Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation. Bret Harte
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hesitated at the fire in the woods; yet it was surely his own house! He hurried to the door, opened it; not only the light of the sitting-room streamed into the hall, but the ruddier glow of an actual fire in the disused grate! The familiar dark furniture had been rearranged to catch some of the glow and relieve its sombreness. And his wife, rising from the music-stool, was the room’s only occupant!
Mrs. Rylands gazed anxiously and timidly at her husband’s astonished face, as he threw off his waterproof and laid down his carpet-bag. Her own face was a little flurried with excitement, and his, half hidden in his tawny beard, and, possibly owing to his self-introspective nature, never spontaneously sympathetic, still expressed only wonder! Mrs. Rylands was a little frightened. It is sometimes dangerous to meddle with a man’s habits, even when he has grown weary of them.
“I thought,” she began hesitatingly, “that it would be more cheerful for you in here, this stormy evening. I thought you might like to put your wet things to dry in the kitchen, and we could sit here together, after supper, alone.”
I am afraid that Mrs. Rylands did not offer all her thoughts. Ever since Mr. Hamlin’s departure she had been uneasy and excited, sometimes falling into fits of dejection, and again lighting up into hysterical levity; at other times carefully examining her wardrobe, and then with a sudden impulse rushing downstairs again to give orders for her husband’s supper, and to make the extraordinary changes in the sitting-room already noted. Only a few moments before he arrived, she had covertly brought down a piece of music, and put aside the hymn-books, and taken, with a little laugh, a pack of cards from her pocket, which she placed behind the already dismantled vase on the chimney.
“I reckoned you had company, Ellen,” he said gravely, kissing her.
“No,” she said quickly. “That is,” she stopped with a sudden surge of color in her face that startled her, “there was—a man—here, in the kitchen—who had a lame horse, and who wanted to get a fresh one. But he went away an hour ago. And he wasn’t in this room—at least, after it was fixed up. So I’ve had no company.”
She felt herself again blushing at having blushed, and a little terrified. There was no reason for it. But for Jack’s warning, she would have been quite ready to tell her husband all. She had never blushed before him over her past life; why she should now blush over seeing Jack, of all people! made her utter a little hysterical laugh. I am afraid that this experienced little woman took it for granted that her husband knew that if Jack or any man had been there as a clandestine lover, she would not have blushed at all. Yet with all her experience, she did not know that she had blushed simply because it was to Jack that she had confessed that she loved the man before her. Her husband noted the blush as part of her general excitement. He permitted her to drag him into the room and seat him before the hearth, where she sank down on one knee to pull off his heavy rubber boots. But he waved her aside at this, pulled them off with his own hands, and let her take them to the kitchen and bring back his slippers. By this time a smile had lighted up his hard face. The room was certainly more comfortable and cheerful. Still he was a little worried; was there not in these changes a falling away from the grace of self-abnegation which she had so sedulously practiced?
When supper was served by Jane, in the dull dining-room, Mr. Rylands, had he not been more engaged in these late domestic changes, might have noticed that the Missouri girl waited upon him with a certain commiserating air that was remarkable by its contrast with the frigid ceremonious politeness with which she attended her mistress. It had not escaped Mrs. Rylands, however, who ever since Jack’s abrupt departure had noticed this change in the girl’s demeanor to herself, and with a woman’s intuitive insight of another woman, had fathomed it. The comfortable tete-a-tete with Jack, which Jane had looked forward to, Mrs. Rylands had anticipated herself, and then sent him off! When Joshua thanked his wife for remembering the pepper-sauce, and Mrs. Rylands pathetically admitted her forgetfulness, the head-toss which Jane gave as she left the room was too marked to be overlooked by him. Mrs. Rylands gave a hysterical little laugh. “I am afraid Jane doesn’t like my sending away the expressman just after I had also dismissed the stranger whom she had taken a fancy to, and left her without company,” she said unwisely.
Mr. Rylands did not laugh. “I reckon,” he returned slowly, “that Jane must feel kinder lonely; she bears all the burden of our bein’ outer the world, without any of our glory in the cause of it.”
Nevertheless, when supper was over, and the pair were seated in the sitting-room before the fire, this episode was forgotten. Mrs. Rylands produced her husband’s pipe and tobacco-pouch. He looked around the formal walls and hesitated. He had been in the habit of smoking in the kitchen.
“Why not here?” said Mrs. Rylands, with a sudden little note of decision. “Why should we keep this room only for company that don’t come? I call it silly.”
This struck Mr. Rylands as logical. Besides, undoubtedly the fire had mellowed the room. After a puff or two he looked at his wife musingly. “Couldn’t you make yourself one of them cigarettys, as they call ‘em? Here’s the tobacco, and I’ll get you the paper.”
“I COULD,” she said tentatively. Then suddenly, “What made you think of it? You never saw ME smoke!”
“No,” said Rylands, “but that lady, your old friend, Miss Clifford, does, and I thought you might be hankering after it.”
“How do you know Tinkie Clifford smokes?” said Mrs. Rylands quickly.
“She lit a cigaretty that day she called.”
“I hate it,” said Mrs. Rylands shortly.
Mr. Rylands nodded approval, and puffed meditatively.
“Josh, have you seen that girl since?”
“No,” said Joshua.
“Nor any other girl like her?”
“No,” said Joshua wonderingly. “You see I only got to know her on your account, Ellen, that she might see you.”
“Well, don’t you do it any more! None of ‘em! Promise me!” She leaned forward eagerly in her chair.
“But Ellen,”—her husband began gravely.
“I know what you’re going to say, but they can’t do me any good, and you can’t do them any good as you did ME, so there!”
Mr. Rylands was silent, and smiled meditatively.
“Josh!”
“Yes.”
“When you met me that night on the Sacramento boat, and looked at me, did you—did I,” she hesitated,—“did you look at me because I had been crying?”
“I thought you were troubled in spirit, and looked so.”
“I suppose I looked worried, of course; I had no time to change or even fix my hair; I had on that green dress, and it NEVER was becoming. And you only spoke to me on account of my awful looks?”
“I saw only your wrestling soul, Ellen, and I thought you needed comfort and help.”
She was silent for a moment, and then, leaning forward, picked up the poker and began to thrust it absently between the bars.
“And if it had been some other girl crying and looking awful, you’d have spoken to her all the same?”
This was a new idea to Mr. Rylands, but with most men logic is supreme. “I suppose I would,” he said slowly.
“And married her?” She rattled the bars of the grate with the poker as if to drown the inevitable reply.
Mr. Rylands loved the woman before him, but it pleased him to think that he loved truth better. “If it had been necessary to her salvation, yes,” he said.
“Not Tinkie?” she said suddenly.
“SHE never would have been in your contrite condition.”
“Much you know! Girls like that can cry as well as laugh, just as they want to. Well! I suppose I DID look horrid.” Nevertheless, she seemed to gain some gratification from her husband’s reply, and changed the subject as if fearful of losing that satisfaction