Or other nights, when the sky was friendly, he would place Inga in the bottom of the canoe, well cushioned and balanced at the stern, and would send the black waters foaming behind them for long, vigorous hours, while he tired the physical rebellion that lay in his aching appetite. They spoke rarely, each of a taciturn temperament, well content to be absorbed into the expanding night with its solitary sounds. Sometimes they would return for a few hours’ sleep snatched before the coming of the day, and sometimes they would linger for a glorious moment of sketching in the fugitive maiden hour of the dawn. Then he would come back to camp, worn with weariness and the inner struggle, to fall into a heavy slumber, drifting into insensibility with Inga’s hand clasped in his. When he awoke beyond high noon, she would be sitting on the steps, her chin in her hand, gazing out at Catamount, where the storms came rolling down to whip the lake. By some strange instinct, the moment his eyes opened she seemed to feel his gaze on her and sprang up immediately, coming lightly to his side, her skirts and silken blouse all aflutter with the freshness of the morning breeze. In those long reaches of the night, when he threw all his weight on her slender strength, she seemed the happiest and the closest to him. What weariness she herself felt she hid from him, ready for a foray into the night at any moment, tender, gentle, and healing in her touch, which at times knew, in a sudden gust of emotion, how to still the beating restlessness that held him. He loved her profoundly and yet he seldom showed it in a spoken word—the reticence of her own nature laying its spell of silence over his.
XXXVII
Once possessed with the thought of change, Dangerfield wished to be off at once. He had lived so keenly in the region of sensations these last months, that only sensations new and unmastered could answer the craving of the artist, which had found a rebirth in the new life of the senses. The green unanimity of the July woods and the brazen expanse of the heated sky tormented his eye. He felt a longing for the region of the sea, whose moods have alone infinite variety, ever stirring, changing and changeless.
The next night, prepared for departure with the morning, they sat on the steps of their camp, hand in hand.
“When I’ve made up my mind to go, I can’t bear to wait,” he said, all at once. “Are you like that?”
She shook her head.
“I love to stick to the things I know,” she said softly.
The day had gone down in stillness and lassitude; the night hung over them from the hollow bowl of the sky. Above the sharpened silhouette of Catamount, crouching against the horizon, the sinking bulb of the moon, like some molten mass, seemed burning sullenly. By some odd effect of rising mists, the red reflection fell on the glassed lake in a single glowing tongue of flame. But, even as they watched, a stirring in the air brought a rippling, spreading dance of moonbeams across the waters to their feet. A few leaves whispered above their heads.