Snow-Blind

CHAPTER VIII

Hugh came up from his hiding-place like a man risen from the dead. They helped him to his chair before the fire; they poured coffee down him, rubbed his blue, stiff hands. He sat looking up pitifully, his eyes turning from one to the other of them like those of a beaten hound. All the masterfulness, all the bombast, had been crushed out of him; even the splendor of his flaring hazel eyes was dimmed—they were hollow, hopeless, old. For a long time he did not speak, only drank the coffee and submitted himself meekly to their ministrations; then at last he touched Sylvie with a trembling hand.

“Sylvie,” he whispered brokenly.

“Hugh, dear, you’re safe now; please speak; please laugh; you frighten me more than anything—why is he so silent, Pete? Bella, tell me what’s wrong?”

“He’s been crouching there on the damp, cold ground for hours,” said Bella, “not knowing what might happen.” Her voice trembled; she passed a hand as shaking as her voice across Hugh’s bent head. “You’re safe now. You’re safe now,” she murmured.

Hugh’s teeth chattered, and he bent closer to the fire.

“Ugh—it was cold down there,” he said, “like a grave! Sylvie, come here.” Just an echo of his old imperious fashion it was—though the look was that of a beggar for alms. “Give me those warm little hands of yours.” She knelt close to him, rubbed his hands in hers, looking up at Pete with a tremulous mouth that asked for advice.

“He’ll be all right in a minute,” said Pete. “You talk to him, Sylvie.”

“Yes, you talk—you talk. Do you remember how I talked to you when you were afraid of the bears—ah!” He drew her head savagely against his breast, folded his arms about it, stroked the hair. “Sylvie! Is it all right? Can it be—the same?”

“Yes, yes, why not?”

“Were you frightened?”

“Not after the first. After they had described you, I knew that they were looking for the wrong man, and then I felt all right. I didn’t know—poor Hugh!—how cold and cramped you were. What a shame that you took a false alarm and hid yourself! I don’t believe there would have been a bit of danger if you’d stayed out. They’d never even heard of you, I suppose.”

Her talk, so gay, so strangely at cross-purposes with reality, was like a vivifying wine to him. The color came back into his face; a wild sort of relief lighted his eyes.

“Then it didn’t occur to you, Sylvie, that that brute might have been me—that the men might, after all, have been describing me—eh?” he asked, risking all his hope on one throw.

She laughed, and, lifting herself a little in his arms, touched her soft mouth to his. “But, Hugh, you told me your story, don’t you remember? And it is gloriously, mercifully different from Rutherford’s.”

He put his chin on his fist and stared over her head into the fire. She felt the slackening of his embrace and searched his arms with questioning fingers. “Why are you cross, Hugh? Did I say anything to hurt you? Let’s forget Ham Rutherford. I wonder where he is, poor, horrible wretch!”

“Dead—dead—dead,” Hugh muttered. “Dead and buried—or he ought to be. O God!” he groaned, and crushed her close against him; “I can’t ask you to love me, Sylvie—to marry me. Now you know what it is like to love a man who must be afraid of other men. What right have I to ask any woman to share my life?”

“But, Hugh—if I love you?”

“And you do love me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He laughed out at that, stood up, drawing her to stand beside him. “Bella—Pete,” he called, “do you hear—you two?” He beckoned them close, laid a hand on them, drew first one, then the other toward Sylvie. “She loves me. She sees me as I am!” Suddenly he put his grizzled head on Sylvie’s shoulder and wept. She felt her way back to the chair, sat down, and drew him to kneel with his arms about her, her head bent over him, her small hands caressing him. She looked at Pete for help, for explanations, but she could not see his pale, tormented face.

After a while Hugh was calm and sat at her feet, smoking. But he was unnaturally silent, and his eyes brooded upon her haggardly.

It was several days before Hugh regained his old vigor and buoyancy; then it came to life like an Antaeus flung down to mother earth. His hour of doubt, of self-distrust, of compunction, was whirled away like an uprooted tree on the flood of his happiness. He flung reason and caution to the four winds; he dared Bella or Pete to betray him, he played his heroic part with boisterous energy; his tongue wagged like a tipsy troubadour’s. What an empty canvas, a palette piled with rainbow tints, a fistful of clean brushes would be to an artist long starved for his tools, such was Sylvie’s mind to Hugh. She was darkness for him to scrawl upon with light; she was the romantic ear to his romantic tongue; she was the poet reader for his gorgeous imagery. He had not only the happiness of the successful lover, but even more, the happiness of the successful creator. What he was creating was the Hugh that might have been.

With Sylvie clinging to his hand, he now went out singing—the three of them together, great Hugh and happy artist Hugh all but welded into one man for her and for her love. Those were splendid days, days of fantastic happiness. Hugh’s joy, his sense of freedom, gave him a tenfold gift of fascination.

Yet one day—one of those dim, moist spring days more colorful to Hugh’s heart than any of his days—there cut into his consciousness like a hard, thin edge, a sense of a little growing change in Sylvie. It had been there—the change,—slightly, dimly there, ever since the sheriff’s visit. It was not that she doubted Hugh—such a suspicion would have struck him instantly aware and awake—but that she had become in some way uncertain of herself, restless, depressed, afraid. And it was always his love-making that brought the reaction, a curious, delicate, inner recoil, so delicate and slight, so deep beneath the threshold of her consciousness, that in the blind glory of his self-intoxication he missed it altogether—might, indeed, have gone on missing it, as she would have gone on ignoring or repressing it, if it had not been for their kiss on the mountain-top.

This was one of Hugh’s madnesses; he would take Sylvie up a mountain and show her his kingdom, show her himself as lord of the wilderness. He had been there before many times, to the top of their one mountain, always under protest from Bella and Pete. It was a bare rock exposed to half the world and all the eyes of Heaven; and for a man in hiding, a man who lived, yet whose name was carved above a grave, it was a very target for untoward accident. Some trader or trapper down in the forest might look up and behold the misshapen figure black and bold, against the sky. Yet there was never so mighty a Hugh as when he stood there defiant and alone. Now he wanted Sylvie to sense that tragic magnificence.

So they went out, Hugh’s arm about her, as strange a pair of lovers as ever tempted the spring—the great, scarred, uncouth, gray cripple and the slim, unseeing girl, groping and clinging, absolutely shut off from any contact with reality as long as this man should interpret creation for her. Sylvie turned back to wave at Pete, whom they had left standing in the doorway.

“I’ll be hunting for you if you stay out late,” he called—to which Hugh shouted back: “You hunting for us! Don’t fancy I can’t take care of this child, myself.”

“Both of them blind!” Pete muttered to himself in answer.

They were moving rather slowly across the rough, sagebrush-covered flat, and presently Hugh led Sylvie into the fragrant silence of the forest trail. To her it was all scent and sound. Hugh whispered to her what this drumming meant and that chattering and that sudden rattle almost under their feet.

They had to go slowly, Sylvie touching the trees here and there, along her side of the trail. He lifted her over logs and fallen trees, and sometimes, before he set her down, he kissed her. Then Sylvie would turn her head shyly, and he would laugh. Thus they made slow, sweet progress.

“I see more in the woods with your eyes than I ever could with my own,” she told him.

“I have eyes for us both,” he answered. “That’s why God gave me the eyes I have, because He knew the use I’d be making of them.”

“Is this the trail Pete follows to the trading-station?” she asked. “I wish you could take me there, Hugh, or—would you let him take me?”

He tightened his arm. “I can’t bear to have you out of my sight,” he answered.

She sighed. “It seems so queer that they haven’t tried to find me. Do you suppose they think that I’m dead? Did Pete mail my letter to Miss Foby, I wonder?”

“What does Miss Foby matter?” he asked jealously. “What does anything matter to you but—me? Here we leave Pete’s trail and I take you straight up the mountain, dear one. We’ll rest now and then; when we get to the rocky place just below the top, I’ll carry you. Are you happy? I always feel as if my heart melted with the snow when spring comes—a wild, free, tumbling feeling of softness and escape.”

She sighed. “Yes—if only I could see. I miss my eyes out of doors more than in the house. Does snow-blindness really last so long? Perhaps it was the nervous shock and the exhaustion as much as the glare. I am sure it all will just go suddenly some day. I stare and stare sometimes, and I feel as if I might see—almost.”

He frowned. “You mustn’t miss anything when you have me, Sylvie. Do you suppose I miss anything, now that I have you? My career, my old friends, my old life, my liberty, the world? That for everything!” He snapped his fingers. “If only I have you.”

“You love me so much,” she answered, as though she were oppressed, “it frightens me sometimes.”

“When you are wholly mine—” he began. “Well, wait till we get to the top of the mountain; there I’ll tell you all my plans. They’re as big and beautiful as the world. I feel, with your love, that I can move mountains. I can fashion the world close to my heart’s desire. We’ll leave this blank spot and go to some lovely, warm, smiling land where the water is turquoise and the sky aquamarine—”

“And perhaps my sight will come back.” It was almost a prayer.

He did not answer. They had come to a sharp sudden ascent. He took her in his arms, scrambled across the tumbled rocks, and set her down beside him on the great granite crest that rose like the edge of a gray wave. The clean, wild wind smote her and shook her and pressed back her hair and dress. She clung to him.

“Is it steep? Are we on the edge of a cliff, Hugh? I’m not afraid!”

“We’re on the very top of the world,” he told her breathlessly, his voice filled with a sense of awe, “our world, Sylvie, I’m master here. There’s no greater mind than my own in all that dark green circle. It’s pines, pines, pines to the edge of the earth, Sylvie, an ocean of purple and green—silver where the wind moves, treading down, like Christ walking on the water. And the sky is all gray, like stone.”

“Can you see the flat, the cabin?”

“The flat, yes—a round green spot, way down there behind us. The cabin? No. That’s in a hollow, you may be sure, well out of sight. I’m an outlaw, dearest, remember. There’s a curve of the river, like a silver elbow. And Sylvie, up above us, an eagle is turning and turning in a huge circle. He thinks he’s king. But, Sylvie, it’s our world—yours and mine. This is our marriage.”

She drew back. “What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you a feeling for such images? We’ll go before a parson—don’t be afraid. Would I frighten you, Sylvie? I love you too much for that. Why, Sylvie, what’s wrong?”

When his lips, clinging and compelling, had left hers, she bent her face to his arm and began to cry.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.... But please don’t kiss me like that, not like that!”

He released her and half turned, but her hands instantly hunted for him, found him and clung.

“Hugh, don’t be angry. Be patient with me. Try to understand. Perhaps it’s because I am in the dark. I do love you. I do. But you must wait. Soon it will be spring for me, too. You don’t understand? You’re angry? But I can’t explain it any better.”

“You can lay your hand on me,” he said hoarsely. “God knows I’m real enough.” And he thought so! “My love for you is here like a granite block, Sylvie.”

“I know. It is the one thing in the darkness that is real. I know you—your love, splendid and strong and brave. Wait just a little, Hugh. Try to be patient. Suddenly it will all come right. The fog will lift. Then we’ll really be on top of the mountain.” She laughed, but rather sadly.

“I will always hate this mountain-top,” he said. “I used to love it. I was so close to happiness, and now you’ve snatched it out of my reach.” He drew in sobbing breaths.

“No—it’s myself I’m keeping from happiness, not you,” she answered. “I know it will come right, but you must not hurry me. Dear Hugh, be patient.” She found his hand and raised it, a dead weight, to her lips. “Please be patient. Let’s go down out of this wind. I can’t see your world, and I’m cold.”

So, in silence—a dull gray silence Hugh led her down into the valley.