Don-A-Dreams/Part 2/Chapter 10
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The spring had come early, in a sudden heat of sunlight that steamed the snow off the hillsides and warmed the moist air to the temperature of a hothouse. The grass had greened as if it were in a forcing-bed; the twigs of the trees had flushed and budded miraculously; the birds had come out chirping and fluttering on the lawns, in busy possession of a world which they had seized and settled overnight. And on a radiant holiday afternoon, Don walked with her along the road that dipped into his valley on the outskirts of the town, as happy as if he were bringing her to a new Eden.
They had escaped from the cramped seats of a crowded trolley-car, and they came to freedom down the middle of the water-rutted steep road between guardian poplar-trees, at a pace that set the loose stones rolling under their feet. It brought back to her cheeks a colour that the winter had blanched from them, and to her eyes a sparkle of mischief that had been lacking to the more timid, grave regard with which she had met him since their quarrel. She ran to a boulder that had been bared by the rains at the roadside, and sprang up on it; and leaning against the wind, she drank in the air and the distance with deep breaths and a long gazing, poised on her little feet with her arms as if floating out beside her, her skirts blown, her ribbons fluttering in her hat; and he watched her, holding his breath on a smile, as if she were a bird which he was afraid was about to fly away. "Isn't it lovely!" she thrilled. "The trees—so green! Look at the shadows of the clouds on the hill there! Oh!" She clasped her hands. "Where are we going?"
He laughed, guarding the small secret. "Down there—around the turn in the valley—where we can look over the river."
"Is it as pretty as this?"
"Prettier. It's never been farmed, the sides are too steep."
She stood gazing. "How do you find such places?"
"I look for them."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
She reached for his arm to help her down. "Why are you always alone?"
When she was beside him in the grass, he replied: "Because you're not always with me."
She gave him her full face with a hesitating smile. "You would tire of me, if I were." And when he shook his head, tight-lipped, she cried: "Oh yes, you would! I tire myself even. Some days I just hate myself. Ask Helen Kimball if you wouldn't. You should see the way she looks at me sometimes when I'm talking at the table."
"I met her," he said; and at the thought of Helen Kimball—the stiff, the critical, in her posed assumption of superiority—he smiled tolerantly. "I met her the night I called with Conroy."
"What did you think of her?" (She remembered Miss Kimball's "Mr. Chopin.")
"I didn't think of her at all."
She understood, and she laughed. After a silence, she said: "I'd love to roll down this hill, wouldn't you?"
"It isn't as smooth as it looks—under the grass."
"Let's run."
She caught his sleeve gaily and started down the slope, with a constantly increasing speed which he saw at once she would be unable to check. "Don't!" he cried. "Not so fast!"—and tried to hold her back. She tripped and almost fell over a rock. He caught at a bush, and jerked her to her feet, and swinging her at arm's length he brought her around toward him as they slipped, held her until the bush broke, caught another, and stopped her breathless and frightened on the edge of a sudden steepness, with his arm about her. She clung to him, gasping and choking with excitement.
"You might have hurt yourself."
"Oh dear! Let me—sit down. I"
He let her down, kneeling beside her. She put her hat up from her forehead and straightened it, panting. "I"
"Are you all right?"
She leaned back against his support. "I—I wanted to make you run," she laughed. "You were so"
"Was I?" He took her hand and held it against his breast in a passionate apology for his stiffness. "You know I'm"
"What have you done!" she cried. There was blood on his fingers where the bush had torn them. "You've cut yourself!"
"It's nothing. . . . I wish it were—anything—for you."
"Don!"
He looked away quickly to hide the loosening which he felt in his lips, the moisture in his eyes. She took out her handkerchief, and wiped his fingers silently. "I'm not worth it," she said in a low voice of shame. "I'm—I let Conroy—I"
"Don't!" he begged. "You are. You're everything—you're all I have."
He raised her hand, smeared with the blood of his, and kissed it like a knight. It went tense at the touch of his lips. "Oh, Don!" she whispered, drooping. "Don!"—and in another voice, quickly: "Don! Someone will see us!"
He released her. They returned to the road and went on down the hill, side by side, in the staring sunlight, as silent, as nervous—and he as pale and as bewilderedly happy—as if they were a newly-married couple coming down the aisle of the church from the altar railing.
He made her comfortable under his pine, in a little nook of budded underbrush on the side of a hill overlooking the river; and he sat below her, turned so as to look up at her with the glowing face of a shy young passion. She had taken off her hat, and she leaned back against the tree, flushed and smiling and holding him with a deep gaze that twinkled and softened and beamed on him. They were rediscovering their past; it had become a new wonder to them, since it had led them to this. "Do you remember the little place we had in Coulton?—beside the stream?" she said. "Do you remember the day I found you there?—and you called me 'Miss Margaret'?"
"May I—again? You've always been 'Miss Margaret.'"
"Have I? Of course. Do you like it?"
"Yes." He fondled the name with his voice: "Miss Margaret!"
"What am I to call you?"
"I don't know. You called me 'Don.'"
"But everyone calls you that. I want a name of my own, too."
"It doesn't sound the same—when you say it."
"How do I say it?" She tried it in varying inflections: "Don? Don. Don!"
"It's your voice. It's so" He gulped.
"Why, I haven't a pretty voice, do you think?"
"I can hear it when I'm alone. I can see you, any time, by just closing my eyes."
"Really! Try it now. Close them."
"No." He shook his head, his eyes fastened on her hungrily. "I want to see you really. I shall be alone again soon enough."
"Why—why are you so much alone?"
"Because I can . . . think of you."
"Don!" she said earnestly. "You mustn't do it. I—you"
"After you went away from Coulton, I was so lonely I used to go to the ravine to meet you and—and here, when I was at college, before you came, I had you all the time." She reached out her hand on the warm impulse of pity, and he took it in both his. "Now I shall have this to remember—the softness."
"Oh, Don, dear," she pleaded, bending down to him. "If I disappoint you! If I"
He played with her fingers, watching them whiten and dimple. "You never will again. I know you now. You never will."
"But when I go away?"
"You'll come back."
She caught his wrist and shook it, as if to wake him from this smiling certainty of happiness. "But if I don't? If I go to New York? Mother has written me that she wants me to spend the winter in New York, studying."
"Well, I'll go too." He laughed confidently.
"To New York? What will you do there?"
He did not know. He would find something. If she went abroad—to Germany—he would wait for her to come back. "It's all right," he said. "Don't worry. I know. I can wait."
She leaned back against her tree again, gazing out over the river at the far shore, as if it were the uncertain future in which he put such trust. When he looked at her, he saw the troubled wrinkle of her forehead, and he said: "Don't—don't think of it that way. Go wherever you like. I can wait. I'll be busy preparing for you—until you come back."
She said, in a shaken voice: "We're so young. It'll be years before we can be together, really. If I meet someone else . . . and don't . . . come back."
"You always have. You always will. If you don't, I'll know it's because he is—better. It will always be the same—with me—now, whether you come or not. I'll always think of you the same."
She could not speak, except through the pressure of her fingers. He answered it with the trust of his eyes. "You'll not worry about it?"
She shook her head, blinded. "I'll try," she promised chokingly. "I'll try to come back—always—for always."
He held her hand against his cheek. "Thanks," he whispered, in a speechless gratitude.
That day was to remain with him, in living memory, as a joy that was not to be forgotten unless he forgot his own identity. It was to become as essentially a part of him as the memory of a vision might be part of the life and religion of a saint. The view of the river shining among the branches, the fallen trees in the underbrush, the yellow sunlight, the green shadows, her face against the brown trunk of the tree, the warm surrender of her hand—the memory of these was to be about him in his future like thoughts of home in exile. They were to give to all women a subtle quality of wood-enchantment; as if they reminded him of nymphs and graces known in some forgotten, far-off golden land. And they were to make the smallest patch of grass and trees poetical to him, love-haunted, at once heart-gladdening and full of painful longings—even though it were only a green square in a great city, noisy with traffic and shabby with the dust from the worn pavements of thronged streets.
And as if he were conscious of the momentous influence of the hour—or perhaps as instinctively as the plant that turns itself to the ripening of the sunlight—he gave himself up to her, without any reserve of his secrets, returning to her the homage of all the dreams which she had inspired, the flowering of the past which she had suddenly made perfect. It marked the change in him from mere dreaming to aggressive idealism. He was no longer afraid of himself or of her, resolved that whatever he believed of her should be made true; and she heard him at first with shame and protestations, with pity, with tenderness, and at last with a humbled gratitude and a secret pledge to be worthy of such devotion if it were possible—until, like a pair of children under their tree, she leaning against his shoulder, holding hands, they looked out on the future with shining eyes, trusting it with the hope of their hearts.
She was to be a singer, perhaps in grand opera, surely on the concert stage; and he was to keep busy with his books while she was working with her music. They would meet in New York—that London of ambitious young Canadians. He would find something there for him to do. "They have so much money," he said, "they'll not miss the few thousands I'll need." He inspired her, for the moment, with some of his confidence, and she tried to trust herself as much as he trusted her. When she fell silent, regretting the loss of girlish irresponsibility and heart-freedom which these plans required of her, feeling her hand held where her inclination was only reluctantly settled, he saw the shadow in her face again, and said: "Don't worry, now. Leave it to me. I'll make it come true. I always have."
She sighed. "It isn't that. It isn't you. It's myself I'm afraid of."
"I know," he said. "I'll make you come true, too."
She smiled doubtfully, watching a cloud that had furled itself across the sun, above the far shore of the river, low on the horizon. How low it was—the sun! "What time is it?" She drew her watch from her belt. "Goodness!" she cried. "It's nearly six o'clock."
"Oh, well," he said. "Who cares?"
She caught up her hat frantically. "It will take us an hour to get back. The Kimballs"
He came down to realities, troubled by her alarm. "I know a short cut."
"Come! Quick! We must hurry."
He started off confidently on his "short cut"; and she followed, pinning her hat as she went.
They lost their way in the green twilight of the woods. It was dusk before they came out upon an unknown road and saw their street-car line. It was almost dark when he left her reluctantly, at the Kimball gate. And when he was sitting at his window, his lamp unlighted—smiling at the sky above the spire of St. Stephen's—Mrs. Kimball was saying to the defiant girl: "Very well. Very well. I'll write to your mother at once, then. I shall no longer be responsible for you, if you do such things. That will do."