more shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves
and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead
to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead
crust. The shimmer is inside really."
And she, with her little finger in her mouth, would ponder these
sayings. They gave her a feeling of life again, and vivified things
which had meant nothing to her. She managed to find some meaning in his
struggling, abstract speeches. And they were the medium through which
she came distinctly at her beloved objects.
Another day she sat at sunset whilst he was painting some pine-trees
which caught the red glare from the west. He had been quiet.
"There you are!" he said suddenly. "I wanted that. Now, look at them and
tell me, are they pine trunks or are they red coals, standing-up pieces
of fire in that darkness? There's God's burning bush for you, that
burned not away."
Miriam looked, and was frightened. But the pine trunks were wonderful
to her, and distinct. He packed his box and rose. Suddenly he looked at
her.
"Why are you always sad?" he asked her.
"Sad!" she exclaimed, looking up at him with startled, wonderful brown
eyes.
"Yes," he replied. "You are always sad."
"I am not--oh, not a bit!" she cried.
"But even your joy is like a flame coming off of sadness," he persisted.
"You're never jolly, or even just all right."
"No," she pondered. "I wonder--why?"
"Because you're not; because you're different inside, like a pine-tree,
and then you flare up; but you're not just like an ordinary tree, with
fidgety leaves and jolly--"
He got tangled up in his own speech; but she brooded on it, and he had a
strange, roused sensation, as if his feelings were new. She got so near
him. It was a strange stimulant.
Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was only five. He was
a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in his quaint fragile face--one of
Reynolds's "Choir of Angels", with a touch of elf. Often Miriam kneeled
to the child and drew him to her.
"Eh, my Hubert!" she sang, in a voice heavy and surcharged with love.
"Eh, my Hubert!"
And, folding him in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side with
love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched
with love.
"Don't!" said the child, uneasy--"don't, Miriam!"
"Yes; you love me, don't you?" she murmured deep in her throat, almost
as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as if she were swooned in
an ecstasy of love.
"Don't!" repeated the child, a frown on his clear brow.
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