"Well, I suppose you'll please yourself; but I won't have you thinking you've done this for my sake."
"I'm doing it for its own," he said, and spoke the truth, for in opposing his design, Clara had shown him all its beauty.
A year later, as he strode upward amid high-growing bracken, on that Saturday in June, he saw the same beauty, and it was undimmed, untarnished by labour and disappointment. The joy of knowing had been Alexander's all his life, and he had suffered sincerely at the discovery that most boys were dull to its delight, and spent their energies in escaping it. He had lived through some haggard months in trying to lure them with careful morsels, but he had ended by administering learning like medicine and under no disguise. But if here he felt himself cheated, there still lived and grew in him the early belief that in all he did and was he would be helping to fashion men, and, as he stood to give a lesson, he knew that the character of Alexander Rutherford was of more importance to these indifferent listeners than the words of Virgil. There was a cause for humility, and an inspiration, and if, in that first year, Alexander watched his soul and his thoughts overmuch, it was but the fault of his earnestness and his youth, and, outside his work, he was not given to self-analysis, that frequent offspring of self-pity. He was not sorry for himself: the brooding time of his boyhood was past, and now, even when anxiety had its claws in him, and he hurried home from school in fear of what he should find, he was conscious of an underflow of happiness as ceaseless as the streams he loved, whose voices were always with him as he followed the track his own feet had made. The sound came in changing volume through the curtain of the mist as though, behind that grey wrapping, doors were opened and then shut. On these days of dripping quiet, the water cried, but there were others when it chuckled between its babbling sentences, or roared in its fury to reach the sea.
The thin figure of trouble might walk with Alexander and lie beside him when he slept, but it could not rob him of content. Roused in the night by the opening of a door and stealthy feet on the stairs, he would pull on his clothes and follow his father into the darkness, and hardly regret his bed when the freshness of falling rain met his cheek, or the night smell of flowers assailed him; or, when he waited in the kitchen while the coals slipped in the fireplace and lost their red, and he strained his ears for a voice or a footstep, they were comforted by the singing of the larches. At those times, when he could not read, he made a comrade of Theresa, who looked down from the mantelpiece. A new picture of her stood there, with her hair upturned, and a smile that had no tiresome permanence: it came and went, he thought, according to her mood or his, and always the eyes looked at him with friendship. He would nod to her as he filled his pipe, and be glad of her companionship. He spoke to her sometimes, but his thoughts never went to Radstowe and made her solid. That would have been to spoil his vague conception of a girl who gave all he wanted and asked for nothing, who was there when he desired her and absent when he chose, who was no more and no less real than he would have her be; and when Edward Webb wrote of his Theresa, it was of another than this pictured girl that Alexander thought: it was of the spoiled child of a fond father, fixed by him in a false pose of genius, and unrelated to the sexless being who looked and smiled at him on lonely nights, and was as fine, and free, and formless as the wind.
Alexander walked far that day, and came back with the stars. His steps were loud on the stony path, and through the soft and palpable darkness he heard the stirring of the creatures in the henhouse and the dog's welcoming bark.
There was peace in the kitchen. His father and mother sat close together before the small wood fire, and the lamp, lighting the book from which he read to her, strengthened the colour of her hair. The murmuring voice stopped as Alexander entered, and the book was closed. He felt intrusive, out of season, like one who has come upon lovers unawares.
"There's a letter for you," said Clara, and rose to put food on the table. "Is it from Edward Webb?"
"Yes."
It was not the usual bulky package: the envelope held no verse for Alexander's criticism, but a thin sheet of paper, hardly covered. He read the letter, walked into the yard, and back again.
"His wife's dead," he said.