‘What do you think of the window?—we’ve done it before, Carin. Better than groping down stairs and passages blocked with lumber.’
‘I’m ready,’ she said, and caught at her skirts by instinct to prove her readiness on the spot.
A drop of a dozen feet or so from the French window to a flower—bed was not very difficult. Her father had taught her how to jump, besides the how of many other practical things. She leaped as lightly as her brother, never touching earth with her hands; and rising from the proper contraction of the legs in taking the descent, she quoted her father: ‘Mean it when you’re doing it.’
‘For no enemy’s shot is equal to a weak heart in the act,’
Chillon pursued the quotation, laying his hand on her shoulder for a sign of approval. She looked up at him.
They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen by heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the change to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether of the clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was uncertain. Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been thought.
‘You remember everything of father,’ Carinthia said. ‘We both do,’ said Chillon.
She pressed her brother’s arm. ‘We will. We will never forget anything.’
Beyond the firwood light was visibly the dawn’s. Half-way down the ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water. It lay on the grass like a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile above. Their childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light, which was neither dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and dwarf growth and grass austerely, not deepening or confusing them. They wound their way by borders of crag, seeing in a dell below the mouth of the idle mine begirt with weedy and shrub-hung rock, a dripping semi-circle. Farther up they came on the flat juniper and crossed a wet ground-thicket of whortleberry: their feet were in the moist moss among sprigs of heath; and a great fir-tree stretched his length, a peeled multitude of his dead fellows leaned and stood upright in the midst of scattered fire-stained members, and through their skeleton limbs the sheer precipice of slate-rock of the bulk across the chasm, nursery of hawk and eagle; wore a thin blue tinge, the sign of warmer light abroad.
‘This way, my brother!’ cried Carinthia, shuddering at a path he was about to follow.