It was this incongruity that struck Chip first of all. Not that there were any of the unapproachable grandeurs of the Alps or the Selkirks, nor anything that towered or terrified or overawed. All the hilly woodland was smiling and friendly—but remote. Man might buy a piece of ground and camp on it; but if he had sensibilities he would remain conscious of an essence that eluded him, the real thing—withdrawn. He could be on the spot, but he could never be of it—not any more than he could give his dwelling the air of springing from the soil.
Chip noticed that, too—the intrusive aspect of any kind of roof that man could make to cover him, unless it were a wigwam. Emery Bland had tried to temper this resentment of the landscape to what was not indigenous to itself by making the lines of his shelter as simple and as straight as possible. He was from the first apologetic to the Spirit of the Mountain, as who would say, "Hang it all, you've tempted me here, but I'll outrage you as little as I can." So he perched his long, white house, Italian in style if it had style at all, on the top of a knoll whence he could look far into green depths, with nothing in the way of excrescence but a tile-paved open-air dining-room at one end, and a shady spot of similar construction at the other, getting his effects from proportion. Something in the way of lawn and garden he was obliged to have, and Mrs. Bland had insisted on a pergola. He fought the pergola for a year or two, but Mrs. Bland had had her way. A country house without a pergola, she said, was something she had never heard of. A sine quâ non was what she called it. So beyond the square of lawn with its border of flowers the pergola stretched its row of trim white wooden Doric pillars, while over the latticed roof and through it hung bine and vine, grape, wistaria, and kadsu. Below the pergola the land broke to a brook that gurgled through copses of alder, tangles of wild raspberry, and clumps of blueberry and goldenrod, carrying the waters of the lake to the Ashuelot, which bore them to the Connecticut, which swept them southward, till quietly, and almost as unobserved by the human eye as when they rose in the bosom of the hills, they fell into the sea.
As there was no other guest, Chip was allowed to do as he pleased. What he pleased was chiefly to sit in the pergola, where the mauve petals of the wistaria were dropping about him, and fill his gaze with the mystic peace of the mountain. On Sunday morning the three Blands went to church, leaving him in sole possession of this green, cool world, with its quality of interpenetrating purity. He took a volume of some ambassador's "Recollections" from his host's shelves of Victorian memoirs; but he never opened it. He also took a cigar, but he didn't smoke. He only looked—looked without effort, almost without consciousness—up into the high wonderlands of peace, whence whatever was brooding there seemed to steal into his soul and cleanse it. It was this sense of cleansing that he carried back as a sort of possession to New York—that and the fact imparted by Mrs. Bland during the afternoon, regarded as unimportant, and yet retained, that Lily Bland was not their niece.
He returned to Mountain Brook twice during that summer, and in June of the following year. It was during this last visit that the girl who had been to him hitherto no more than the living element of the background gave him the impression that she was seeking an opportunity to speak to him.
Throughout Saturday it had been an impression almost too faint to be recorded; but it was significant to him that on Sunday morning she didn't go to church. She shared the house with him, therefore, a fact of which he was scarcely aware till he saw her in possession of the pergola. With a book in her hand she had established herself in a chair not far from that which by preference he had made his own. The act roused his curiosity; but when he, too, had taken a book and strolled out to join her, she didn't keep him in suspense.
She closed her novel as he approached, looking up at him with simple directness. "I've something to tell you."
Behind the attention he gave to these words he registered the observation that when you looked at her—which he had rarely done—you saw she was pretty. Her white skin had a luminosity like that of satin, and the mouth was sweet with a timid, apologetic tenderness. The glances one got from her were almost too fleeting to show the color of the eyes, but he knew they must be blue. Her hair had been striking to him from the first, chiefly because it was of that hue for which there is no English word, but which the French call cendré—ashen—something between flaxen and brown, but with no relation to either—that might have been bleached by a "treatment" only for its unmistakable gleam of life. It waved naturally over the brows from a central parting, and massed itself into a great coil behind. She was dressed simply in white linen, with a belt of "watered" blue silk, and neat, pointed cuffs of the same material.
Instinctively he knew that what she had to tell him must be important, for otherwise she would not have come out of the shy depths into which, like the Spirit of the Mountain, her life seemed to be withdrawn. What it could be he was unable even to guess at. He smiled, however, and, taking a casual tone so as not to strike too strong a note at first, he said, as he sat down, "Have you?"
She continued to speak with the same simple directness. "It's about some one you used to know."
He grew more grave. "Indeed? I should hardly have supposed that you could know any one—whom I used to know?"