A Modern Instance. William Dean HowellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
it climbed a hill, or crossed a treeless level, it was narrowed to a single track, with turn-outs at established points, where the drivers of the sleighs waited to be sure that the stretch beyond was clear before going forward. In the country, the winter which held the village in such close siege was an occupation under which Nature seemed to cower helpless, and men made a desperate and ineffectual struggle. The houses, banked up with snow almost to the sills of the windows that looked out, blind with frost, upon the lifeless world, were dwarfed in the drifts, and seemed to founder in a white sea blotched with strange bluish shadows under the slanting sun. Where they fronted close upon the road, it was evident that the fight with the snow was kept up unrelentingly; spaces were shovelled out, and paths were kept open to the middle of the highway, and to the barn; but where they were somewhat removed, there was no visible trace of the conflict, and no sign of life except the faint, wreathed lines of smoke wavering upward from the chimneys.
In the hollows through which the road passed, the lower boughs of the pines and hemlocks were weighed down with the snow-fall till they lay half submerged in the drifts; but wherever the wind could strike them, they swung free of this load and met in low, flat arches above the track. The river betrayed itself only when the swift current of a ripple broke through the white surface in long, irregular, grayish blurs. It was all wild and lonesome, but to the girl alone in it with her lover, the solitude was sweet, and she did not wish to speak even to him. His hands were both busy with the reins, but it was agreed between them that she might lock hers through his arm. Cowering close to him under the robes, she laid her head on his shoulder and looked out over the flying landscape in measureless content, and smiled, with filling eyes, when he bent over, and warmed his cold, red cheek on the top of her fur cap.
The moments of bliss that silence a woman rouse a man to make sure of his rapture. "How do you like it, Marsh?" he asked, trying at one of these times to peer round into her face. "Are you afraid?"
"No,—only of getting back too soon."
He made the shivering echoes answer with his delight in this, and chirruped to the colt, who pushed forward at a wilder speed, flinging his hoofs out before him with the straight thrust of the horn trotter, and seeming to overtake them as they flew. "I should like this ride to last forever!"
"Forever!" she repeated. "That would do for a beginning."
"Marsh! What a girl you are! I never supposed you would be so free to let a fellow know how much you cared for him."
"Neither did I," she answered dreamily. "But now—now the only trouble is that I don't know how to let him know." She gave his arm to which she clung a little convulsive clutch, and pressed her head harder upon his shoulder.
"Well, that's pretty much my complaint, too," said Bartley, "though I couldn't have expressed it so well."
"Oh, you express!" she murmured, with the pride in him which implied that there were no thoughts worth expressing to which he could not give a monumental utterance. Her adoration flattered his self-love to the same passionate intensity, and to something like the generous complexion of her worship.
"Marcia," he answered, "I am going to try to be all you expect of me. And I hope I shall never do anything unworthy of your ideal."
She could only press his arm again in speechless joy, but she said to herself that she should always remember these words.
The wind had been rising ever since they started but they had not noticed it till now, when the woods began to thin away on either side, and he stopped before striking out over one of the naked stretches of the plain,—a white waste swept by the blasts that sucked down through a gorge of the mountain, and flattened the snow-drifts as the tornado flattens the waves. Across this expanse ran the road, its stiff lines obliterated here and there, in the slight depressions, and showing dark along the rest of the track.
It was a good half-mile to the next body of woods, and midway there was one of those sidings where a sleigh approaching from the other quarter must turn out and yield the right of way. Bartley stopped his colt, and scanned the road.
"Anybody coming?" asked Marcia.
"No, I don't see any one. But if there's any one in the woods yonder, they'd better wait till I get across. No horse in Equity can beat this colt to the turn-out."
"Oh, well, look carefully, Bartley. If we met any one beyond the turn-out, I don't know what I should do," pleaded the girl.
"I don't know what they would do," said Bartley. "But it's their lookout now, if they come. Wrap your face up well, or put your head under the robe. I've got to hold my breath the next half-mile." He loosed the reins, and sped the colt out of the shelter where he had halted. The wind struck them like an edge of steel, and, catching the powdery snow that their horse's hoofs beat up, sent it spinning and swirling far along the glistening levels on their lee. They felt the thrill of the go as if they were in some light boat leaping over a swift current. Marcia disdained to cover her face, if he must confront the wind, but after a few gasps she was glad to bend forward, and bury it in the long hair of the bearskin robe. When she lifted it, they were already past the siding, and she saw a cutter dashing toward them from the cover of the woods. "Bartley!" she screamed, "the sleigh!"
"Yes," he shouted. "Some fool! There's going to be trouble here," he added, checking his horse as he could. "They don't seem to know how to manage—It's a couple of women! Hold on! hold on!" he called. "Don't try to turn out! I'll turn out!"
The women pulled their horse's head this way and that, in apparent confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the roadside, in spite of Bartley's frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and then their cutter went over, amidst their shrieks and cries for help.
Bartley drove up abreast of the wreck, and, saying, "Still, Jerry! Don't be afraid, Marcia,"—he put the reins into her hands, and sprang out to the rescue.
One of the women had been flung out free of the sleigh, and had already gathered herself up, and stood crying and wringing her hands; "Oh, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Hubbard! Help Hannah! she's under there!"
"All right! Keep quiet, Mrs. Morrison! Take hold of your horse's head!" Bartley had first of all seized him by the bit, and pulled him to his feet; he was old and experienced in obedience, and he now stood waiting orders, patiently enough. Bartley seized the cutter and by an effort of all his strength righted it. The colt started and trembled, but Marcia called to him in Bartley's tone, "Still, Jerry!" and he obeyed her.
The girl, who had been caught under the overturned cutter, escaped like a wild thing out of a trap, when it was lifted, and, plunging some paces away, faced round upon her rescuer with the hood pulled straight and set comely to her face again, almost before he could ask, "Any bones broken, Hannah?"
"No!" she shouted. "Mother! mother! stop crying! Don't you see I'm not dead?" She leaped about, catching up this wrap and that, shaking the dry snow out of them, and flinging them back into the cutter, while she laughed in the wild tumult of her spirits. Bartley helped her pick up the fragments of the wreck, and joined her in making fun of the adventure. The wind hustled them, but they were warm in defiance of it with their jollity and their bustle.
"Why didn't you let me turn out?" demanded Bartley, as he and the girl stood on opposite sides of the cutter, rearranging the robes in it.
"Oh, I thought I could turn out well enough. You had a right to the road."
"Well, the next time you see any one past the turn-out, you better not start from the woods."
"Why, there's no more room in the woods to get past than there is here," cried the girl.
"There's more shelter."
"Oh, I'm not cold!" She flashed a look at him from her brilliant face, warm with all the glow of her young health, and laughed, and before she dropped her eyes, she included Marcia in her glance. They had already looked at each other without any sign of recognition. "Come, mother! All right, now!"
Her mother left the horse's head, and, heavily ploughing back