Part 38 (1/2)
Isabel's eyes brightened through her tears. There was something in the cordial goodness of Judge Sharp that no grief could have resisted.
”Please, sir,” said Mary, struggling faintly in the arms of her n.o.ble friend--”please, sir, I can walk very well.”
”And I can carry you very well--why not? Come, now for a climb.”
And away strode the great-hearted man, holding her up that she might gaze on the scenery over his shoulder.
Isabel followed close, helping herself up the steep rocks, now by catching hold of a spice-bush and shaking off all its ripe golden blossoms; now drawing down the loops of a grape-vine and swinging forward on it, encouraged in each new effort by the hearty commendations of her new friend.
At last they reached the summit of a detached ridge of rocks that rose like a fortification back of the highway. Judge Sharp sat down upon a shelf cus.h.i.+oned like an easy-chair with the greenest moss and placed the children at his feet.
A true lover of nature himself, he did not speak, or insist upon forcing exclamations of delight from the children who shared the glorious view with him. But he looked now and then into Mary Fuller's face, and was satisfied with all that he saw there.
He turned and glanced also into the beautiful eyes of little Isabel.
They were wandering dreamily from object to object, searching, as it were, along the misty horizon for some sign of her dead mother. It was her heart rather than her intellect that wandered over that magnificent scenery for something to dwell upon.
”Are you sure, sir?” said Mary Fuller, timidly, looking up; ”are you quite sure that this is the same world that Isabel and I were in yesterday?”
”Why not? Doesn't it seem like the same?”
”No,” answered Mary, kindling up and looking eagerly around; ”it is a thousand times larger, so vast, so grand, so--. Pray help me out, I wish to say so much and can't. Something chokes me here when I try to say how beautiful all this seems.”
Mary folded her hands over her bosom, and began to waver to and fro on the moss seat, struck with a pang of that exquisite pleasure which so closely approaches pain when we fully appreciate the beautiful.
”You like this?” said the Judge, watching her face more than the landscape, that had been familiar to him when almost a wilderness.
”I should like to stay here for ever. It seems as if every one that we have loved so much, is resting near the sky away off yonder falling close down upon the mountains.”
”It is a n.o.ble view,” said the Judge, standing up, and pointing to the right. ”Have you ever learned anything of geography, children?”
”A little,” they both answered, glancing at each other as if ashamed of confessing so much knowledge.
”Then you have heard of the Green Mountains yonder; they are like thunder-clouds under the horizon?”
The children shaded their eyes, and looked searchingly at what seemed to them a dark embankment of clouds, and then Mary turned, holding her breath almost with awe, and gathered in with one long glance the broad horizon, sweeping its circle of a hundred miles from right to left, closed by the mountain spur on which they stood.
Where distance levelled small inequalities of surface, and made great ones indistinct and cloudy, the whole aspect of the scenery took an air of high cultivation and abundant richness. Thousands and thousands of farms, cut up and colored with their ripened crops, lay before them--golden rye stubbles; hills white with buckwheat and rich with snowy blossoms; meadows, orchards, and groves of primeval timber, all brightened those luxuriant valleys and plains that open upon the Hudson. Deep into New York State, and far, far away among the mountains of New England the eye ranged, charmed and satisfied with a fullness of beauty.
Mary saw it, and all the deep feelings as fervent, but less understood in the child than in the woman, swelled and grew rich in her bosom.
Not a tint of those luxuriously colored hills ever left her memory--not a shadow upon the distant mountains ever died from her brain. It is such memories, vivid as painting, and burnt upon the mind like enamel, from childhood to maturity, that feed and invigorate the soul of genius.
Enoch Sharp had been a man of enterprise. Action had ever followed quick upon his thought. Placed by accident in certain avenues of life, he had exerted strong energies, and a will firm as it was kindly, in doing all things thoroughly that he undertook; in no circ.u.mstances would he have been an ordinary man. Had destiny placed his field of action among scientific or military men, he would have proven himself first among the foremost; as it was, much of the talent that would have distinguished him there, grew and throve upon those domestic affections which were to him the poetry of life.
Thrown into constant communion with nature in her most n.o.ble aspects, he became her devotee, and was more learned in all the beautiful things which G.o.d has created, than many a celebrated savant who studies with his brain only.
True to the unearthed poetry lying in rich veins throughout his whole nature, Enoch Sharp sat keenly regarding the effect this grand panorama of scenery produced on the two children.
He looked on Isabel in her bright, half-restless beauty, with a smile of affectionate forbearance. There was everything in her face to love, but it had to answer to the glow and enthusiasm of his own nature.