“Oh, don’t!” she breathed; as though protesting against sacrilege.
“Gee! Was I off the blamed key, again?” he asked.
“No, no,” she answered, the wonder-light dying from her face as the spell dissolved. “It’s all right,” she went on, seeing his chagrin. “It’s all right. I’m sorry I was cross. You were so busy with the boat you didn’t get a chance to notice what a magic lake this is we’ve come into; or you couldn’t have broken the charm. Look! Can’t you see Siegfried running through the hemlocks, on his way to Mime’s cave? And that band of dead gray tamaracks down there with the single flaming maple in the foreground! Isn’t it like an army of tree-ghosts with the red standard in its van?”
So she prattled on, seeking to keep him from seeing how he had jarred upon her mood. But he knew, none the less. And he realized that there were times, even on vacation, when one must be silent. But what those times might be he could not guess. Nor did he dare ask.
When next day they climbed the Crags and looked down on the gleaming lake with the scattered green of its islands, she looked at him in eager expectation of his delight. He surveyed the lake in stony silence. Then let his gaze run expressionless over the lines of mountain ramparts far to southward that rose in ever higher swells until the farthest was half lost in haze. No word did he speak. He felt he was rising to the occasion. If one must not speak on Eldon Lake at sunset it followed that one should be equally reticent on the Crags by the brighter light of morning.
“Say something!” she commanded, keenly disappointed at his apathy.
“Noo York must be somewheres in a line with that biggest mountain over there to the south,” he hazarded; glad to learn that the present was, for some reason, not one of those mysterious speechless occasions.
In the evenings, as a rule, they went to the “open camp.” There in the big three-sided log shed with its evergreen-lined walls and its deep, blanket-covered floor of soft balsam boughs, a dozen or more people were wont to congregate by night. In front of the shed blazed a Homeric camp fire that tempered the mountain chilliness and made the whole place light as day. The young people,—Desirée and Jack among them,—usually spent the short evenings in singing and story-telling. Caleb felt less at his ease here than anywhere else. For the young folk talked a language of Youth, that he did not understand. The stories he found somewhat mild, and the point of several of them he failed to catch. A sense of strangeness prevented him from joining in the songs. He had had no youth; save that which Desirée had imparted to him. And he knew himself out of place among the carefree, jolly crowd. It made him feel ponderous, aged, taciturn. The easy laughter of youth only perplexed him. His sole joy during these open camp evenings was to lie in a shadowed corner of the “lean-to” and watch the firelight play on Desirée’s bright face; to hear her infectious laugh; to see how popular she was among the youngsters of her own age. So long as she did not seek to ease his boredom by dragging him into the talk, he was well content to lie thus and drink the delight of her fresh loveliness. When she made him talk, he straightway became pompously shy; and managed to convey his sense of acute discomfort to everyone about him.
Altogether, the Adirondacks, for perhaps the first time since that wonderland’s discovery, had found a visitor who did not speedily become a worshipper.