She could endure neither his own look nor the mother's, and fled to her room. There she studied her face in the glass. It was all true. She was going to live, and she sickened at the thought. Again it was a time for tears and laughter.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE AWAKENING
THE white giant, sun-stricken, drooping languidly, crumbled and dissolved before their eyes. The air softened. The streams rushed full, the southern hillsides showed bare and gaunt.
In the lake cabin they felt aged by their imprisonment. It had been so long, so remote from the world rush. Like prisoners long confined, they were loath to leave a dungeon where life had been well ordered if not exhilarating. Benumbed in the first days of the change, they returned indoors to the soothing evenness of their six months' hibernation. They found those first changes unbelievable. Winter would surely go on forever; too mighty a jailer it was to be vanquished by a mere breath of honey and flowers. They stayed in to warn one another against false appearances.
But there came a day when, in the blaze of noontime, Ben Crider moved his chair out by the door and sang softly to the strains of his guitar. His eyes blinked in the sunlight as he sang, yet they did not fail to detect the signs of spring so plentiful about the clearing in bud and leaf and tiny grass shoot, even though patches of snow still lay in the shaded spots.
The woman who cooked came also to the door as Ben sang. He had spoken of her the winter through as "the woman," dimly perceiving her as a spirit that mumbled endless complainings as she toiled, for she was one who had been disillusioned by much cooking. She cooked acceptably, and Ben had burgeoned in the uncanny luxury of food prepared by another hand than his own, but he had given her little attention beyond discovering her opinion that cooking was a barren performance, since people perversely ate and thereby destroyed, and the thing must be done again endlessly. He had vaguely observed that this woman was not beautiful, and now, as she faced him with a sudden joviality in the spring sunshine, he saw that she could never have been beautiful. She beamed amicably on the balladist, and he, turning casual eyes on her, was stricken to dismayed silence; the tuneful praise of young love fainted on his lips as he stared, aghast, and his startled hand hushed the vibrant strings. A moment he looked, recovering from the shock. Then, in swift recoil, he grasped his chair and went resolutely out under the big hemlock, there to resume his song and his absent contemplation of Nature's awakening—his back to the cabin door. In this sensitive mood he wished not to incur again a vision that blighted song.
It was no longer disputable that spring was real; no baseless tradition, but an unfolding reality. Ben had divined it, and the other prisoners were not long in proving it.
One of them surveyed it in panic wonder, turning in upon herself to face the ordeal of enforced living. They wandered in the open, three of them, now, finding it good to feel the bare, elastic earth under their feet again, and prove the noiseless but sensational life of growing things all about them. They plucked buds to see their secret hearts, and exposed the roots of peeping herbs that had begun their strivings before the snow went.
When the sunny places had been dried and warmed, and were pulsing in their myriad hidden hearts, so that winter began to fade in their minds as some dream of night, they would penetrate the sunless depths of a narrow cañon where the snow yet lay deep and the stream was a mere choking of ice in a gorge.