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Together, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Part Six - Chapter 66 |
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_ PART SIX CHAPTER LXVI Margaret and the children drove down to White River with her the next morning. Just as Margaret had previously opposed her restless desire to leave Grosvenor, with gentle suggestions and quiet persuasion, so this time she accepted her going as inevitable. "But you may come back; I wish it might be!" was all she said, not very hopefully. Isabelle shook her head. She made no plans, but she felt that no matter what the outcome of the trial might be it was hardly probable that her path would lead back to this retreat. As she got into the sleigh she looked up the hillside to the hospital, its many windows glistening in the rising sun, its severe outlines sharp against the snowy field, and her eyes roved on to the dusky firs in the valley, up to the purple hilltop of the Altar, on to the distant peaks rising behind, with crests already bare. Her eyes were misty as she drove through the familiar village street, past the blacksmith's shop, where Sol Short waved a second good-by with a glowing bar of steel caught from the forge, on towards the Pass and the descent,--it was a haven of peace, this hillside village! Within that circle of snowy hills, in the silent beauty of the Northern winter, she had lived more, lived deeper, than anywhere else in the world. But she should not come back,--there would be no place for that. Grosvenor had given its benediction,--the hills and the woods, the snowy expanses and frozen brooks, the sunsets and starlit firmament,--the blacksmith's simple content and Renault's beacon lights, Margaret's peace,--all had done their work in her. As the lumbering sleigh dragged over the Pass, she gazed back to fix its image in her mind forever. The fresh March wind blew in her face, chill but full of distant promise, as if in its sweep from the north it had heard the tidings of spring, the stirrings deep below snow and frost. And the sky shimmered cloudless from horizon to horizon, a soft blue.... The agitations before and the struggle to come were interspaced by this lofty place of Peace--wherein she had found herself! * * * * * The frost-covered train from the north drew up at the platform in a cloud of steam. The fireman, a lad of eighteen, with a curl waving from under his cap, was leaning far out of the cab, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the snowy mountains just visible from White River. He was careless,--alive, and content this fine morning,--his grimy arms bare on the sill of the cab window, the broad earth and its hills spread before him. As the engine shot past, he looked down at Isabelle, curiously, and then up to the mountains again, as if his life were complete enough. A careless figure of the human routine of the world, endlessly moving, changing, energizing, functioning in its destined orbit! And all lives were tied together in the fine mesh of circumstance,--one destiny running into another as the steel band of railroad ran on and on into distant places, just as the lad in the engine cab was somehow concerned with the whole human system that ended, perchance, in the courtroom at St. Louis.... Isabelle took Margaret in her arms and holding her close, as if she would seize her very spirit, kissed her. "Tell the doctor," she said, "that I am beginning to understand--a little." _ |
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