Lilac Spring. Ruth Axtell Morren

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СКАЧАТЬ turned away from her earnest gaze. “You’ve just become a romantic since seeing all those old castles.”

      “Love has nothing to do with seeing castles! I’ve always believed in love. I’ve just become old enough to express my views better now. And there is One Who agrees with me.” She tapped the cover of the book between them. “God. He has a lot to say about love.”

      “Yes, I know all about that kind of love…doing unto others….”

      She looked away from him. “That sounds like doing your duty. It’s so much more than that. It’s about loving one’s Savior. It’s an all-consuming love He has for us.”

      “You sound like Pastor McDuffie.”

      Her lips curved slightly. “He’s the one who began making me see that being a Christian was more than just going to church on Sunday or following the Golden Rule. Do you know what I discovered through him?” Her slate-blue irises were rimmed in a deeper hue that was almost black. “How wonderful it is to fall in love with God.”

      Silas turned away, her words leaving him feeling inadequate, as if he were missing some vital component in his makeup. The cat had climbed onto his lap, and he touched its fur, feeling the throb of its purr under his fingertips.

      “When one realizes the love Jesus poured out for us on that cross, it becomes easy to love Him back with every particle of one’s being, to hold nothing back, to say ‘Yes, Lord,’ when He asks something of us.” She picked up the Bible and hugged it to her breast. “Don’t tell me this is just romanticism. Love is our whole purpose for existing.”

      He wasn’t ready to concede any such thing. His mind went to the feel of a boat taking shape under his hands. That was life to him. He pushed the swing back with a jerk.

      The cat, disturbed by the motion, got up and jumped to the floor. It stretched its back and sauntered off.

      They swung in silence for a while.

      Cherish sighed. “God gave us the love between a man and a woman as an—” her hand fluttered out in search of the correct word “—extension of His love for us.”

      Again he didn’t know how to answer. “Someone will love you some day, Cherish, with the kind of love you yearn for.”

      She tipped her head to one side, regarding him steadily. “Do you think so?”

      “I’m sure of it,” he replied, wondering who that man would be and realizing he couldn’t conjure up any image of the man who would be good enough for her.

      “I hope you’re right,” she answered him, and set the book on her lap. “Don’t you want to be loved again? The way Emma loved you?”

      Her eyes searched his, and he had a fleeting sense of how much more wrenching and painful the death of a loved one would be to a man than to a boy. He turned away from Cherish and looked down the lawn toward the inlet beyond. The tide had filled it, just as Cherish’s words had filled his mind without any conscious resistance on his part.

      “I never think about it,” he answered honestly. “I was awfully young—we both were—when Emmy and I ‘pledged our troth.’ Then we just kept the promise, although we didn’t see each other but just once a year after I came up here for my apprenticeship.

      “When I turned nineteen, I asked your father for permission to get married. Although I’d already fulfilled the terms of my apprenticeship and didn’t really need his consent, he counseled me to wait until I was at least twenty-one, with more money saved up.”

      He looked straight ahead to some indefinite point in the center of the painted porch floor. “His advice made sense. At that age you don’t expect to lose someone younger than yourself, just like that, even though we go through it all the time. I’d already lost an older brother and sister, and my father never came back from the Grand Banks.”

      He cleared his throat, the recollection of those days coming back to him as he spoke about them. “Then she got rheumatic fever and died, just a month shy of my twenty-first birthday.” He’d felt bitter about it for a long time. Just when it had faded, he didn’t know.

      “Do you still miss Emma after all these years?”

      He shook his head slowly. “It’s as I said—I guess I’m married to boats now.”

      “You know I love you, Silas.”

      He lifted his gaze to hers, her words arresting him.

      Before he could figure out what she meant, she asked softly, “Don’t you love me?”

      Her big blue eyes waited for his answer. He could feel himself redden. He rubbed the back of his neck, at a loss for an answer. How was he supposed to answer such a question? Was she talking about their old familiar affection for each other, developed over the years? Or that sublime sentiment she had been describing to him? He managed to tear his gaze away.

      “Well…uh…yes.”

      “You don’t have to say it as if you’re going to choke on it!”

      His face grew warmer. “I’m not! Of course I love you. I’ve known you since you were a little girl. You’re like a sister to me.”

      When he looked at her again, she was gazing away from him.

      He felt the weight of responsibility. Cherish trusted him. Winslow trusted him. How could he live up to that trust when he found himself yearning to kiss those sweet lips inches from him?

      Silas lay on his bed, hearing the lap of the waves below boxing him in. He could no longer push aside Cherish’s question. Don’t you love me?

      She’d said I love you in her frank, childlike way. She loved the boy who’d come to Haven’s End fourteen years earlier. But it was a naive, girlish emotion that would soon pass once she’d been back a while and realized Silas van der Zee was the same uneducated man she’d left two years ago, who’d never been beyond this coast, who never could come anywhere near the kind of gentlemen she’d met in her travels. Soon she’d outgrow her childish fancy and turn admiring woman’s eyes on someone like Warren Townsend.

      But what about Silas himself? Don’t you love me? Why did the question make him squirm like a pale grub dug out of the dark, damp earth and exposed to the unfamiliar light and air?

      What did he know of love? Did he even know how to love?

      He loved boats. He could hold on to that one fact. He loved the feel of smooth wood emerging from the sanding, knowing it was something tangible, something he could force and shape and tame. He loved the look of a rift-sawn timber with its straight grain, knowing its superior strength, its unlikeliness to cup or warp in the water. He loved the smell of cedar and oak and pine that permeated the boat shop even up to his room, the only home he’d known for the past fourteen years.

      He loved the challenge of taking straight, strong, unbending logs and cutting and shaping them into a buoyant craft. He loved the triumph of seeing that craft ply through the waters, daring that depthless expanse of waves, defying nature itself when it brought even the wind to do its bidding through that mathematical precision of setting sails at a certain angle to move forward.

      He loved the challenge, the СКАЧАТЬ