As he waited, the mist blew off of the land; the gray of twilight was whisked away to a twilightland that is hidden in the heart of the forest. He found to his delight that the tree was even more impressive in the vivid morning light than it had been at night. It was not that the light actually got into it. Its branches were too thick and heavy for that. It still retained its air of eternal secrecy, an impression that it knew great mysteries that a thousand philosophers would give their lives to learn. He was constantly awed by the size of it. He guessed its circumference as about twenty-five feet. The great lower limbs were themselves like massive tree trunks. Its top surpassed by fifty feet any pine in the vicinity.
As he watched, the sun came up, gleaming first on its tall spire. It slowly overtook it. The dusk of its green lightened. Bruce was not a particularly imaginative man; but the impression grew that this towering tree had an answer for some great question in his own heart,—a question that he had never been able to shape into words. He felt that it knew the wholly profound secret of life.
After all, it could not but have such knowledge. It was so incredibly old; it had seen so much. His mind flew back to some of the dramas of human life that had been enacted in its shade, and his imagination could picture many more. His own father had lain here dead, shot down by a murderer concealed in the distant thicket. It had beheld his own wonder when he had found the still form lying in the moonlight; it had seen his mother's grief and terror. Wilderness dramas uncounted had been enacted beneath it. Many times the mountain lion had crept into its dark branches. Many times the bear had grunted beneath it and reached up to write a challenge with his claws in its bark. The eyes of Tuft-ear the lynx had gleamed from its very top, and the old bull-elk had filed off his velvet on the sharp edges of the bark. It had seen savage battles between the denizens of the wood; the deer racing by with the wolf pack in pursuit. For uncounted years it had stood aloft, above all the madness and bloodshed and passion that are the eternal qualities of the wilderness, somber, stately, unutterably aloof.
It had known the snows. When the leaves fell and the wind came out of the north, it would know them again. For the snow falls for a depth of ten feet or more over most of Trail's End. For innumerable winters its limbs had been heaped with the white load, the great branches bending beneath it. The wind made faint sounds through its branches now, but would be wholly silent when the winter snows weighted the limbs. He could picture the great, white giant, silent as death, still keeping its vigil over the snow-swept wilderness.
Bruce felt a growing awe. The great tree seemed so wise, it gave him such a sense of power. The winds had buffeted it in vain. It had endured the terrible cold of winter. Generation after generation of the creatures who moved on the face of the earth had lived their lives beneath it; they had struggled and mated and fought their battles and felt their passions, and finally they had died; and still it endured,—silent, passionless, full of thoughts. Here was real greatness. Not stirring, not struggling, not striving; only standing firm and straight and impassive; not taking part, but only watching, knowing no passion but only strength,—ineffably patient and calm.
But it was sad too. Such knowledge always brings sadness. It had seen too much to be otherwise. The pines are never cheerful trees, like the apple that blossoms in spring, or the elm whose leaves shimmer in the sunlight; and this great monarch of all the pines was sad as great music. In this quality, as well as in its strength, it was the symbol of the wilderness itself. But it was more than that. It was the Great Sentinel, and in its unutterable impassiveness it was the emblem and symbol of even mightier powers. Bruce's full wisdom had not yet come to him, so he couldn't name these powers. He only knew that they lived far and far above the world and, like the tree itself, held aloof from all the passion of Eve and the blood-lust of Cain. Like the pine itself, they were patient, impassive, and infinitely wise.
He felt stilled and calmed himself. Such was its influence. And he turned with a start when he saw Linda in the doorway.
Her face was calm too in the morning light. Her dark eyes were lighted. He felt a curious little glow of delight at the sight of her.
"I've been talking to the pine—all the morning," he told her.
"But it won't talk to you," she answered. "It talks only to the stars."