"Anna, your distinctions are too absurd for reason to examine even. Have I a voice that could command an army, or shout out orders in a storm at sea? Have I the voice of a man?"
Sophie had a depth of azure in her eyes that looked ocean-deep into an interior soul; she had softly purplish windings of hair around a low, cool brow, that said, "There are no torrid thoughts in me." And yet I always felt that there was an equator in Sophie's soul, only no mortal could find it. Looking at her, as thus she stood, I forgot that she Lad questioned me.
"Why do you look at me so?" she asked. "Answer me! Have I the voice of a man? Listen now! Hear Aaron up-stairs: he's preaching to himself, to convince himself that some thorn in theology grows naturally: could I do that?"
"Your voice, I fancy, can do wonders: but about the theology, I don't believe you like thorns in it; I think you would break one off at once, and cast it out";--and I looked again at the rough tower, and ran my fingers over the strong protective key in my hands.
"Don't look that way, Anna,--please don't!--for your footsteps have an ugly way of following some will-o'-the-wisp that goes out of your eyes. I know it,--I've seen it all your life," Sophie urged, as I shook my head in negation.
"Will you lend me this hood?" I asked, as I took up one lying near.
"If you are determined to go; but do wait. Aaron shall go with you after dinner; he will have settled the thorn by that time."
"What for should I take Aaron up the winding stairs? There is no parishioner in want or dying up there."
And I tied the hood about my head, and in a wrapping-shawl, closely drawn,--for cold and cannon-like came the bursts of wind down through the mountain valleys,--I went out. Through the path, hedged with leafless lilac-shrubs, just athrob with the mist of life sent up from the roots below, I went, and crossed the church-yard fence. Winding in and out among the graves,--for upon a heart, living and joyous, or still and dead, I cannot step,--I took my way. "Dear old tower, I have thee at last!" I said; for I talk to unanswering things all over the world. In crowded streets I speak, and murmur softly to highest heights.
But I quite forgot to tell what my tower was built like, and of what it was made. A few miles away, a mountain, neither very large nor very high, has met with some sad disaster that cleaved its stony shell, and so, time out of memory, the years have stolen into its being, and winter frosts have sadly cut it up, and all along its rocky ridges, and thickly at its base, lie beds of shaly fragments, as various in form and size as the autumn-leaves that November brings.