Margaret and the children drove down to White River with her the next
morning. Just as Margaret had previously opposed her restless desire to
leave Grosvenor, with gentle suggestions and quiet persuasion, so this time
she accepted her going as inevitable.
"But you may come back; I wish it might be!" was all she said, not very
hopefully.
Isabelle shook her head. She made no plans, but she felt that no matter
what the outcome of the trial might be it was hardly probable that her path
would lead back to this retreat. As she got into the sleigh she looked up
the hillside to the hospital, its many windows glistening in the rising
sun, its severe outlines sharp against the snowy field, and her eyes roved
on to the dusky firs in the valley, up to the purple hilltop of the Altar,
on to the distant peaks rising behind, with crests already bare. Her eyes
were misty as she drove through the familiar village street, past the
blacksmith's shop, where Sol Short waved a second good-by with a glowing
bar of steel caught from the forge, on towards the Pass and the
descent,--it was a haven of peace, this hillside village! Within that
circle of snowy hills, in the silent beauty of the Northern winter, she had
lived more, lived deeper, than anywhere else in the world. But she should
not come back,--there would be no place for that. Grosvenor had given its
benediction,--the hills and the woods, the snowy expanses and frozen
brooks, the sunsets and starlit firmament,--the blacksmith's simple content
and Renault's beacon lights, Margaret's peace,--all had done their work in
her. As the lumbering sleigh dragged over the Pass, she gazed back to fix
its image in her mind forever. The fresh March wind blew in her face, chill
but full of distant promise, as if in its sweep from the north it had heard
the tidings of spring, the stirrings deep below snow and frost. And the sky
shimmered cloudless from horizon to horizon, a soft blue....
The agitations before and the struggle to come were interspaced by this
lofty place of Peace--wherein she had found herself!
* * * * *
The frost-covered train from the north drew up at the platform in a cloud
of steam. The fireman, a lad of eighteen, with a curl waving from under his
cap, was leaning far out of the cab, smoking a cigarette and looking up at
the snowy mountains just visible from White River. He was careless,--alive,
and content this fine morning,--his grimy arms bare on the sill of the cab
window, the broad earth and its hills spread before him. As the engine shot
past, he looked down at Isabelle, curiously, and then up to the mountains
again, as if his life were complete enough. A careless figure of the human
routine of the world, endlessly moving, changing, energizing, functioning
in its destined orbit! And all lives were tied together in the fine mesh of
circumstance,--one destiny running into another as the steel band of
railroad ran on and on into distant places, just as the lad in the engine
cab was somehow concerned with the whole human system that ended,
perchance, in the courtroom at St. Louis....
Isabelle took Margaret in her arms and holding her close, as if she would
seize her very spirit, kissed her.
"Tell the doctor," she said, "that I am beginning to understand--a little."
PART SEVEN