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Page 11
The storm was still raging when he alighted that evening from the
up coach at the trail nearest his house. Although incumbered with
a heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp
without begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had
deprived him of his horse. It was "like her" to do these things in
her good-humored abstraction, an abstraction, however, that
sometimes worried him, from the fear that it indicated some
unhappiness with her present lot. He was longing to rejoin her
after his absence of three days, the longest time they had been
separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with a certain
lover-like excitement, quite new to his usually calm and temperate
blood.
Struggling with the storm and darkness, but always with the happy
consciousness of drawing nearer to her in that struggle, he labored
on, finding his perilous way over the indistinguishable trail by
certain landmarks in the distance, visible only to his pioneer eye.
That heavier shadow to the right was not the hillside, but the
SLOPE to the distant hill; that low, regular line immediately
before him was not a fence or wall, but the line of distant
gigantic woods, a mile from his home. Yet as he began to descend
the slope towards the wood, he stopped and rubbed his eyes. There
was distinctly a light in it. His first idea was that he had lost
the trail and was nearing the woodman Mackinnon's cabin. But a
more careful scrutiny revealed to him that it was really the wood,
and the light was a camp-fire. It was a rough night for camping
out, but they were probably some belated prospectors.
When he had reached the fringe of woodland, he could see quite
plainly that the fire was built beside one of the large pines, and
that the little encampment, which looked quite comfortable and
secluded from the storm-beaten trail, was occupied apparently by a
single figure. By the good glow of the leaping fire, that figure
standing erect before it, elegantly shaped, in the graceful folds
of a serape, looked singularly romantic and picturesque, and
reminded Joshua Rylands--whose ideas of art were purely reminiscent
of boyish reading--of some picture in a novel. The heavy black
columns of the pines, glancing out of the concave shadow, also
seemed a fitting background to what might have been a scene in a
play. So strongly was he impressed by it that but for his anxiety
to reach his home, still a mile distant, and the fact that he was
already late, he would have penetrated the wood and the seclusion
of the stranger with an offer of hospitality for the night. The
man, however, was evidently capable of taking care of himself, and
the outline of a tethered horse was faintly visible under another
tree. It might be a surveyor or engineer,--the only men of a
better class who were itinerant.
But another and even greater surprise greeted him as he toiled up
the rocky slope towards his farmhouse. The windows of the sitting-
room, which were usually blank and black by night, were glittering
with unfamiliar light. Like most farmers, he seldom used the room
except for formal company, his wife usually avoiding it, and even
he himself now preferred the dining-room or the kitchen. His first
suggestion that his wife had visitors gave him a sense of pleasure
on her account, mingled, however, with a slight uneasiness of his
own which he could not account for. More than that, as he
approached nearer he could hear the swell of the organ above the
roar of the swaying pines, and the cadences were not of a
devotional character. He hesitated for a moment, as he had
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."
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