Читать книгу Judith of the Cumberlands - MacGowan Alice - Страница 7

The girl was like one hearkening for a finer voice amid all this distracting noise; she could hear neither. She made feverish haste to clear away and wash her dishes, that she might creep to her own room under the eaves. Through her open casement came up to her the sounds of the April night: a heightened chorus of little frogs in a rain-fed branch; nearer in the dooryard a half-dozen tree-toads trilling plaintively as many different minors; with these, scents of growing, sharpened and sweetened by the dark. And all night the cedar tree which stood close to the porch edge below moved in the wind of spring, and, chafing against the shingles, spoke through the miniature music in its deep, muffled legato, a soft baritone note like a man’s voice—a lover’s voice—calling to her beneath her window.

It roused her from fitful slumbers to happy waking, when she lay and stared into the dark, and painted for herself on its sombre background Creed Bonbright’s figure, the yellow uncovered head close to her knee as he stood and talked at the foot of the mountain trail. And the voice of the tree in the eager spring airs said to her waiting heart—whispered it softly, shouted and tossed it abroad so that all might have heard it had they been awake and known the shibboleth, murmured it in tones of tenderness that penetrated her with bliss—that Creed was coming—coming—coming to her, through the April woods.