IV
He woke to his expected liberty, on the following Sunday morning, in his boarding-house room—a room as small as a squirrel-cage, with its slanting roof and its dormer window the sash of which, hung loosely on hinges, allowed a powdered snow to sift in on the sill. The railroad journey of the previous night had been an impatient flight to this haven of lonely freedom; and he had fallen asleep, too tired to think, with a happy assurance that the next day would rise on his new life.
It had risen. The sun was bright on window-panes that were white with a hoar frost as thick as a lichen. His trunk, still unstrapped, stood in a corner. His lamp was on his table, his books on the shelves of the "what-not" which served him as a bookcase. It was as if he were in a cabin on board ship, a night's sail from land; and he was eager to be out on deck to see the new horizon.
He jumped from his bed, and the cold closed on him as invigorating as an icy bath. It was nine o'clock by his watch. He scrambled into his clothes, his teeth chattering laughably. The water from his cracked basin stung on his hands and face. He smiled at the ghostly reflection of himself in the mirror that was as dull as a sheet of tin; and he laughed when he found that his watch, lying on the marble top of his washstand, had been stopped overnight by the penetrating cold of the stone. He went downstairs on tip-toe, in the silence of a house asleep, put on his overcoat and fur cap like a thief, and opened the front door on a sparkling level of new-fallen snow that lay, untracked—an unbroken wonder, a white spell of silence—over the empty street. He stood a moment, on the edge of it, almost reluctant to break the charm. Then he drew his cap down to his ears, and with an unvoiced shout of high spirits he ran down the porch steps and waded in.
The sunshine blinded him, breaking into prismatic colours on the lashes of his half-closed eyes. The snow silenced his footsteps. There was not even a stir of wind to make life around him. He walked in an enchanted world, through the stillness of a Sunday morning, his thought singing ecstatically, in a croon of pleasure, like a child at play.
He went without design, without direction. But unconsciously he turned into the way that led to college, and he strode along, swinging his arms, his head down against the sun, glancing at the houses which he passed, and smiling—with all the contempt of his frost-bitten and tingling alertness—at thought of the warm sloth of the sleepers indoors. He caught a glimpse of a face at a lower window, but the frozen brilliance of a lawn gleamed between him and it, and he could not see it clearly. He slowed his pace at the next street corner, and hesitated there until he remembered that the Conservatory of Music stood in the middle of the block below: then he turned in that direction, with the scarcely conscious intention of looking at the door through which she was to enter to her studies and the windows from which she was to look out.
He was thinking of her blissfully, deep in his dreams, when he heard a muffled sound of hurried footsteps behind him. He was in front of the Conservatory, now, and he walked very slowly, to let the passer-by go before him, so that he might stand and gaze if he pleased. He heard a quick breath at his elbow. He pretended to be curiously interested in the red stone building, bald and formal, among its stripped trees. A low voice—her voice—choked with mischief, asked: "Well? How do you like it?"
She was gasping between laughter and the attempt to catch her breath, flushed with the exertion of overtaking him and enjoying almost hysterically the awkwardness of his surprise. He stammered: "Why—how" He was not conscious of taking the hand which she held out to him. He stared at her in a dumb amazement that was ludicrous. "How did you"
"I saw you pass the house. Didn't you see me?—at the window?"
He shook his head blankly. "No. Was it you—following me?"
She nodded, breathless.
"Why didn't you call out?"
"I—I couldn't." She freed her hand from him and pressed it against her side, panting. "I was walking so fast, I couldn't. Why did you stop?"
He did not take his fascinated gaze from her to indicate the building; he jerked his head back at it, beginning to smile as a slow blush of pleasure burned up into his face. "Conroy told me"
"That I was coming?"
"Yes—to study music." His smile was for himself now as he saw the situation. "I came to see whether you were here yet."
"Really?" He had not changed, she thought; his face was a little older, a little thinner; but his smile was the same unguarded, boyish grin. She laughed, in a sudden release of her pent-up excitement, her amused scrutiny deepening to a frank regard of sympathy, as warm as a clasp of hands.
It brought his own ardour into his face, glowing and tender. "Yes," he said. "Really." And his voice shook on the word with a husky tremble.
She looked away from him in quick embarrassment, glancing around her at the frozen silence that held them in the heart of an immense calm. "Isn't—isn't it funny? Why is it so quiet?"
She wore a little sealskin cap set jauntily on the dark brown lustre of her hair, and under a wave of that—as she turned—he saw the rosy-tender daintiness of her ear, a little curled shell of an ear that appealed to everything masculine in him as the sight of an infant's wrinkled fingers will appeal to all the maternal in a woman. He heard himself reply: "Well, it's Sunday. And it can't be more than eight o'clock yet."
She felt his look on her, and could not turn to meet it. "Wouldn't she scold if she knew—mother? She had a cough. I left her in bed."
He blinked the existence of her mother—of everyone but the two of them alone and together. "Have you had your breakfast?"
"No.... Have you ?"
"No." He added daringly, in a voice that belied the attempted bravado of his smile: "I couldn't wait. I wanted to see you."
She tried to laugh at him again. "You funny boy!"
"I knew I'd meet you."
"How?"
"I don't know. Are you going to church?"
The hungry directness of the appeal confused her. "I suppose so. Yes. After breakfast."
"Where? What one?"
"Whichever's the nearest."
"St. Stephen's?"
She tried to fence with him, to get time to think. "Is that the nearest ?"
"Yes." He waited.
She looked around her vaguely. "Where is it?"
"I'll show you. After breakfast.... May I?"
She had never before seen that expression in a face, or heard that tone in a voice; and they frightened her at the same time that they thrilled and flattered her. "Oh, goodness!" she faltered. "I must hurry back—before they come down—and miss me." She started, with a quick step, toward the house; and he stumbled in the snow as he turned with her, looking at her—instead of watching the path he was walking—and gone suddenly dumb. "I hope they don't see me," she said. "You mustn't come to the door." She stopped abruptly. How ever shall I tell mother!"
He asked, startled: "Tell her what?"
"Why, that I—I ran after you?"
"Don't tell her. Tell her you met me at church, I'll meet you there."
She hinted guiltily: "I promised her I wouldn't write."
"Well, you didn't, did you?"
"No, I only wrote Jessie. But if I make an appointment to meet you, isn't that"
"Don't make it. I'll meet you."
"Where?"
"You're not to know. What time will you be going—to church?"
She started forward rapidly again, without answering, but he kept pace with her. "To St. Stephen's?" he pressed her. "It's right ahead of us—about four blocks up the street." When she did not reply, he suggested, with an appealing timidity: "At ten o'clock?"
At last, she said, almost in a whisper, her face shamefully suffused: "Yes, ... but you mustn't come any further now. There's the house—where you see those little trees along the 'boulevard.'" She put out her hand. "Good-bye."
He held it a moment. "Good-bye."
When she glanced back from the gate, he was standing where she had left him, his hand half raised from releasing hers, gazing after her.
She disappeared; and he looked about him, blinking, like a man who has seen a vision and does not recognise the familiar and unchanged world in which it has left him.
He turned dazedly down the street. Beautiful! How beautiful she was! That was his first thought. And it was not a thought so much as a mental picture of her which he could gloat over now, in silence, without the distraction of speech. He framed her face in the hollow of his hands and held it before him—the dear girl's face, laughing up at him from its dimples, with a tenderer gleam in the mischievous eyes! Beautiful! Beau He came down with a startling jolt from the sidewalk into the drifted gutter. He pulled himself together with a half laugh, and hurried away down the avenue like one possessed.
And he was possessed. His eyes were possessed by her smile, his ears by the note of her voice, his brain by the trivial words she had spoken, his nerves by the thrill that had set him shaking when he had tried to say good-bye to her. She had taken him, body and mind; and his blood was in a fever, and his thoughts were deliriously confused. But even so, there was something spiritual in his frenzy. He thought of her as the boy of the classic fable must have thought of his goddess when she descended to him—Diana!—from her moon. After the first hungry obsession that had made him take her face in his hands, he stood back from her as from something holy. She was what the poets had made woman to him. She was something so nearly divine that she was to be almost worshipped with that passionate reverence which the poets make of love. All his religious emotions, turned back from their proper outlet by the scepticisms of Science, flowed out to her in the tide of desire. His make-believes, his day-dreams of her, had surrounded her with a sort of glory that was part of the bewitchment of her beauty. He did not even dare, in his thought, to kiss her hand.
And yet, that was not all. The process of his mind was not so high fantastical alone. With the complexity of a brain that was trained to cheat itself with its own make-believes but still was never ignorant that it was being cheated, Don was aware that his relations with her were not to be simply those of blind worship and accepted love. Her frightened confusion, when his voice had betrayed him, warned him, now, that mere ecstasy and ardour would only drive her from him; that he must be politic; that she was a human being judging him in accordance with the conventions of human society, and not as clairvoyant as a goddess or as untrammelled as an ideal. He understood that he was in a game against her, a game of courtship with his happiness at stake; and with all the madness of a lover, he developed some of the instinctive craftiness as well.
He began to plan, walking more deliberately and frowning in his effort to think. He recognised that her mother, of course, would be the great opponent of any free intercourse with her; and though he might perhaps call on her, in the restricted circle of parental surveillance, that would be to bring the lady of his dreams down to the commonplaces of everyday life, and he rejected the thought. What he wanted was her alone, away from everybody else in the world, as he had had her in the innocent beginnings of their companionship at Coulton, as he had always had her in imagination, since.
He finished his walk at the bowed pace of troubled meditation.
The mistress of the house in which he boarded had a motherly regard for her studious guest, and served him without intruding any remarks upon him whenever she saw him preoccupied with thought. Her daughter, long since discouraged in the first attentions of a somewhat stale coquetry, had fallen back on a disdainful silence in her unavoidable meetings with him, and spoke of him with the contempt of a critic whose appreciations had been despised. The nine-year-old son who completed the family was always silently engaged at breakfast in an attempt to avoid eating porridge—which he hated unhealthily and his mother made him eat—by smuggling as much of it as possible into his coffee cup, drinking off the overflow of coffee and emptying the guilty mug, later, in the kitchen. Mother, daughter and son left Don to his plans.
Nevertheless, when he went out to waylay Margaret on her road to church, he had formed no design for circumventing the difficulties in his path. He saw no further than the fact that he was to meet her again. It was, perhaps, for the last time, alone; but, at least, it was this once; and he took what joy he could from that concession of circumstance.