"By the way, you might shine up to Hilda Farrand and join the rest of the fortune-hunters.She's got it to throw to the birds, and in her own right.Seriously, old fellow, don't put yourself into a false position through ignorance.Not that there is any danger to a hardened old woodsman like you."Thorpe went to the group of pines by the pole trail the following afternoon because he had said he would, but with a new attitude of mind.He had come into contact with the artificiality of conventional relations, and it stiffened him.No wonder she had made him keep silence the afternoon before! She had done it gently and nicely, to be sure, but that was part of her good-breeding.
Hilda found him formal, reserved, polite; and marvelled at it.In her was no coquetry.She was as straightforward and sincere as the look of her eyes.
They sat down on a log.Hilda turned to him with her graceful air of confidence.
"Now talk to me," said she.
"Certainly," replied Thorpe in a practical tone of voice, "what do you want me to talk about?"She shot a swift, troubled glance at him, concluded herself mistaken, and said:
"Tell me about what you do up here--your life--all about it.""Well--" replied Thorpe formally, "we haven't much to interest a girl like you.It is a question of saw logs with us"--and he went on in his dryest, most technical manner to detail the process of manufacture.It might as well have been bricks.
The girl did not understand.She was hurt.As surely as the sun tangled in the distant pine frond, she had seen in his eyes a great passion.Now it was coldly withdrawn.
"What has happened to you?" she asked finally out of her great sincerity.
"Me? Nothing," replied Thorpe.
A forced silence fell upon him.Hilda seemed gradually to lose herself in reverie.After a time she said softly.
"Don't you love this woods?"
"It's an excellent bunch of pine," replied Thorpe bluntly."It'll cut three million at least.""Oh!" she cried drawing back, her hands pressed against the log either side of her, her eyes wide.
After a moment she caught her breath convulsively, and Thorpe became conscious that she was studying him furtively with a quickening doubt.
After that, by the mercy of God, there was no more talk between them.She was too hurt and shocked and disillusioned to make the necessary effort to go away.He was too proud to put an end to the position.They sat there apparently absorbed in thought, while all about them the accustomed life of the woods drew nearer and nearer to them, as the splash of their entrance into it died away.
A red squirrel poised thirty feet above them, leaped, and clung swaying to a sapling-top a dozen yards from the tree he had quitted.Two chickadees upside down uttering liquid undertones, searched busily for insects next their heads.Wilson's warblers, pine creepers, black-throats, myrtle and magnolia warblers, oven birds, peewits, blue jays, purple finches, passed silently or noisily, each according to his kind.Once a lone spruce hen dusted herself in a stray patch of sunlight until it shimmered on a tree trunk, raised upward, and disappeared, to give place to long level dusty shafts that shot here and there through the pines laying the spell of sunset on the noisy woods brawlers.
Unconsciously the first strain of opposition and of hurt surprise had relaxed.Each thought vaguely his thoughts.Then in the depths of the forest, perhaps near at hand, perhaps far away, a single hermit thrush began to sing.His song was of three solemn deep liquid notes; followed by a slight rhetorical pause as of contemplation; and then, deliberately, three notes more on a different key--and so on without haste and without pause.It is the most dignified, the most spiritual, the holiest of woods utterances.Combined with the evening shadows and the warm soft air, it offered to the heart an almost irresistible appeal.The man's artificial antagonism modified; the woman's disenchantment began to seem unreal.
Then subtly over and through the bird-song another sound became audible.At first it merely repeated the three notes faintly, like an echo, but with a rich, sad undertone that brought tears.Then, timidly and still softly, it elaborated the theme, weaving in and out through the original three the glitter and shimmer of a splendid web of sound, spreading before the awakened imagination a broad river of woods-imagery that reflected on its surface all the subtler moods of the forest.The pine shadows, the calls of the wild creatures, the flow of the brook, the splashes of sunlight through the trees, the sigh of the wind, the shout of the rapid,--all these were there, distinctly to be felt in their most ethereal and beautiful forms.And yet it was all slight and tenuous as though the crack of a twig would break it through--so that over it continually like a grand full organ-tone repeated the notes of the bird itself.
With the first sigh of the wonder-music the girl had started and caught her breath in the exquisite pleasure of it.As it went on they both forgot everything but the harmony and each other.
"Ah, beautiful!" she murmured.
"What is it?" he whispered marvelling.
"A violin,--played by a master."
The bird suddenly hushed, and at once the strain abandoned the woods-note and took another motif.At first it played softly in the higher notes, a tinkling, lightsome little melody that stirred a kindly surface-smile over a full heart.Then suddenly, without transition, it dropped to the lower register, and began to sob and wail in the full vibrating power of a great passion.
