He dropped his chin on his hand. After a while he could hear the rustling of the water, again, the noise of the horses, grinding the grass with their powerful jaws.
“Now, Paul, tell me just what’s in your mind this very minute.”
“I . . . a great many things.”
“I want to know exactly what you’re seeing and thinking and hearing.”
“How all the gold and red and purple from the trees and the bushes floats in the stream there. It never is drowned, Nancy. Nothing that’s real seems to be worthwhile. Do you see?”
“I don’t see. Why do you look at the trees in the water, and not on the bank, just opposite, and all around us?”
“Well, those trees will lose all their leaves the first strong wind that comes along. But their images in the water . . . you see where the still water is, around the curve? . . . they stand in the water taller and bigger and brighter than they really are. You can see the blue of the sky, too, and a bright streak of cloud all filled with sun. That’s not real, so you can look at that picture in the water and it will never die. It’s like a thought. You see that, Nancy?”
She nodded and muttered something.
“There is no wind to go moaning and mourning through the branches that are reflected there, Nan. That’s important, I think. Now, while I look at that picture, I’m hearing all the humming and buzzing and whirring and singing of the insects. The hornets, and the wasps, and the bumblebees and the bees, and the crickets and the flies, and the grasshoppers. They aren’t real noises. If you speak, you put out all those sounds. Well, you see how it is. You just sit close to the ground with your eyes and your ears open, and you gather things in. All those things die. They’re singing just for this autumn only. Two days together the sounds will never be the same singing exactly. So it’s better to shut your eyes on things as they are and see them as you want them to be.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” said Nancy briskly. “I’ve told you that you’re in danger of your life and you start in thinking about reflections in the water, and humming bees. I’m finished, Paul. I’ll never try to do anything for you again. I just suspected that it would be like this.”
“You want me to go away,” he said, looking deep in the quivering beauty that lay in golden towers inlaid with blue in the river. “Well, I would have to leave Ashur if I went.”
“A man can live without a horse,” she said. “Besides, you’ll have your memory of Ashur, you know. And memories and thoughts . . . they’re all that you really care about.”
He was so earnestly intent that he failed to see the sarcasm.
“Oh, no, they’re not . . . not always, I mean. There’s Ashur. I can’t use him for a starting point and go on imagining finer horses. He’s perfect. He just fills my mind. I can’t imagine him made differently.”
“Perhaps you can’t,” said the girl. “Well, Ashur would go with you if you whistled to him.”
He shook his head. “Then I would be leaving good old Jack.”
“I think good old Jack would follow you, too, Paul.”
“Suppose that I had Jack and Ashur . . . of course I couldn’t have either of them . . . but just supposing . . . then there’d still be you left behind me.”
“I?” said Nancy in an oddly altered voice. “That would be hard for you, of course.”
He was perfectly serious, still. “Even if I ran away,” he went on, “I would have to come slipping back to try to see you. Do you know why I want school to begin? So that I can see you every day. You are so beautiful, Nancy.”
“Paul!” cried a breathless voice. “I don’t see why you’re saying this.”
He stared gloomily at the lovely waters. “Oh, I know that you don’t care. But you’ve started me confessing. Do you mind if I go on about you?”
“No,” she said, “perhaps you’d better. You don’t simply hate me for being so blunt?”
“Hate you? What an idea! Why, Nancy, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I want to see you so much that I almost jump up out of bed to go and stand under your window. Sometimes when I think of you I feel . . . I feel . . .” He became silent.
“You were saying,” she prompted in a faint voice, “when you think about me, Paul . . .”
“I feel the way a dog sounds when it bays the moon.”
He laughed a little. Nancy did not laugh.
“I think of your mother and your father, Nancy. They have you every day.”
“And they have no other child. And I’m only a girl.”
“You?” cried Torridon. “You? Only a girl? Why, Nancy,” he went on, carried away, and turning upon her, “you’re the most beautiful thing in the world, and the sweetest . . . although you frighten me terribly, you’re so cold and grave . . .” He stopped in mid-gesture, mid-speech.
Great, bright, glistening tears were running rapidly down Nancy’s face.
He could not believe it. But most of all it was wonderful that she did not try to conceal them. She simply kept on looking straight at him with wide eyes. As if she were looking through him, and not at him. It was like the falling of proud towers, like the rushing of great walls and the battlements to the earth, so that a city was revealed in all its undefended beauty.
“I suppose you’re finished,” said Nancy.
“Oh, Nancy,” he stammered, “I never meant to hurt you. I never dreamed, no matter what I said, you’d ever care. Tell me what I’ve done, and how I can make up for it? I wouldn’t care if I had to work on my knees all the rest of my life.”
And he fell on his knees before her as he spoke. His heart was aching terribly. But he could not tell whether it was joy or sorrow that swelled it so greatly.
“I don’t want you to work on your knees,” said Nancy. “But I think you ought to kiss me, Paul.”
XII
They went back down the road, side-by-side, slowly, their horses close. Outstretching branches brushed at their faces. The moist odor of decaying leaves was pungent from the woods, and here and there were faintly tangled suggestions of wood smoke, drawn from far away and drooping down again, to be caught among the trees.
The day was wearing late, past the heat of the afternoon; the sun in the west was turning gold, but they rode in the shadow of the valley. All about them the autumn colors that had looked like scarlet enamel, gold leaf, and burnished Tyrian purple under the higher sun, now were filmed across with delicacy. But the heads of the trees lifted into a more brilliant beauty than ever before, yet harmonizing more, drawn from one into another by the golden softness of the light.
It was, in a way, like passing through water and looking up to the day. It was like riding through thin winter mist, except that not winter chill, but summer warmth was above them.
As they drew down the broadening valley, they looked from a gap in the trees and saw a house in the distance. All its western windows flared like polished metal; blue-white smoke rose kindly above it. And suddenly the two lovers looked at one another with inexpressible tenderness and joy.
“What shall I do?” he said. “Tell me, Nancy. You think better than I do.”
“Make a small pack of your clothes tonight as soon as you are in your room alone. Then, when the house is still, come out and to my house.”
“Nancy, Nancy, what do you mean?”
“Are you frightened?”
“I’m trying not to be,” he said. “I want to be a hero for you, Nancy darling.”
“You will be,” she said slowly, looking at him half critically, half smiling. “You always will be when the danger really comes. But you’ll come?”
“If you told me to ride down into the river, I’d never dream of disobeying.”
They laughed together—she softly, he on a broken note.