She stood aside in her still, aloof fashion.
“Why?”
“You go,” she pleaded.
Almost for the first time in her life she had the pleasure of giving up to a man, of spoiling him. Paul looked at her.
“All right,” he said, sitting down. “Mind out!”
He set off with a spring, and in a moment was flying through the air, almost out of the door of the shed, the upper half of which was open, showing outside the drizzling rain, the filthy yard, the cattle standing disconsolate against the black cartshed, and at the back of all the grey-green wall of the wood. She stood below in her crimson tam-o'-shanter and watched. He looked down at her, and she saw his blue eyes sparkling.
“It's a treat of a swing,” he said.
“Yes.”
He was swinging through the air, every bit of him swinging, like a bird that swoops for joy of movement. And he looked down at her. Her crimson cap hung over her dark curls, her beautiful warm face, so still in a kind of brooding, was lifted towards him. It was dark and rather cold in the shed. Suddenly a swallow came down from the high roof and darted out of the door.
“I didn't know a bird was watching,” he called.
He swung negligently. She could feel him falling and lifting through the air, as if he were lying on some force.
“Now I'll die,” he said, in a detached, dreamy voice, as though he were the dying motion of the swing. She watched him, fascinated. Suddenly he put on the brake and jumped out.
“I've had a long turn,” he said. “But it's a treat of a swing—it's a real treat of a swing!”
Miriam was amused that he took a swing so seriously and felt so warmly over it.
“No; you go on,” she said.
“Why, don't you want one?” he asked, astonished.
“Well, not much. I'll have just a little.”
She sat down, whilst he kept the bags in place for her.
“It's so ripping!” he said, setting her in motion. “Keep your heels up, or they'll bang the manger wall.”
She felt the accuracy with which he caught her, exactly at the right moment, and the exactly proportionate strength of his thrust, and she was afraid. Down to her bowels went the hot wave of fear. She was in his hands. Again, firm and inevitable came the thrust at the right moment. She gripped the rope, almost swooning.
“Ha!” she laughed in fear. “No higher!”
“But you're not a BIT high,” he remonstrated.
“But no higher.”
He heard the fear in her voice, and desisted. Her heart melted in hot pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he left her alone. She began to breathe.
“Won't you really go any farther?” he asked. “Should I keep you there?”
“No; let me go by myself,” she answered.
He moved aside and watched her.
“Why, you're scarcely moving,” he said.
She laughed slightly with shame, and in a moment got down.
“They say if you can swing you won't be sea-sick,” he said, as he mounted again. “I don't believe I should ever be sea-sick.”
Away he went. There was something fascinating to her in him. For the moment he was nothing but a piece of swinging stuff; not a particle of him that did not swing. She could never lose herself so, nor could her brothers. It roused a warmth in her. It was almost as if he were a flame that had lit a warmth in her whilst he swung in the middle air.
And gradually the intimacy with the family concentrated for Paul on three persons—the mother, Edgar, and Miriam. To the mother he went for that sympathy and that appeal which seemed to draw him out. Edgar was his very close friend. And to Miriam he more or less condescended, because she seemed so humble.
But the girl gradually sought him out. If he brought up his sketch-book, it was she who pondered longest over the last picture. Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like water that shakes with a stream of gold in the dark, she would ask:
“Why do I like this so?”
Always something in his breast shrank from these close, intimate, dazzled looks of hers.
“Why DO you?” he asked.
“I don't know. It seems so true.”
“It's because—it's because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it's 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.
“You love me, don't you?” she murmured.
“What do you make such a FUSS for?” cried Paul, all in suffering because of her extreme emotion. “Why can't you be ordinary with him?”
She let the child go, and rose,