The Argonauts of North Liberty. Bret Harte
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of the same architectural order as the church. There was no corner or projection to break the force of the wind that swept its smooth glacial surface; there was no indication of light or warmth behind its six closed windows.
“There seems to be nobody at home,” said Demorest, briefly. “Come along with me to the hotel.”
“Joan sits in the back parlor, Sundays,” explained the husband.
“Shall I drive round to the barn and leave the horse and buggy there while you go in?” continued Demorest, good-humoredly, pointing to the stable gate at the side.
“No, thank you,” returned Blandford, “it’s locked, and I’ll have to open it from the other side after I go in. The horse will stand until then. I think I’ll have to say good-night, now,” he added, with a sudden half-ashamed consciousness of the forbidding aspect of the house, and his own inhospitality. “I’m sorry I can’t ask you in—but you understand why.”
“All right,” returned Demorest, stoutly, turning up his coat-collar, and unfurling his umbrella. “The hotel is only four blocks away—you’ll find me there to-morrow morning if you call. But mind you tell your wife just what I told you—and no meandering of your own—you hear! She’ll strike out some idea with her woman’s wits, you bet. Good-night, old man!” He reached out his hand, pressed Blandford’s strongly and potentially, and strode down the street.
Blandford hitched his steaming horse to a sleet-covered horse block with a quick sigh of impatient sympathy over the animal and himself, and after fumbling in his pocket for a latchkey, opened the front door. A vista of well-ordered obscurity with shadowy trestle-like objects against the walls, and an odor of chill decorum, as if of a damp but respectable funeral, greeted him on entering. A faint light, like a cold dawn, broke through the glass pane of a door leading to the kitchen. Blandford paused in the mid-darkness and hesitated. Should he first go to his wife in the back parlor, or pass silently through the kitchen, open the back gate, and mercifully bestow his sweating beast in the stable? With the reflection that an immediate conjugal greeting, while his horse was still exposed to the fury of the blast in the street, would necessarily be curtailed and limited, he compromised by quickly passing through the kitchen into the stable yard, opening the gate, and driving horse and vehicle under the shed to await later and more thorough ministration. As he entered the back door, a faint hope that his wife might have heard him and would be waiting for him in the hall for an instant thrilled him; but he remembered it was Sunday, and that she was probably engaged in some devotional reading or exercise. He hesitatingly opened the back-parlor door with a consciousness of committing some unreasonable trespass, and entered.
She was there, sitting quietly before a large, round, shining centre-table, whose sterile emptiness was relieved only by a shaded lamp and a large black and gilt open volume. A single picture on the opposite wall—the portrait of an elderly gentleman stiffened over a corresponding volume, which he held in invincible mortmain in his rigid hand, and apparently defied posterity to take from him—seemed to offer a not uncongenial companionship. Yet the greenish light of the shade fell upon a young and pretty face, despite the color it extracted from it, and the hand that supported her low white forehead over which her full hair was simply parted, like a brown curtain, was slim and gentle-womanly. In spite of her plain lustreless silk dress, in spite of the formal frame of sombre heavy horsehair and mahogany furniture that seemed to set her off, she diffused an atmosphere of cleanly grace and prim refinement through the apartment. The priestess of this ascetic temple, the femininity of her closely covered arms, her pink ears, and a little serviceable morocco house-shoe that was visible lower down, resting on the carved lion’s paw that upheld the centre-table, appeared to be only the more accented. And the precisely rounded but softly heaving bosom, that was pressed upon the edges of the open book of sermons before her, seemed to assert itself triumphantly over the rigors of the volume.
At least so her husband and lover thought, as he moved tenderly towards her. She met his first kiss on her forehead; the second, a supererogatory one, based on some supposed inefficiency in the first, fell upon a shining band of her hair, beside her neck. She reached up her slim hands, caught his wrists firmly, and, slightly putting him aside, said:
“There, Edward?”
“I drove out from Warensboro, so as to get here to-night, as I have to return to the city on Tuesday. I thought it would give me a little more time with you, Joan,” he said, looking around him, and, at last, hesitatingly drawing an apparently reluctant chair from its formal position at the window. The remembrance that he had ever dared to occupy the same chair with her, now seemed hardly possible of credence.
“If it was a question of your travelling on the Lord’s Day, Edward, I would rather you should have waited until to-morrow,” she said, with slow precision.
“But—I—I thought I’d get here in time for the meeting,” he said, weakly.
“And instead, you have driven through the town, I suppose, where everybody will see you and talk about it. But,” she added, raising her dark eyes suddenly to his, “where else have you been? The train gets into Warensboro at six, and it’s only half an hour’s drive from there. What have you been doing, Edward?”
It was scarcely a felicitous moment for the introduction of Demorest’s name, and he would have avoided it. But he reflected that he had been seen, and he was naturally truthful. “I met Dick Demorest near the church, and as he had something to tell me, we drove down the turnpike a little way—so as to be out of the town, you know, Joan—and—and—”
He stopped. Her face had taken upon itself that appalling and exasperating calmness of very good people who never get angry, but drive others to frenzy by the simple occlusion of an adamantine veil between their own feelings and their opponents’. “I’ll tell you all about it after I’ve put up the horse,” he said hurriedly, glad to escape until the veil was lifted again. “I suppose the hired man is out.”
“I should hope he was in church, Edward, but I trust YOU won’t delay taking care of that poor dumb brute who has been obliged to minister to your and Mr. Demorest’s Sabbath pleasures.”
Blandford did not wait for a further suggestion. When the door had closed behind him, Mrs. Blandford went to the mantel-shelf, where a grimly allegorical clock cut down the hours and minutes of men with a scythe, and consulted it with a slight knitting of her pretty eyebrows. Then she fell into a vague abstraction, standing before the open book on the centre-table. Then she closed it with a snap, and methodically putting it exactly in the middle of the top of a black cabinet in the corner, lifted the shaded lamp in her hand and passed slowly with it up the stairs to her bedroom, where her light steps were heard moving to and fro. In a few moments she reappeared, stopping for a moment in the hall with the lighted lamp as if to watch and listen for her husband’s return. Seen in that favorable light, her cheeks had caught a delicate color, and her dark eyes shone softly. Putting the lamp down in exactly the same place as before, she returned to the cabinet for the book, brought it again to the table, opened it at the page where she had placed her perforated cardboard book-marker, sat down beside it, and with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the page began abstractedly to tear a small piece of paper into tiny fragments. When she had reduced it to the smallest shreds, she scraped the pieces out of her silk lap and again collected them in the pink hollow of her little hand, kneeling down on the scrupulously well-swept carpet to peck up with a bird-like action of her thumb and forefinger an escaped atom here and there. These and the contents of her hand she poured into the chilly cavity of a sepulchral-looking alabaster vase that stood on the etagere. Returning to her old seat, and making a nest for her clasped fingers in the lap of her dress, she remained in that attitude, her shoulders a little narrowed and bent forward, until her husband returned.
“I’ve lit the fire in the bedroom for you to change your clothes by,” she said, as he entered; then evading the caress which this wifely attention provoked, by bending still more primly over her book, she added, “Go at once. You’re making everything quite damp here.”
He returned in a few moments in his slippers and jacket, but evidently found the same difficulty in securing a conjugal and confidential contiguity to his wife. There was no apparent social centre or nucleus of comfort in the apartment; its fireplace, sealed by