And when it was over, the poor mother was kneeling by the fire, with the baby at her breast, sobbing and crooning softly as she rocked it to and fro in its deep sleep.
“It’s suffocating in here, now that it is all over. Don’t you want to come out and watch the storm?” Gabriel asked me in a low voice as he stood beside me looking down on the comfortable pair on the hearth. “Don’t be afraid. It is a great one, mostly electrical, and will likely go on all night this way. It makes the atmosphere almost unendurably heavy. Do you want to watch it from the bluff there at the end of the clearing? You can look down and see it at play in the valley.”
“Please,” I answered, catching the word in the middle with a breath that was a sob in retreat.
Then before I knew it, or how, we were seated together on a big rock that jutted out from the edge of the world. The cabin, with its one or two dim lights, loomed with shadowy outlines behind us, and tall trees hugged us close on both sides; but before us and beneath us was a wild, black, turbulent night.
“Now look down into the valley when the next flash comes,” Gabriel said with a note of excitement sounding in his deep voice that matched the wind through the trees.
Then just as he finished speaking, a slow, steady sheet of light came and lit up the world below us. The fields in their spring garments, embroidered by the threads of silver creeks, lay lush and green, dotted by farm-houses in which dim lights twinkled, bouqueted by glowing pink orchards, and outlined by blooming hedges. Tall trees were massed along the edges of the meadows and the river-banks, and among them the white lines of the old sycamores gleamed in masses of high lights. And in the wild, soft wind that rushed up the mountain-sides and flung itself upon us there was mingled the tang of the honeysuckle and rhododendron with the sweetness of the orchards and pungence of newly plowed earth.
Then as suddenly as the picture had risen before our eyes it sank back into the purple blackness, and I caught my breath with the glory of it.
“And God made it!” I exclaimed softly, with the last sob that had been left in my heart caught from my mouth by the wind.
“‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein,’” he answered, and the wind took his words as if it had been waiting for them to carry across the mountains.
After that for several long minutes, I don’t know how many, I sat silent in the windy blackness, with the tree-branches sighing and crashing over our heads, and wild things rustling in the leaves and bushes beside us, and wondered what was happening to me.