All day the mercury in the bulb had been dropping. All day the lake had been groaning in travail,—“making ice,” the natives had it. It was both impressive and depressive, the muffled vibrations booming across the high pitched silences like the half smothered roars of some starving wild beast in the pains of wounds and hunger. The dogs had been frightened at first, and had barked and howled in unison. Sir Bedivere, the splendid St. Bernard, was country born, but the two years of his life had been passed in the effete ways of cities: and dainty Lady Babbie, the proud-pedigreed collie puppy, was only a few months up from Virginia. Sir Bedivere the venturesome had gone down to the lake, where the strange thing was concealed, and, ear to ice, listened gravely and inquiringly. He had then, in the way of dogs of much wisdom, communicated to his timid young companion on the bank that there was nothing to fear, and had eventually imbued her with his daring to the extent of a slippery frolic on the groaning ice.
From the doorway Maida had stood and watched them. It was the doorway of a summer bungalow, lovely in its season, and of much beauty, albeit of a bleak and lonely sort, in this midwinter of snows. The great pine sentinels stood impassively erect, and their uniforms were whiter than any pipe-clayed trappings of militant man. The silver birches shivered and shook in the late wintry sun; and the poplars—those ridiculous “popples,” with their bare, gaunt long legs, to her the Clan-na-Gaels of the forest—stood stiff and stoical, like Scotsmen on parade. The garden, an exquisite life in summer, was a floral graveyard, and had the desolate look of all dead things, wrapped in its winding sheets of white, awaiting springtime resurrection. There were some translucent red berries in the hedge of tatarian honeysuckle, and she had scattered some crumbs about; but it was too cold for even the brave little brown chickadees to venture out. The red berries made a vivid splash of color,—the only one, save the magnificent copper lights of her hair, in the whole vast white and green expanse.
She let her eyes rest on the scarlet line: she had always loved color, and light, and warmth, and kaleidoscopic movement. Her inner vision pictured the city at this hour: The carriages would all be rolling homeward from the park, the ring of the horses—the grub toilers of the day, hastening to the metamorphosis that would transform them into butterflies of night. The electric bulbs would be sowing their blossoms by millions across the dusk, till the whole city was one riotous hotbed of color. Was it only a year ago that she had been a part—an enjoying, pulsing part—of this great Babylonian garden of bloom?
She had loved it all passionately: but she also had loved, though then uncognizant of it, with the other and unsuspected side of her many-fibered nature, this country of snows, its stern silences, the sigh of the winds as they swept like Fates through the trees, the tang of the air when the frost bit deep, which was like wine to the blood.
The city had claimed and held the pleasure loving, lotus dreaming side of her; but there was sterner fiber, bequeathed by grim old Puritan forebears ere they had met and crossed—never utterly merged—with the soft seductions of the South. Stephen Strong, M. D.,—the man, not the physician.—had detected these elements in her long before. “Adversity will fashion you,” he had said to her once in his usual direct, way, “if she ever takes you in hand, into a wondrous being that will surprise the being you are now.” Ah, yes; but the fierceness of the fashioning, and the brutality of the hammer and anvil! It had been in the intolerable pain of it that she had turned to the Supreme Mother—Nature the nurse, the teacher, the friend—to find how well she loved her, and how dearly beloved was she in return. And so she had shut herself up here among the great solitudes, closing the inner gates of her soul to the world, but opening them wide for the Mother of All, whose touch but opening them wide for the Mother of All, whose touch alone was tender enough to probe the wounds, the better to bind and heal. No one else would—could—ever know, save this all comprehending Mother and herself, and the God who had permitted the catastrophe to be.