CHAPTER XIV
Hugh sat in his great carved chair, his hands laid out across the bulky arms, his head bent forward a little so that his eyes encompassed all the restless beauty of the fire. After nightfall, when the wind began to shake the cabin, he had built up the fire, and its light now fought ruddily against the whiteness of the moon. Hugh had not lighted his lamp, nor let Bella light it, but he told her to make some strong coffee and keep it hot on the stove. “When Sylvie comes in,” he had said, “she’ll be exhausted. We’ll give her a hot drink and send her to bed, eh, Bella! The foolish child!” This had been said softly, but with a wild, half-vacant look which Bella could not meet.
It was her belief that Pete and Sylvie had gone, not to return that night or any other night. In a desperate, still fashion she guarded this flaming conviction, peering up from long contemplations of it to learn whether there flickered any light of torment on Hugh’s face. But all day, after the queer blankness of face and eyes with which he had first received her news of Sylvie’s disappearance, he had been alternately gay and tranquil. All morning he had mended his boat, and in the afternoon he had cleaned his gun; and whenever he could cajole Bella into being his audience, he had talked. His talk was all of Sylvie, of her pretty childishness, her sweet, wayward ways, of her shyness, her timidity; and later, when supper was cleared away and he had throned himself in the center of that familiar circle of firelight, he had dropped his beautiful voice to a lower key and had boasted of Sylvie’s love for him.
Bella sat on a big log sawed to the height of a low stool. She sat with her face bent down between her hands as though she were saving her eyes from the fire, but those bright, devoted eyes never left Hugh’s face, though sometimes they made of it but a blurred image set in the broken crystals of her tears.
Thus, together, they heard the first rumble of the storm and saw the white squares of moonlight wiped from the floor as with a dark cloth. Next, the windows seemed to jump at them and jump away. “Lightning!” said Hugh. “She’ll be afraid! Will Pete be able to comfort her? Will he, Bella?” Then, because she took courage to look into his face, she saw that his heart had been burnt all day, but that his faith, stronger than his fear, had kept the flame smothered, almost below his consciousness.
While the storm raged across their roof, beat a brutal tattoo close above their deafened heads, pushed at the door, drove a pool of water under the threshold, Hugh walked up and down, to and fro, from fire to window, from door to wall, but not fast, rather with a sort of stateliness. Sometimes he looked sidelong at Bella’s expressionless, listening face. At last he forced himself back to the chair and sat there, mechanically polishing the barrel of his gun, but his tongue still spoke the saga of illusion. It stopped when the storm dropped into the bottomless silence of dawn. Then there was only the dripping from their eaves. Hugh sat there, very white, his gun laid across his lap. Bella, as white, lifted her face.
“They’re coming,” she whispered, and got stiffly to her feet.
Hugh moved back into his chair, turning sidewise and gathering himself as though for a spring. His nervous hands clutched at his gun. Upon the silence the door opened, and Pete and Sylvie came into the room. Wet and storm-beaten and beautiful they were, with scarlet cheeks.
Pete came quickly over to Hugh’s chair; he let fall his pack and gazed resolutely down at his brother’s face.