"Are you cold?--say! Are you cold?--say!"--in a tone most provokingly made up of wonder and dulness. In vain Fleda answered him, that she was not very cold and would soon not be cold at all by that good fire;--the question came again, apparently in all its freshness, from the interrogator's mind,--"Are you cold?--say!--"
And silence and words, looking grave and laughing, were alike thrown away. Fleda shut her eyes at length and used the small remnant of her patience to keep herself quiet till she was called to breakfast. After breakfast she accepted the offer of her hostess to go up stairs and lie down till the cars were ready; and there got some real and much needed refreshment of sleep and rest.
It lasted longer than she bad counted upon. For the cars were not ready at eleven o'clock; the snow last night had occasioned some perplexing delays. It was not till near three o'clock that the often-despatched messenger to the dépôt brought back word that they might go as soon as they pleased. It pleased Mrs. Renney to be in a great hurry, for her baggage was in the cars she said, and it would be dreadful if she and it went different ways; so Fleda and her companion hastened down to the station house and choose their places some time before anybody else thought of coming. They had a long, very tiresome waiting to go through, and room for some uneasy speculations about being belated and a night journey. But Fleda was stronger now, and bore it all with her usual patient submission. At length, by degrees the people dropped in and filled the cars, and they get off.
"How early do you suppose we shall reach Greenfield?" said Fleda.
"Why we ought to get there between nine and ten o'clock, I should think," said her companion. "I hope the snow will hold up till we get there,"
Fleda thought it a hope very unlikely to be fulfilled. There were as yet no snow-flakes to be seen near by, but at a little distance the low clouds seemed already to enshroud every clump of trees and put a mist about every hill. They surely would descend more palpably soon.
It was pleasant to be moving swiftly on again towards the end of their journey, if Fleda could have rid herself of some qualms about the possible storm and the certain darkness; they might not reach Greenfield by ten o'clock; and she disliked travelling in the night at any time. But she could do nothing, and she resigned herself anew to the comfort and trust she had built upon last night. She had the seat next the window, and with a very sober kind of pleasure watched the pretty landscape they were flitting by--misty as her own prospects,--darkening as they?--no, she would not allow that thought. "'Surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God;' and I can trust him." And she found a strange sweetness in that naked trust and clinging of faith, that faith never tried never knows. But the breath of daylight was already gone, though the universal spread of snow gave the eye a fair range yet, white, white, as far as the view could reach, with that light misty drapery round everything in the distance and merging into the soft grey sky; and every now and then as the wind served, a thick wreath of white vapour came by from the engine and hid all, eddying past the windows and then skimming off away over the snowy ground from which it would not lift; a more palpable veil for a moment of the distant things,--and then broken, scattered, fragmentary, lovely in its frailty and evanishing. It was a pretty afternoon, but a sober; and the bare black solitary trees near hand which the cars flew by, looked to Fleda constantly like finger-posts of the past; and back at their bidding her thoughts and her spirits went, back and forward, comparing, in her own mental view, what had once been so gay and genial with its present bleak and chill condition. And from this, in sudden contrast, came a strangely fair and bright image of Heaven--its exchange of peace for all this turmoil,--of rest for all this weary bearing up of mind and body against the ills that beset both,--of its quiet home for this unstable strange world where nothing is at a stand-still--of perfect and pure society for the unsatisfactory and wearying friendships that the most are here. The thought came to Fleda like one of those unearthly clear Northwestern skies from which a storm cloud has rolled away, that seem almost to mock Earth with their distance from its defilement and agitations. "Truly I know that it shall be well with them that fear God!"--She could remember Hugh,--she could not think of the words without him,--and yet say them with the full bounding assurance. And in that weary and uneasy afternoon her mind rested and delighted itself with two lines of George Herbert, that only a Christian can well understand,--
"Thy power and love,--my love and trust, Make one place everywhere."
But the night fell, and Fleda at last could see nothing but the dim rail fences they were flying by, and the reflection from some stationary lantern on the engine or one of the forward cars, that always threw a bright spot of light on the snow. Still she kept her eyes fastened out of the window; anything but the view inboard. They were going slowly now, and frequently stopping; for they were out of time, and some other trains were to be looked out for. Nervous work; and whenever they stopped the voices which at other times were happily drowned in the rolling of the car-wheels, rose and jarred in discords far less endurable. Fleda shut her ears to the words, but it was easy enough without words to understand the indications of coarse and disagreeable natures in whose neighbourhood she disliked to find herself; of whose neighbourhood she exceedingly disliked to be reminded. The muttered oath, the more than muttered jest, the various laughs that tell so much of head or heart emptiness,--the shadowy but sure tokens of that in human nature which one would not realize and which one strives to forget;--Fleda shrank within herself and would gladly have stopped her ears; did sometimes covertly. Oh if home could be but reached, and she out of this atmosphere! how well she resolved that never another time, by any motive, of delicacy or otherwise, she would be tempted to trust herself in the like again without more than womanly protection. The hours rolled wearily on; they heard nothing of Greenfield yet.
They came at length to a more obstinate stop than usual. Fleda took her hands from her ears to ask what was the matter.