E. H. Young

“ The thin figure of trouble might walk with Alexander and lie beside him when he slept, but it could not rob him of content. Roused in the night by the opening of a door and stealthy feet on the stairs, he would pull on his clothes and follow his father into the darkness, and hardly regret his bed when the freshness of falling rain met his cheek, or the night smell of flowers assailed him; or, when he waited in the kitchen while the coals slipped in the fireplace and lost their red, and he strained his ears for a voice or a footstep, they were comforted by the singing of the larches. ”

“ She went fast to find her fires and, while her mind was fixed on them, she was still aware of the vast moor she loved, its darkness, its silence, the smells it gave out, the promise of warmth and fertility in its bosom. She could not clearly see the ground, but her feet knew it: heather, grass, stones, and young bracken were to be overcome; here and there a rock or thorn-bush loomed out blacker than the rest in warning; sometimes a dip in the earth must be avoided; once or twice dim grey objects rose up and became sheep that bleated out of her way, and always, as she ran, she mounted. ”

“ Theresa, can you love me back? I am not satisfied with serving. I will not say I am. I want all I have ever seen, or heard, or dreamt of you, and all I do not know, all you may grow to be. Last night, when I was lying outside your door, listening for the sound of you, I did not think about my mother; I did not think about my father or yours. I remembered how you had put your head against my arm, under the yews, and how you had smiled at me in the firelight, and I could not sleep for hoping, and I thought you must have heard me crying out to you ”

“ Helen dropped into the darkness like a swimmer taking deep water quietly and at once she was immersed in happiness. She forgot her stepmother sitting so stiffly on the sofa and for a little while she forgot that the future which held her and Zebedee in its embrace held a solitary Mildred Caniper less warmly. In the scented night, Helen allowed herself to taste joy without misgiving.
She walked slowly because she was hemmed in by feelings which were blissful and undefined: she knew only that the world smelt sweeter than it had ever done, that the stars shone with amazing brightness. ”

“ Looking at it, Alexander wore an expression between pride of possession and youthful reserve; he lay on his stomach, nibbling a heather stalk, and frowning that he might not smile. This was his mountain, all the mountains were his, and he would have led hither no one whom he could not trust; but Edward Webb's long-drawn sighs, the restless movements of a pleasure that looked and was not able to express itself, and then the settled quiet of his drinking gaze, assured him that he had made no mistake. This man understood that he was in the presence of the mighty. ”

“ Mildred Caniper seldom thwarted her, and she knew that every day George Halkett rode or walked where he might see her, and her memory of that splendid summer was to be one of sunlight blotted with the shapes of man and horse moving across the moor. George was not always successful in his search, for she knew that he would pall as a daily dish, but on Sundays if Daniel would not be beguiled, and if it was not worth while to tease Helen through Zebedee, she seldom failed to make her light secret way to the larch-wood where he waited. ”

“ He thought of Nancy, of Grace and Theresa in their beds: Nancy, with her hand under her cheek, and the humorous, half-mocking smile on her lips, even in sleep; Grace, with her nose in the pillow, and Theresa widespread, tossing her tawny head. Heaven keep them and him! If only the darkness had not been so thick—thick, yet unsteady, promising cracks of light which did not come, and, as he grew more dazed, taking unwelcome shapes of small and evil things, of things nameless, gigantic, formless, yet hideous in suggestion, that came slyly through the folds of mist to push him from his place. ”

“ For Helen, the moor was a personality with moods flecking the solid substance of its character, and even Miriam, who avowed her hatred of its monotony, had to admit an occasional difference. There were days when she thought it was full of secrets and capable of harbouring her own, and there were other days when she forgot its little hills and dales and hiding-places and saw it as a large plain, spread under the glaring eye of the sun, and shelterless, so that when she walked there she believed that her body and, in some mysterious way, her soul, were visible to all men. ”

“ Edward Webb, too, had a nap. Grace read demurely in the breakfast-room, and Theresa sat on the kitchen fender when Bessie, having washed up the dinner things by a miracle of speed, had emerged to the light of day. Theresa always tried to catch a glimpse of her on these occasions, for she could never feel that this was the same person who, moving amid dimness, clad in drab colours, besmirched with black, had cooked the breakfast; for on Sunday and the weekly night out she seemed to leave herself in her bedroom and bring forth a cruder creature, gowned in bright blue, and shadowless. ”

“ She was a woman, young and full of life, and the moor was wide and dark, great-bosomed, and beside her there ran a man who held her firmly and tightened, ever and again, his grasp of her slipping fingers. Soon it was no effort not to think and to feel recklessly was to escape. Their going made a wind to fan their faces; there was a smell of damp earth and dusty heather, of Halkett's tweeds and his tobacco; the wind had a faint smell of frost; there was one star in a greenish sky.
She stopped when she could go no further, and she heard his hurried breathing and her own. ”

“ His soul was fretted; life was a jumble; he saw himself struggling along an endless, dusty road, white to the knees, eyes blinded and throat parched. There stretched before him years more of such travelling, yet—and his hands unclenched themselves—was he not greatly blessed? His eyes were sometimes cleansed by a sight of stars above the hills; he stooped now and then to a mountain stream, and of his weariness Theresa would reap the fruits. He took a deep breath, for he saw the steady hills which were his friends, and felt their wind on his cheeks. Life cleared itself again ”

“ But what about Miriam? Little fool, little fool! Does she know what she's done?"
"No one knows but you. You see, she fainted. I always thought she'd come between us, but what queer things God does!"
His voice rose suddenly, saying, "Helen, it's unbearable. But you shall not stay here. I shall take you away."
"There's Notya."
"Yes."
"Do you mean—Is she going to die?"
"I don't know. She may not live for long. And if she dies, you shall come away with me. We can go together anywhere in the world. There's no morality and no sense and no justice in such a sacrifice." ”

“ How to live on it! Theresa! I did not know you were there."
"Yes, I followed you." Her voice shook with pity for him. "Mother saw me." People's eyes! She saw them socketless, like those she had once detached from the head of Grace's favourite doll. "Is it only money? Then we'll manage. I'm not going to eat meat any more. I loathe the stuff, and lentils are cheap. I'll tell Bessie to order them." They both smiled wanly, strangely alike in that moment. "You needn't laugh. We must be practical. Grace is nearly keeping herself, and I shall be soon. I wish you wouldn't look so miserable." ”

“ Helen said simply.
"Are you so pleased to see me?"
Helen's reluctant smile expanded. "I suppose it's that."
"Aha! It's lovely to be me! People go down like ninepins! Why?" Piously, she appealed to Heaven. "Why?"
"They get up again, though," Helen said with a chuckle.
"For instance?" Miriam demanded truculently.
"Oh, I'm not going to be hard on you," Helen said, and though she spoke with genuine amusement, she felt a little seed of anger germinating in her breast. That was what George had done to her: he had made her heart a fertile place for passions which her mind disdained. ”

“ Theresa asked lazily, and was so much startled by Grace's quick and emphatic, "Oh no, thank you!" that she almost felt it in her conscience to follow her; but she sat still, frowning, and put a direct question when Grace, returned, unusually silent, and stood to warm her hands before the fire.
"Have you been out with a man?"
"Theresa, you're horrid. No, I have not. You talk to me as though I were a servant girl."
Theresa smiled. "I wish you were as unsusceptible as Bessie. She gets all her romance out of novelettes, bless her!" ”

“ Perhaps, after all, the things that happened were not necessarily best, and for the first time Helen felt a blind anger against the unknown. In a moment of sharp vision, she saw what this vaguely concentrated life had done for her and Miriam, and she wondered by whose law it had been decreed that no human being could have a destiny unconditioned by some one else, and though she also saw that this law was the glory as well as the tragedy of life, she rebelled against it now, lest the radiant being whom she loved should be dishonoured or disillusioned. ”

“ Early on the Saturday morning when her father was expected to return, Theresa awoke and, quickly flinging off the bedclothes, sat up with a jerk. The busy fingers of the wind were tapping at the pane, calling her to come out and play, and from the bottom of the hill there rose a more imperative summons, the hooting of a steamer making her way out of the docks. It was high tide, and she smiled her pleasure, hugging her knees. Every day that sound was borne up to her on the hill, like a trumpet call to life. ”

“ She had the mind of a slave, she told herself, the mind of a slave, and she deserved no better than to be one.
She wrapped a grey cape about her and sat outside the garden gate. The wind was strong enough to lean against, stronger than man or anything he had made. Its freshness seemed to get beneath her skin, into her mind, to clean every part of her. Its action had a swiftness that prevented thought, and she was content to sit there till the doctor came, though the nurse had gone to bed in Christopher, and Mildred Caniper was alone. ”

“ I want the sun."
They followed the grassy track and struck across the new green of the bracken to the stream that rioted among the rocks, teasing itself into foam, lashing itself into waterfalls, or lying in still pools. By one of these, on a broad slab of stone, Theresa and Alexander halted. The sun struck on the water and on them; it gilded the purple of Theresa's gown until it was illuminated like a missal; it found the lurking red in Alexander's hair, it turned hers to flame, and to each one it showed the suffering of the other. ”

“ Sometimes, as the train carried him on, with, to his imagination, something remorseless and inimical to him in its energy, he would look up from his book and stare longingly at the country which the fast wheels spurned; but on his lonely Saturday and Sunday, when he was stranded in some town, he seldom had energy to obey adventure's whisper, and explore farther than a quiet place where he could read, and write his daily letter to his wife. But, Theresa having a hunger for adventure, her father had decided that at least she should be satisfied by proxy, and he had sought the mountains. ”

“ It was not the real Mildred Caniper who had told that story in the night; it was the one who, weakened by illness, was content to sit with folded hands by the fireside.
She dimmed the sun for Helen and robbed the spring of hope. This glory would not last: colours would fade and flowers die, and so human life itself would slip into a mingling of light and shadow, a pale confluence of the two by which a man could see to dig a grave. ”

“ It was May, but a cold wind rattled the windows, and Nancy had her feet inside the fender and a shawl round her shoulders. Theresa was sewing, as a silent protest against the ardent letter-reading upstairs. Her lips were tightened, and conscious virtue enveloped all of her but the hair that flamed in love's own colour. She was now eighteen, and the hair was massed on her head, overweighting it, strengthening the pallor of a face where only a few golden freckles broke the white.
She shivered. "May is the worst month of all," she said, and threw down her sewing. ”

“ She lived there with them happily, not thwarted by moods and past miseries, and though she had not yet seen the father of those children about the house, tonight, as she stood in the covering darkness, she thought she heard his footsteps in the garden where the children played among the trees.
She moved abruptly, slipped, and sat down with a thud. Her laughter, like a ghost's, trickled through the stillness, and even while she laughed a door was opened and John appeared, holding a lighted candle in his hand.
"It's only me," Helen said.
"What the devil are you up to?" ”