“There’s your clothes!” she cried with the voice of Deborah. “A haley old mess that house is already, without ye! What did I say to ’em? Never you mind. They know more ’n they did. The fear o’ the Lord’s the beginnin’ o’ wisdom. I said what was vouched to me that hour. I bit a piece out o’ the roof!”
At all events she had determined the situation, and from now forward there were three in the house. It seemed incredible. Miles passed the first days in a dream, a revolution of thoughts and habits. To have this shining guest come and go upon the stairs, or sit at table like a mortal, or read beside the window on rainy afternoons, or move at night overhead in Tony’s chamber, not only threw all indoor routine into the bright confusion of drama, but changed the very air upon the hills, the light on the waters. The valley was visited, like the plains of Mamre.
And even when this earliest wonder passed, and they began to live as though always under the same roof, he could not find the old bearings. The change had scattered, tossed, and revived his faculties, as haymakers pitch a mouldy windrow abroad in the sun. By an odd transfer, she who rightfully should radiate all that was new and strange, had slipped at once into customary life, established, familiar, like a thing of childhood; and when they walked the shore, dug in the garden side by side, or tended lamps in the early evening, it was she who always had belonged there: all other things—trees he had seen grow, rocks he knew in every line and fissure, paths he could follow running in the dark—had altered as after long absence or some new gift of sight.
It was a happy, incomprehensible time; none the less happy, although he felt somehow that vague elements were weaving into danger, that an unknown thread guided them in a maze. Perhaps it was only that their delight would keep no even level, but daily mounted; perhaps that in their simplest talk, when their friendship seemed the oldest, there fell a silence, a chance word, a shock of difference or agreement, a flash of bygone things, to show how unerringly their lines converged, across what gulfs.
One afternoon, when summer had glowed and ripened, they revisited Kilmarnock Brook. Alders flanked the bend through a long meadow, mapping it distantly as a curved wall of darker green, and losing it, to near approach, in a cool, low wood where grassy clearings wound so intricately that a stranger (unless he made the one plunge through tangle) might wander among leaves, see the oozy light quivering over them from below, and hear the invisible water sing like a stream of Tantalus. But Anna and Miles knew all these interlocked recesses, and, threading them in and out, had reached their own secret place,—an alder closet, where a tiny crescent of lawn curved round a pool. On a bank which ran smoothly into brown water, they sat a little apart, in shadow. Above them sunlight dappled the leaves, and day-flies danced in brief ecstasy; below, with a delicate breath of steeping earth and roots and brookmint, the water stole away silently, to take up its tinkling narrative round the next bend.
For a long time neither had spoken. Suddenly Miles laughed.
“Ophelia!”
She was looking past her open book, considering the pool.
“You needn’t call names,” she replied, without rousing. “Besides, I don’t know what you mean.”
“‘Read on this book!’” he scoffed. “The old chucklehead knew! No girl would ever read in one.”