CHAPTER XVII

"There's snow on the hill-tops," said Clara.

"Yes, I saw."

"Did you have a cold drive?"

"I wasn't cold."

"My dear, your hands are like bits of ice. And your feet, too, I expect. Let me take your boots off for you."

"No, no, please. I'll do it."

"Very well. You sit there and toast your toes, and you shall have some nice hot tea in a minute."

Edward Webb pattered down the stone passage, and put his head in at the door.

"Theresa, come and look at the Blue Hill. It's wonderful in this light--wonderful."

"Don't go, my dear. Leave her alone, Edward. The Blue Hill will be there to-morrow, and the child's cold."

"Oh, mayn't I? Just for a minute!" She rose from the red-cushioned chair and Clara gave consent with a nod of the head and a flourish of the bread-knife.

Issuing from the dark passage, she was confronted by the Blue Hill. Night was falling, and what little light there was seemed to be stealing into the mountain. She thought it had opened its arms and its breast like a great door, and the day was creeping into it. Only to the west, beyond the lake and out over the sea, there was a pale amber streak, refusing shelter, but slowly, as she watched, its colour faded, melted into the universal grey, and was gathered home with the rest.

"I have often wondered what happened to the day," she said in a small voice. She thought there was a slight movement of the hill, as though, with the last light safely housed, it closed its doors and settled down to sleep. And the other hills folded their arms likewise, and slept. She heard their breathing, and then she became aware of the ceaseless running of the streams.

A sharp pain of joy ran through her, and she had to hold her throat lest a sobbing sigh should be let loose and spoil with human sounds the marvellous stillness of the night. Swiftly she stepped back into the passage and leaned against the wall. Its solidity assured her that this was not another of her lovely dreams, and the smell of tea and hot cakes was confirmation; yet, as she felt her way to the kitchen, she feared to wake.

But nothing vanished. James Rutherford, back from returning the cart Janet had lent, was by the fire, and the dog sat with its nose on his knee.

"Alexander is away," said Clara.

Yes, Theresa had heard that.

"You are to have his room. Sit in the armchair again and have your supper by the fire. We're going to have a fine Easter, aren't we, Jim? Jim is weather-wise," she explained.

Theresa smiled nervously at the gaunt man who was rhythmically stroking the dog's head. He looked very dark and shadowy where he sat beyond the rays of the lamp. "Yes, it will be fine," he said, and nodded at Theresa.

"I should like one day, only one, to be wet," said Edward Webb, fussing up and down between the two doors of the kitchen. "I want Theresa to see the mists. She hasn't seen the mountains until she has seen them hidden. I want her to hear the wind howling and see the rain driven. That's rain personified, half god, half man, urging and urged. In a town, it's nothing more than water falling, but here----"

"This is how he goes on," said Clara. "He and Alexander!"

"No, no. Alexander keeps a wise silence. It is I who am so--so garrulous, I am afraid."

"Oh, we like to hear you," she said.

A voice came from the shadows. "I like soft rain on my face, in the dark among the mountains. It is very dark among them in the night."

The burning wood stirred uneasily, a flame leapt, and Theresa saw the hand, pallid in the fierce glow, still working on the dog's head. The flame sank, and the small sounds in the kitchen, the clink of teacups and the dull drumming of a light wind at the pane, added to her sense of mysterious and impending happenings. She sat here, at last, in the kitchen she seemed to have known all her life. Above her, on the mantelpiece, her own eyes looked down, smiling in comradeship and welcome and amusement at her surprise. Those photographs had been sent without her knowledge and she felt strangely at a disadvantage. For all these years Alexander had been familiar with her looks, while to her he was still a vague form, perpetually menacing an exacter shape. She was like someone who has thought herself alone and finds all her actions watched. But Alexander was away, and she would not have to meet the scrutiny that compared reality with pictures. If she had not been assured of that she would not have been here among the hills. But--happiness triumphed above discomfiture--she was undeniably here! The smell of burning wood was in her nostrils and, outside, the hills were powerfully, peacefully asleep under their caps of snow. She was here, with the freshness of the mountain air on her cheeks, while, in the warm west, Grace was a three days' bride. But on the thought of that surrender Theresa would not dwell.

She felt she was having her revenge on Alexander, when, having been lighted up the stairs by his father, she closed the door of his room; for if he had been able to study her face during all these years, she could now retort with an examination of his belongings. His books, she considered, would be quite as tell-tale as her appearance--and then she caught back her thoughts. He had probably never so much as glanced at the mantelpiece, and why should she be curious as to his tastes?

She went to the window, and, kneeling before it, undressed with hasty hands. She saw the fields and the mountains, and a great moon swung in heaven: she had realized a dream, but her one wish was to put out the light and draw the bedclothes close about her head, and lose consciousness of this room which moved her like a presence.

It was a long time before she slept. A mouse scratched in the wall, somewhere a door was shaken in its frame, and often the stairs creaked as though a foot had pressed them. She hated the bed she lay on, and the blankets covering her; they were unbearably intimate. This was the pillow Alexander's head had dinted, and the moon made his possessions clear to her wakeful eyes. The room was whitewashed, and the walls, against which many books were stacked, were bare of pictures. "Dull creature!" she exclaimed, and, muffled to the chin, sat up in bed, determined to be done with foolishness. She would not allow the man to mar her joy, for to do so was to admit an importance to which he had no right. She punched the pillow defiantly and, holding her ankles, rested her chin on her knees. Sitting thus she could see the shoulder of the Blue Hill, and she nodded to it grimly, in a kind of challenge, for it seemed to hold the judicial scales between her and Alexander, and to persuade her to its own wise tolerance. What, it asked mildly, had Alexander done to offend? and she was bound to answer: "Nothing. Nothing but make me feel inferior, ever since I first heard his name. How could I like a boy who was not afraid of geese when I was terrified by them? A boy who tramped long miles to school at an age when I thought it an adventure to go down to the docks, a clever boy who won scholarships I knew I could never get? I was prejudiced against him at ten years old! Oh, Alexander, I have been very silly! I'm quite willing to be friends." She kissed her hand. "We are friends, I tell you. But be careful how you behave, my man. I'm very hard to please!" She laughed at the moonlit night. "As if he cares!" And then, hitting the pillow forcefully again, "Oh, but if I saw him, I'd make him care!"

A beautiful windy morning waked her. She found her father on the horse-block, his nose and cheeks blue with cold, his eyes reddened but bright with joy.

"Where shall we go to-day, Theresa? I hoped to take you to see Janet, but Clara tells me it is not convenient, so that must be for another time. There are the Spiked Crags--look! You see them? And the Blue Hill, and what Alexander calls the school track----"

"The Spiked Crags, please," she said.

He nodded. "I knew you would choose them."

During the ascent, she owed it to her father's breathlessness that they did not talk, and in the silence that was only broken by his panting Theresa could realize the hills. Yet she wished she were quite alone. She could feel her father's mind, like his body, straining after her wondering what she thought of this and that, watching for signs, and her desire was to sit as unheeded as a stone and let the winds play over her, and be a little part of something so much vaster than herself that her petty frets and follies would be of no more moment than the sound of one heather stalk grating against another.

"Do you mind," she said, "if I go on ahead of you? I'm--I'm so impatient to get to the top."

He smiled and nodded, patting his chest to account for lack of speech.

"You're sure you don't mind?"

"Yes, yes," he nodded, and she sped on. But she did not sit and ponder on her insignificance. Joy took hold of her and made her its own. There was a great tumult of singing in her breast, the wind lashed her, torturing her skirt and flicking the hair into her eyes until she clapped a hand to each side of her head to control the struggling locks, and let go again to wrestle with the greater problem of her petticoats and to wind her skirt about her waist.

She danced through the hard patches of snow lying here and there; she shouted because she knew the wind would tear the sound and scatter it; she was as light as the driven clouds, and she waved her hands to them. She forgot Mr. Partiloe, or, remembering him, did not shudder; she forgot the restlessness of her being, and rejoiced in the lithe young body that bent easily before the wind, and pushed its way against it, and loved its buffeting. There was no one to watch her and, when she reached the summit, she behaved with the abandonment of all young things in the spring-time of the year and their own lives. Little pigs, and lambs, and colts have their squealing, skipping, prancing ways of praising God, and Theresa had her own. She ran as fast as the wind would let her, with her hands high above her head; she lay down in the places which the snow disdained; she drove her fingers into the snow and sucked them warm again; and she loosed her hair so that it was flung out like a pennon. Dishevelment is seldom fair to see, and Theresa did not look beautiful. She did not care. She wanted to feel the wind's fingers at the roots of her hair, and she liked the tug and the sound as the strands were whipped this way and that. She stood alone on the mountain top, and gave her body to the elements, yet remained free. The elements made a generous lover: they took all she could give, yet they kept nothing, and they resigned her at a word. Poor little Grace, she thought, to be fastened for ever to the body and soul of a man, even though the man had intelligent green eyes and an adoring heart! It was better to be the wind's lady--easy come and easy go, and no fragile human feelings to be a hindrance.

The sight of her father toiling upward sobered her ecstasy. She sat down to await him, feeding on beauty as she braided her hair. She could see the valley, the lake, and the river all running towards the sea between walls of ever lessening hills. Here, at the valley's head, they were immense; they swept to the sky and rolled their great backs into distant valleys, and the little homesteads down below were meek in their shadow; but, like a wave that has spent its strength, the heights diminished as they approached the shore, that shore lying between two oceans, the one of water and the one of hills.

Her eyes felt cleansed of all the doubtful sights they had ever met, and her mind shared in the cleansing. Her happiness was so deep that she did not know of it; for, as nearly as human beings may, she was seeing things filtered of self, and the wide winds were in her soul.

She had made two thick plaits by the time her father sank to the ground and leaned his head against her shoulder.

"I wish your mother could have seen this," he said.

"The dear soul would never have got here. And now she doesn't have to climb at all. She'll be very glad, you know, to be allowed to look down on it all without any trouble."

"I came here so often without her, but it was not time I could have spent with her. That comforts me. But there are little things one did or did not do. Theresa, when you love, don't be afraid to let your conduct reflect your heart."

"Well, am I not very nice to you?"

"Very nice, my dear; but I was thinking of a different kind of love."

"Oh, don't talk to me of that! Not till I'm middle-aged. Then, perhaps, I'll consider it, and marry a comfortable widower, slightly infirm, so that I can occasionally escape, but not ill enough to need nursing."

"You'll have no such jog-trot end, my dear. I hope you'll run in harness with a swifter steed."

"I don't want to be harnessed at all," she said, and lay back.

Their thoughts went on different journeys, and his were so absorbing that, when he halted at his next remark, he had forgotten how easily she might trace his route.

"I hope you will meet Alexander some day," he said. Then he flushed guiltily, and, with a pitiful attempt at carelessness, began to hum untunefully.

Her words came instinctively, like an arm raised against a blow. "Oh, I expect I shall." The next moment, she could marvel at the readiness with which she had spoken, in spite of her stiffened body and the lump of revolt in her throat.

She lay very still, but her heart was thudding and, as though with the glow of her father's blush, her face was crimsoned; but soon it faltered into white and her lips trembled. The quality of her anger brought her near tears, and a great pity for herself surrounded her like air. Was she a chattel to be proffered in hope of sale? she asked silently, and that brought pride to drive back her weeping. She sat up with a beautiful, strong lift of her back. Pride was her strength. It enabled her to deceive her father.

"Shall we go on?" she said, and smiled, so that he thought she had not understood, and was thankful. She saw care visibly lifted from him, and her heart was tender for him. Was he not true to his own advice, and did not all his actions speak of love? She could not blame him since he loved her, thought her incomparable, and said so, through his eyes.

She linked her arm in his, but her rage against Alexander was red-hot.