And his face fell forward on his hands and wet them with jets of scalding tears. Full of awe and misery, little Jane dropped upon her knees beside him, and, clasping his hands in hers, said to herself some silent prayer.
After that placid-ending Christmas, after that first prayer, those first tears, after Vivia's music at nightfall, Ray was another creature. He no longer shut himself up in his room, but was down and about with little Jane at peep of day. Indeed, he had now a horror of being alone, following Janet from morn till eve, like a shadow, and stooping forward, when the dark began to gather, with great, silent tears rolling over his face, unless she came and took the cricket at his foot, slipping her warm hand into his, and helping him to himself with the unspoken sympathy. But it was a horror which nothing wholly lulled to sleep at last but Vivia's singing. Every night, for an hour or more, Vivia wrought the music's spell about him, while he lay back in his chair, and little Jane retreated across the hearth, not daring to intrude on such a season. They were seldom purely sad things that she played: sometimes the melody murmured its cantabile like a summer brook into which moonbeams bent, flowing along the lowland, breaking only in sprays of tune, and seeming to paint in its bosom the sleeping shadows of the fair field-flowers; and if ever the gentle strain lost its way, and found itself wandering among the massive chords, the profound melancholy, the blind groping of any Fifth Symphony or piercing Stabat Mater, she answered it, singing Elijah's hymn of rest; and as she sang, there grew in her voice a strength, a sweetness, that satisfied the very soul. When the nine-o'clock bell rang in from the village through the winter night's crystal clearness, little Jane would lightly nudge her mother and steal away to bed; and in the ruddy twilight of the felling fire the two talked softly, talked,—but never of that dark thing lying most deeply in the heart of either. Perhaps, by-and-by, when the thrilling wound should be only a scar, if ever that time should come, the one would be able to speak, the other to hear.
Week after week, now, Ray began to occupy himself about the house more and more, resuming in succession odd little jobs that during all this time had remained unfinished as on the day he went. He seemed desirous of taking up the days exactly as he had left them, of bridging over this gap and chasm, of ignoring the fatal summer. Something so dreadful had fallen into his life that it could not assimilate itself with the tissues of daily existence. The work must be slow that would volatilize such a black body of horror till it leavened all the being into power and grace undreamed of before.
But little Jane did not philosophize upon what she was so glad to see; she hailed every sign of outside interest as a symptom of returning health, and gave him a thousand occasions. Yesterday there were baskets to braid, and to-day he must initiate her in the complications of a dozen difficult sailor's-knots that he knew, and to-morrow there would be woodchuck-traps to make and show her how to set. For Janet's chief vexation had overtaken her in the absence of fresh eggs for breakfast, an absence that would be enduring, unless the small game of the forest could be lured into her snares and parcelled among the apathetic hens. Many were the recipes and the consultations on the subject, till at last Ray wrote out for her, in black-letter, a notice to be pinned up in the sight of every delinquent: "Twelve eggs, or death!" Whether it were the frozen rabbit-meat flung among them the day before, or whether it were the timely warning, there is no one to tell; but the next morning twelve eggs lay in the various hiding-places, which Mrs. Vennard declared to be as good eggs as ever were laid, and custards and cookies renewed their reign. Here, suddenly, Ray remembered the purse in his haversack, containing all his uncounted pay. It was a weary while that he stayed alone in the cold, leaning over it as if he stared at the thirty pieces of silver, a faint sickness seized him, then hurriedly sweeping it up, with a red spot burning cruelly into either cheek, he brought it down, and emptied it in little Jane's lap, though he would rather have seen it ground to impalpable dust. But, after a moment's thought, the astonished recipient kept it for a use of her own. Finally, one night, Ray proposed to instruct Janet in some particular branch of his general ignorance; and after those firelight-recitations, little Jane forgot to move her seat away, and her hand was kept in his through all the hour of Vivia's slow enchantment.
So the cold weather wore away, and spring stole into the scene like a surprise, finding Vivia as the winter found her,—but Ray still undergoing volcanic changes, now passionless lulls and now rages and spasms of grief: gradually out of them all he gathered his strength about him.
It was once more a morning of early June, sunrise was blushing over the meadows, and the gossamers of hoar dew lay in spidery veils of woven light and melted under the rosy beams. From her window one heard Vivia singing, and the strain stole down like the breath of the heavy honeysuckles that trellised her pane:—
"No more for me the eager day
Breaks its bright prison-bars;
The sunshine Thou hast stripped away,
But bared the eternal stars.
"Though in the cloud the wild bird sings,
His song falls not for me,
Alone while rosy heaven rings,—
But, Lord, alone with Thee!"
One well could know, in listening to the liquid melody of those clear tones, that love and sorrow had transfused her life at last to woof and warp of innermost joy that death itself could neither tarnish nor obscure. In a few moments she came down and joined Ray, where he stood upon the door-stone, with one arm resting over the shoulder of little Jane, and watched with him the antics of a youth who postured before them. It was some old acquaintance of Ray's, returned from the war; and as if he would demonstrate how wonderfully martial exercise supples joint and sinew, he was leaping in the air, turning his heel where his toe should be, hanging his foot on his arm and throwing it over his shoulder in a necklace, skipping and prancing on the grass like a veritable saltinbanco. Ray looked grimly on and inspected the evolutions; then there was long process of question and answer and asseveration, and, when the youth departed, little Jane had announced with authority that Ray should throw away his crutch and stand on two feet of his own again.