Sometimes Harry King rode with Amalia where the wind had swept the way bare, toward the bend in the trail, and would bring her back glowing and happy from the exercise. 306 Sometimes when the storms were fierce without, and he suspected Larry longed for his old-time seclusion, he sat in the cabin. At these times Amalia redeemed her promise to teach him French. Few indeed were the books she had for help in giving these lessons. One little unbound book of old sonnets and songs and a small pamphlet of more modern poems that her father had loved, were all, except his Bible, which, although it was in Polish, contained copious annotations in her father’s hand in French, and between the leaves of which lay loose pages filled with concise and plainly written meditations of his own.
These Amalia loved and handled with reverence, and for Harry King they had such vital interest that he learned the more rapidly that he might know all they contained. He no longer wondered at her power and breadth of thought. As he progressed he found in them a complete system of ethics and religious faith. Their writer seemed to have drawn from all sources intrinsically vital truths, and separated them from their encumbering theologic verbiage and dogma, and had traced them simply through to the great “Sermon on the Mount.” In a few pages this great man had comprised the deepest logic, and the sweetest and widest theology, enough for all the world to live by, and enough to guide nations in safety, if only all men might learn it.
It was sufficient. He knew Amalia better, and more deeply he reverenced and loved her. He no longer quivered when he heard her mention the “Virgin” or when she spoke of the “Sweet Christ.” It was not what his old dogmatic ancestry had fled from as “Popery.” It was her simple, direct faith in the living Christ, which gave her eyes their clear, far-seeing vision, and her heart its quick, responsive 307 intuition and understanding. She might speak of the convent where she had been protected and loved, and taught many things useful and good, other than legends and doctrines. She had learned how, through her father’s understanding and study, to gather out the good, and leave the rest, in all things.
And Harry learned his French. He was an apt scholar, and Larry fell in line, for he had not forgotten the scholastic Latin and French of his college days. He liked, indeed, to air his French occasionally, although his accent was decidedly English, but his grammar was good and a great help to Harry. Madam Manovska also enjoyed his efforts and suggested that when they were all together they should converse in the French alone, not only that they might help Harry, but also that they might have a common language. It was to her and Amalia like their native tongue, and their fluency for a time quite baffled Larry, but he was determined not to be beaten, and when Harry faltered and refused to go on, he pounded him on the back, and stirred him up to try again.
Although Amalia’s convent training had greatly restricted her knowledge of literature other than religious, her later years of intimate companionship with her father, and her mother’s truly remarkable knowledge of the classics and fearless investigation of the modern thought of her day, had enlarged Amalia’s horizon; while her own vivid imagination and her native geniality caused her to lighten always her mother’s more somber thought with a delicate and gracious play of fancy that was at once fascinating and delightful. This, and Harry’s determination to live to the utmost in these weeks of respite, made him at times almost gay.
Most of all he reveled in Amalia’s music. Certain melodies that she said her father had made he loved especially, and sometimes she would accompany them with a plaintive chant, half singing and half recitation, of the sonnet which had inspired them, and which had been woven through them. It was at these times that Larry listened with his elbows on his knees and his eyes fixed on the fire, and Harry with his eyes on Amalia’s face, while the cabin became to him glorified with a light, no longer from the flames, but with a radiance like that which surrounded Dante’s Beatrice in Paradise.
Amalia loved to please Larry Kildene. For this reason, knowing the joy he would take in it, and also because she loved color and light and joy, and the giving of joy, she took the gorgeous silk he had brought her, and made it up in a fashion of her own. Down in the cities, she knew, women were wearing their gowns spread out over wide hoops, but she made the dress as she knew they were worn at the time Larry had lived among women and had seen them most.
The bodice she fitted closely and shaped into a long point in front, and the skirt she gathered and allowed to fall in long folds to her feet. The sleeves she fitted only to her elbows, and gathered in them deep lace of her own making––lace to dream about, and the creation of which was one of those choice things she had learned of the good sisters at the convent. About her neck she put a bertha, kerchiefwise, and pinned it with a brooch of curiously wrought gold. Larry, “the discreet and circumspect liar,” thought of the emerald brooch she had brought him to sell for her, and knowing how it would glow and blend 309 among the changing tints of the silk, he fetched it to her, explaining that he could not sell it, and that the bracelet had covered all she had asked him to purchase for her, and some to spare.
She thanked him, and fastened it in her bodice, and handed the other to her mother. “There, mamma, when we have make you the dress Sir Kildene have brought you, you must wear this, for it is beautiful with the black. Then we will have a fête. And for the fête, Sir Kildene, you must wear the very fine new clothes you have buy, and Mr. ’Arry will carry on him the fine new clothing, and so will we be all attire most splendid. I will make for you all the music you like the best, and mamma will speak then the great poems she have learned by head, and Sir Kildene will tell the story he can relate so well of strange happenings. Oh, it will be a fine, good concert we will make here––and you, Mr. ’Arry, what will you do?”