Snow-Blind

CHAPTER X

“What did he say to you? What did he say to you?” asked Hugh again and again.

Sylvie laughed at him.

“He didn’t say anything—hardly a word, except that he pretended he was going on forever. He said: ‘We will, we will.’ That’s absolutely all, Hugh. Don’t be so silly. What could he say?”

“I don’t know,” Hugh answered. “He might have made fun of me.”

“Fun of you! After saving my life! I’d have boxed his ears! No, no, Peter wouldn’t do that. He’s afraid of me.”

She was so proud of this that Hugh, perforce, laughed. It was after supper, and they had walked a little way from the cabin. They were standing just above the river on a little hillock topped with three big pines. The dusk was thick about them; stars pricked the soft sky. Sylvie was wrapped in Hugh’s coat, and they were linked by their hands hanging at their sides. Every one but Sylvie had been very silent at supper, but she had told her story of Hugh’s heroism again and again until finally even Hugh had grumbled at “the fuss.”

“What makes you think anyone could be afraid of you?” He smiled down at the small dark head which did not reach his shoulder.

“He’s afraid I’ll kiss him. Don’t grip my hand that way; it hurts. You couldn’t be jealous of a boy! Besides, I don’t kiss him any more. I never have kissed him but that once—no, twice, when I told him that I was going to be his sister.”

“You told him that?” Hugh’s voice had an odd anxiety. “How did he take it?”

“I don’t think he was very enthusiastic. He loves you so much, Hugh; you are the very heart of his universe, and I suppose he is jealous of your love for me. Since then he’s avoided me and is as dumb as a fish when I talk to him. I think his body has outgrown his mind, Hugh.”

“Perhaps. I don’t know,” he answered.

“And Bella is so silent, too. Hugh, it must have been a lonely life for you before I came. Those two people, though they love you so much, are not companionable. I think, Hugh, that they aren’t able to understand you. You are so brilliant, and they are so dull; you are so articulate, and they are so dumb; you are so warm, so quick to see, to feel, to sympathize, while they are so slow and so cold. Dear Hugh, I’m glad I came. I am stupid myself, but I have enough intelligence to understand you—a little, haven’t I, dear?”

“So much more than enough!” The low speech with its tremor of humility was almost lost.

“What a noise the river makes!” he said presently.

“Yes. And the pines. The whole air is full of rushing and sighing and clapping and rattling. Sounds tell me so much now. They fill my whole life. It is very queer. Why, a voice means more to me now, I think, than a face ever did.... Is it a deep river, Hugh?”

“Now it is—deep and dangerous. But it goes down very quickly when the snow at its source has melted. In summer it is a friendly little brook, and in the fall a mere trickle that hardly wets your shoe. I have a boat here tied to the root of one of these trees, a boat I made myself, to pole across when the stream is too deep for wading. I’ll take you out in it when the flood’s down; it wouldn’t last fifteen minutes now. In the spring, Sylvie, a nymph comes down from the mountain, a wild white nymph. She has ice-green hair and frost-white arms; you can see her lashing the water, and if you listen, you can hear her sing and cry. Let’s go in, dear; you’re tired and cold—I can feel you shivering. We’ll start a big fire, and I’ll tell you how that nymph caught me once and nearly strangled me with her cold, wet arms. I was trying to save—you’ll laugh when I tell you about it—a baby bear.”

Pete and Bella made room for them silently about the hearth where Pete had already built up a fire. Sylvie groped her way to the throne from which the other woman slipped half furtively and so noiselessly that Sylvie never guessed her usurpation.

“Hugh is going to tell us a story,” she said, and rested her head back so that her small chin pointed out and her slim neck was drawn up—“a wonderful story about the river and a bear. I hope it’s a baby bear, Hugh, for you know how I feel about bears. I honestly think that being so afraid of seeing them is what made me blind!” She gave her small, shy laugh. “I thought I saw them everywhere I looked that day and night. It seems so long ago now, and yet it is not so many weeks. I can still hear Hugh’s voice calling out to me across the snow. And now,” she said, “the snow’s all gone and none of you are strangers any more, and—Go on with your story, Hugh.”

Pete added a log to the fire so that the flames stretched up bravely and made a great fan of light against which they all seemed painted like ornamental figures, Hugh lounging along the rug to make a striking central figure. Bella was drawn up rigidly on a stiff, hard chair; she hemmed a long, coarse towel with her blunt, work-roughened fingers.

Pete sat opposite Sylvie on the floor, his back against the corner of the fireplace, his knees drawn up in his hands, his head a little bent. He too—from under his long level brows—looked for the most part at Hugh, not devotedly, not wistfully, but with a somber wondering. It was only now and then, and as though he couldn’t help it, that the blue, smouldering Northern eyes were turned to Sylvie on her throne. Then they would brighten painfully, and his lips would tighten so that the dimple, meant for laughter, cut itself like a touch of pain into his cheek. The firelight heightened his picturesqueness—the dull blue of his shirt, open at the round, smooth throat, the dark gold-brown of his corduroy trousers, against which the long, tanned hands, knit strongly together, stood out in the rosy, leaping light—beautifully painted against the background of old brown logs.

Yet it was Hugh, after all, who dominated the room by right of his power, his magnetism, the very distortion of his spirit. Here in this lonely square of light and warmth, surrounded by a world of savage, lawless winds heightening the voices of vast loneliness, these three people were imprisoned by him, a Merlin of the West.

He sat up to begin his story, pressing tobacco into his pipe. “Oh, it’s not so much of a story, Sylvie. It was last spring when the river was high and I’d been out with my traps. I was coming home along the river edge, pretty tired, a big load on my back. I came around a bend of the river, and not far below me a little black bear, round as a barrel, was trying to scramble over the flood on a very shaky log. The mother was on the other side, but I didn’t know that then. Well, there’s nothing in God’s world, Sylvie, so beguiling as a baby bear. This little fellow was scared by what he was doing, but he was bound he’d get across the river. He’d make a few steps; then he’d back up and half rise on his hind legs. I watched him a long time. Then he made up his mind he’d better make a dash for it. He began scrambling like a frantic kitten, and it was just in the most ticklish spot that he heard me and jumped and went rolling off into the river. I tell you, my heart came right up into my mouth.”

“Oh, was he drowned?” wailed Sylvie.

Hugh rose and stood with his back to the fire, dominating the room even more convincingly, with his vivid ugliness. Sylvie’s face turned up to him like a white flower to the sun it lives by, without seeing. It was strange to watch the adoration, the worship on that small face, and at the same time to behold the grotesqueness toward which it was directed. Bella was listening with her lowered eyes and tightened lips. She was interested in spite of herself; and Pete’s inscrutable face followed the story with absorption.

“Well, in he rolled with a splash and went rattling down the current, turning over and over. Like a fool, I threw away my hides, ran down the bank and jumped in after him—that is, I meant to hold on to a branch and stand out in the water and catch him as he went by. But the nymph I told you about had her own plans. She wrapped her arms round me, and away we went, bear all. Oh, yes, I’d caught the cub all right, and he was about half drowned by that time—no fight left in him.

“Well, for a bit it was a question whether the world wouldn’t be quickly and well rid of us both, but we tumbled up against a root and scrambled out, and when I’d rested, I picked up limp and trembling Master Bear and went back for my hides. And while I was collecting them, I heard a sort of grumpy, grumbling sound, and I looked up—and, by Jove, Mother Bear was coming across that log with the longest steps you ever saw. That’s when I ran to collect my gun—it was a little farther up the bank than my hides, worse luck!”

Even Bella had forgotten her bitterness in listening, and Pete’s parted lips were those of an excited child. Sylvie leaned forward in her chair, her cheeks tingling, her hands locked. Hugh had thrown himself into the action of his story; his face was slightly contorted as though sighting along a gun-barrel, his arm raised, the ungainliness of his deformity strongly accentuated. He was not looking at Sylvie; true to his nature and his habit, he had forgotten every one but that Hugh of adventure and of romance, the one companion of his soul. None of them was watching Sylvie, and when she gave a sharp, little cry, a queer start and then sat utterly still, Hugh accepted it—they all accepted it—as a tribute to his story-telling powers.

But Sylvie, leaning her elbows on her knees, raised trembling hands to her eyes and hid them. She sat very still, very white, while the story went on, vividly imagined, picturesquely told. When it was over, and the mother bear, after a worthy struggle, defeated, Hugh looked about for his applause. It came, grudgingly from Bella, eagerly from Pete—and from Sylvie in a sudden extravagant clapping of hands, a ripple of high, excited laughter, and a collapse in her chair. She had fainted in a limp little heap.

She came to in an instant, but seemed bewildered and, unprotesting, permitted herself to be carried to bed. She declared she felt quite well again and wanted only to be alone. She repeated this moaningly. “Oh, to be alone!”

Hugh seated himself on the end of the bed and kissed her forehead and her hand, but it quivered under his lips and was drawn away.

He came back into the living-room with a pale, bewildered face.