Some twenty years were to go by before I was to realize the significance of the scene that I had witnessed that winter morning at the old frame farmhouse. It was the year of my return to America with Jim Shepherd, whose career as a rising young painter had just begun to be heralded, that I felt impelled to revisit the place of my childhood. Not my least interest lay in seeing Lisbeth again. I remembered her as a fragile upstanding girl of twelve with soft hair the color of dead leaves and gray inquiring eyes. But whatever it was that I was to find I was conscious that I would see it with new appreciation of values. For if my eight years of medical work abroad had sharpened my discernment, even more had my intimacy with Jim Shepherd swept my mind clean of prejudice and casuistry.
To strangers Jim must often have appeared naive and undevious. The fact was that his passion for truth-probing and his worship of the undiscovered loveliness of life had obscured whatever self-consciousness had been born in him. Meeting him for the first time was like entering another element. It left you a little flat. That candor and eagerness of his at first balked you, it made negligible your traditions of thought and speech. One ended by loving him.
On our arrival at the sparse little village I told him of the Dartons. I had had no news of them for the past four years, and inquiries among the neighbors left me only the more at sea. Lisbeth they seldom saw, they said; she never went to church or meetings; and, especially since her mother, in an unprecedented flare of rebellion, had gone to live with a married sister in town, she had grown silent and taciturn. As for old Con Darton, he was going to seed, in spite of the remnants of an earlier erudition that still clung to him. That is, though he went about unshaven and in slovenly frayed clothing, he still quoted fluently from the Bible and Gray's "Elegy." Among the villagers he had come to have the reputation of a philosopher and an ill-used man. He was poor, it seemed, so poor that he had abandoned the white farmhouse and had come to live in a box-like, unpainted shack at the foot of the hill, the new boarding of which stood out harshly against the unturfed soil. Built just across the way from a disused mill, near the creek, it had become known as the "mill house." In spite of this thriftiness, Con always had money for a new horse, which he would soon trade off for a better; although these transactions had, of late, become fewer, as Con was feared as a "shrewd one." The fact seemed to call forth his neighbors' admiration, just as the tale that he had been "deserted" called forth their pity. Lisbeth, they averred, who had stuck to him, was "a hard piece to get close to."
She was standing at the bottom of the hill where the creek ran between the deserted mill and the new shack; and, as I came down the hill, I felt a sharp twinge of pain at the contrast of the fragile line of her profile against the coarse, dark sweater, at the slender grace of her body against that dead, barn-sprinkled background. I could observe her easily without her knowledge, for she was looking up, as we so often used to at twilight, to the old plank high above the sagging mill, where the turkeys fly to roost towards evening, so awkwardly and comically, with a great breathless whirring of wings. I saw her lift her arms to them with a swift, urging gesture, as though to steady their ungainly flight, and I could not be certain that she was not talking to them. Again a pang for the contracting loneliness of those bitter winters that she had lived through and must still live through, stabbed me.
She turned with a low cry and a momentary flush of gladness. But I noticed, as I questioned her as an old friend might, that the flush melted into a level pallor, and her eyes, deeper and more unquiet than I had remembered them, either wandered up the road or reverted to the last of the turkeys soaring heavily to rest.
"I used to do all those things, Tom," she said in answer to my question.
"Used to?" I laughed. "Why, it's only five years ago I was hearing that you were the best little lady on skis and skates at the West-Highlands."
Her eyelids quivered at the word.
"That year—yes," she said and averted her face.
"You mean—" I had to prod, there was no other way about it—"that you only stayed—one year?"