The Saint in Europe (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

4

They cooked their food and ate in silence, but it was not the same silence as others that there had been. Belinda was oddly subdued, and Simon knew that his work was done. Afterwards, when it was finished and they sat on over cigarettes and enamel mugs of coffee, they were still quiet. Simon was thinking of other evenings of great peace in his life, as a man does in times of perfect contentment for the joy of comparing the incomparable, and he thought also of another more perilous adventure which had once taken him over the trail they had retraced.

Belinda hugged her knees and gazed into the dancing flames. Why had she never noticed the sweet smell of wood-smoke before?…A log rolled over, scattering a small Vesuvius of sparks, and she said, “What are things like where you’re going after Innsbruck?”

Simon kicked the log back.

“They’re better than anything you’ve seen yet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful in the world. It’s a little bit like what we saw yesterday and today, only a hundred times more magnificent. Mountains and valleys and woods and streams. You take a trail that runs half-way up the wall of the world. On one side you can look up through the pines to the snow; on the other side you look down into a green valley with cattle grazing and a torrent racing at the bottom. The air’s full of the scent of wild flowers and the tinkle of cow-bells. When you first come to it you feel you must just sit and look at it all day, taking it into your soul.”

Belinda listened to the murmur of insects in the grass, and everything she had seen that day passed before her in a pageant. At the end she saw the picture that Simon had painted for her. Young men and girls, sun-bronzed and care-free, swung along that trail half-way up the wall of the world, singing. They ate and slept and were happy around camp-fires like this. “What a lot of useless desires we clutter up our lives with,” she thought, “and never know how unimportant they were until they have been almost forgotten! What a mess of stupid formulas and trivialities!” She lay on her back and stared up into the overarching fretwork of leaves. There was still something else to be said: it hurt her, but a new pride demanded it.

“I’m sorry I slapped you and wasted so many days,” she said. “I’d give anything in the world to have them over again.”

He smiled in the firelight.

“I’ll apologize for saying you’d ceased to be ornamental. It wasn’t true, of course, but I wanted to make you mad. There was only a week, and we had to get the quarreling over and done with. As a matter of fact, you’re more decorative than you ever were before.”

He was so calm, so natural, that the effort of self-abasement which might have been a wound in her new peace of mind became nothing at all in retrospect.

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