Snow-Blind | Page 8

tell you about that time--I can't!"
"Don't, then--only, how did you live through the night, my dear?"
"I don't know--except that I never stayed still. I got out from the trees because I was afraid of bears, and I lost my hat. The sun was like fire shining up from underneath and down from up above. My eyes began to hurt almost at once, and by the time night came, it was agony. The darkness didn't seem to help me any either; the glare still seemed to come in under my lids. I couldn't sleep for the pain. I knew I'd freeze if I stood still, so I kept moving all night, trampling round in circles, I suppose. Next morning the terrible glare began again. Then everything went red. I was nearly crazy when you found me, Mr. Garth."
"Please call me Hugh," he murmured, taking her hand in his. "I feel in a way that you belong to me now--I saved you from dying alone there in the cold and brought you back to my home. I've got jettison rights, Sylvie." She let him hold her hand, and flushed.
"You'll never know what it felt like to hear your voice call to me, to feel you pulling me up. I'd only just dropped a few minutes before, but I'd never have struggled up. It would have been the end." She trembled in the memory, and he patted her hand. "I don't know why a man like you lives off here in this wild place, but thank God, you do live here! Though," she added with wistfulness, twisting her soft mouth, "though I can't ever quite see why God should care much for a Sylvie Doone." She touched the lids of her closed eyes. "I wonder why it doesn't worry me more not to be able to see. Now that the pain's gone, I don't seem to care much."
"Thank God. Perhaps, though," he added half-grudgingly, "in a few days you'll see again."
She smiled. "I'd just love to see you. You must be wonderful!"
"What makes you think that?" he asked, his warped face glowing.
"You're so strong and young, such thick hair, such finely shaped hands and such a voice." Sylvie's associates had been of a profession that deals perpetually in personalities. "If I'd been blind a long time, I suppose I could just run my hand over your face, and I'd know what you look like. But I can't tell a thing." She felt for his face and brushed it eagerly with her fingers, laughing at herself. "I just know that you have thick eyelashes and are clean-shaven. Is Bella your wife? And that big little boy your son?"
He started. "No, she's a faithful thing, the boy's nurse. And the kid's my young brother--a great gawk of a boy for his age, a regular bean-pole."
"It's so hard to tell anything about people if you can't see them. I wouldn't have thought he was so big. Is he about fourteen or fifteen? He speaks so low and gently; he might be any age."
"And a man's height--pretty near too big to lick, though he needs it."
"And Bella, what's she like?"
"A dried-up mummy of a woman."
The kitchen door creaked. Hugh started and shot a look over his shoulder. Bella stood on the kitchen threshold with an expressionless face and lowered eyelids.
"Why did you jump?" asked Sylvie nervously.
Hugh wet his lips with his tongue. "Nothing. The door creaked. Go on. Tell me more, child," he urged.
"No. I want to hear about you now. Tell me your story."
Hugh clenched his hands and flushed darkly. He glanced over his shoulder with a furtive look, but Bella had gone.
"No one else rightly knows my story, Sylvie. Will you promise me never to speak of it, to Bella, to Pete, to any one?"
"Of course, I promise." Her face beamed with the pride of a child entrusted with a secret.
Then, lowering his voice and moving closer to her chair, he began a fictitious history, a history of persecuted and heroic innocence, of reckless adventure, of daring self-sacrifice. The girl listened with parted lips. Her cheeks glowed. And behind the door, Bella too listened, straining her ears.
The murmur of Hugh's recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by Sylvie's ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block, colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what she heard. But after a rigid hour she faltered away, stumbled across the kitchen and out into the snow.
There, in the broad light of the setting sun, Pete rhythmically bent and straightened over his saw. The tool sang with a hissing, ringing rhythm, and the young man drove it with a lithe, long swing of body, forward and back, forward and back, in