"I can't bring you that, I'm afraid."
"No—oh no!"
"But I might have one myself." He was pleased with the idea.
"It wouldn't be the same."
"I should tell you about it."
She agreed that would be much better than nothing, and with his endless wish to please her he determined that he would have something to tell.
His days were passed in alternate fortnights of travelling about the country with samples of ugly things incidental to the dressmaking art, and of conveying the same packages from shop to shop of his native town. He was to be seen, a small shrinking figure, sitting in a cab with a pile of cardboard boxes opposite him, and his face turned to the windows, looking through one and then the other for sights that accorded better with his nature than these boxes, on which, when the cab jolted, he laid a hand lest they should slip. The fortnights at home were more endurable than the others, for he returned at evening to his family and his books, and during the day he had many a fair thing to bring healing to his pain, for always he worked with a queer gnawing at the breast. This was not his rightful work, and he did it ill, and, because he had a great love of beauty and fitness in all things, he suffered. But he was driven on to his mighty, ineffectual efforts by the needs of his wife and little daughters, and as he looked out of the musty cab he would see comforting white clouds floating behind red roofs, the river that found its way into the city's heart, and the tall masts of sailing-ships. But the following fortnight was one of exile and of racket—strange towns full of unfriendly faces, dull hotels with texts on the bedroom walls, and the noise and dirt of trains. A book of verses in each pocket was then his solace, and, two by two, the poets journeyed with him, gilding the grime of cities. Sometimes, as the train carried him on, with, to his imagination, something remorseless and inimical to him in its energy, he would look up from his book and stare longingly at the country which the fast wheels spurned; but on his lonely Saturday and Sunday, when he was stranded in some town, he seldom had energy to obey adventure's whisper, and explore farther than a quiet place where he could read, and write his daily letter to his wife. But, Theresa having a hunger for adventure, her father had decided that at least she should be satisfied by proxy, and he had sought the mountains.
He had seen them once, in boyhood, on a holiday, and their wonder had remained with him like a treasure. Why should he not add another to his little store, another gem to shine in the dark parts of his life, and throw some of its colour and glory on Theresa? That should be his adventure; he would find the mountains and roam about them, and look fearfully down their rocky sides, and shudder at the thought of falling, and stock his memory with things to tell Theresa.
So on the afternoon of Friday he left the little station by the seashore, and tramped inland, following the road for a while until, as he turned a corner, he saw the blue shapes of hills, shadowy but strong, mysterious, lifting themselves to heaven, yet compact of the solid earth of man. He stood still, drinking in beauty like hill water, and suffering a glorious new pain. It was more than beauty that he gazed on; it was the most perfect expression of what man's hopes should be, and the discovery shook him. He walked on. Above the hills the sky was stretched in a faint blue shade that swooned into a white, and here, within a stone's throw of him, the fingers of a chestnut-tree had dipped themselves in dyes.
He tasted joy as he went, first across fields and then slowly up the long flank of a hill; it was all joy until, careless or ignorant of the menace in the clouds that were beginning to circle about the summits, he found himself shut in by a thick wall of mist.