist, sat her in the slack, and rose in the air. Thus, holding her beneath the shadow of his wings as in a swing, he flitted about, above the meadow, rising, chuting down in long, smooth slants, circling, soaring. Once he thought he heard from her a slight suppressed cry, and then, after a while, astonished at her silence, he came down to the sh.o.r.e of the lake.
Her eyes were closed, her cheeks were white, and her hands were cold; and it was only after he had dashed water upon her that she revived.
"Dolly, Dolly," he murmured.