“I’ll do all the neighboring.” Tony spoke sulkily as a boy. “Thought I asked you not to come?”
After this ripple of incident, the winter days once more fell stagnant, or at the best, moved on sluggish and imperceptible. Rain came at last, however, and thaws, and warm sea fogs devouring the snow more silently than either, and more swiftly. Then one by one, like spies of Nature stealing into the land, followed the slow and potent changes, yearly forgotten, yearly striking to the core of remembrance and delight. Hushing sounds of water rose from the gullies on still mornings; brown knolls, from day to day, heaved and widened; the ice moved out to sea, a white and broken flotilla, while the river cleared again to shining blue; snow forsook the hills, forsook the shore, and clung raggedly under the cedars in thick, worn plates of ice. Then, too, the earliest fly woke buzzing in the southern window, and at noon the house, with door swung wide, stood open to all the reviving sounds and nameless stirrings of the valley. Now and again, a stray cow gamboled ridiculously down the field, her bell clanking, her shoulder bearing a leathern scar where, all winter long, she had chafed her stanchion. And over the graves, the birch grew blurred above the hill.
In all this time the outcast made no attempt at his “neighboring;” and Miles, without understanding, accepted their alienation. Even pride, however, could not keep him from being lonely,—more than ever lonely, in these mild days and nights of spring. He wandered by himself, framing and rejecting plans, no less discontented with the present than sorely puzzled by the future.
One afternoon, when he had taken these perplexities for another airing, he fell as it were into an April daydream by the river, leaning both elbows on the quarter-deck rail. Along the verge, and scattered among the rotten planks, peeped the russet tops of young fiddle-head ferns, which to his brooding eyes seemed almost visibly to uncurl, as a kitten’s paws uncurl, intense with drowsy and voluptuous life. Pale blades of grass were tenderly thrusting upward from edges of the warm rocks. And yet a damp scent of last year’s leaves, that perished slowly in the hollows, sternly and wholesomely reminded him how the world cherishes to destroy, and destroys to cherish infinitely. Solemnity closed down upon him, while still a kind of beatific spell ran through his veins. For a long time, and for no cause, he recalled only the winter night when they had leaned together on the rail, watching.
By strong effort, at last, he denied this memory, repulsed this longing, and cleared the decks of his mind.
“I must go away.” He fell back on the promise doggedly. And the thought was like lead in his shoes, that once would have winged them. “As quick as summer comes, and Ella can tend lamps, I’m off. That’s the plain course—”
Voices were coming, at the first sound of which he sprang upright. Through the evergreen wall pierced the quick utterance of Tony, angrily imploring.
“Treat me this way, like dirt?” he was urging. “And all because a fellow likes you, and tells you so? Honestly, I mean it, Anna. And what right have I given you to think—”
“Right!” The girl’s voice also trembled, but as though with helpless fury. “What right have you to hunt and drive me like—like—Oh! And I was coming here just to be rid of you!”
“You can’t, my dear,” said the other, cajoling. “You can’t, and that’s a fact. Come now—”