II
Hill Tops!
It was a night in November. Darkness had fallen early. A fire had been lighted in the open grate and the big southern living room was pungently warm. Shades had been drawn, shutting out the dreary autumn afterglow. Aside from the ruddy gleam of the crackling fire, the only illumination in the apartment came from the pedestal lamp beside a piano. The lamp had an old-rose shade. All the hues and angles of the room were softened and blended by its richness.
Nathan came down the wide front stairs, tying the cords of his dressing-gown as he descended. He turned into the living room. A few feet inside the door, he paused.
The room was perfect. White, mahogany, and old rose was the color scheme. The ceiling was shaded and the furniture was heavy. Yet so deftly had the latter been arranged and so perfect the spacing, that the room had an air of fine distance and perspective; relaxation and rest was the result and it soothed like an opiate.
The man’s artist-eye could neither miss nor pass lightly over the proportion and fastidiousness that gave the room its character,—the sense of perfect order without the least sacrifice of comfort. A few oil paintings filled appropriate spaces upon the warm brown walls. Smaller corners held etchings and exotic prints that Madelaine had brought from Japan. The dull polish of the piano, writing desk, music cabinet, table, reflected the glint of the firelight. An exquisite sculptural study showed at just the right point in the corner across the heavy divan drawn up before the grate. And as Nathan inventoried these things, a deep sense of peace grew upon him. It entered into his being with the atmosphere he breathed. An old phrase he had used somewhere before whispered softly again in his subconscious mind, something about “—art drawing-rooms, softly shaded at midnight.” This was home,—his home! One born to such things might never appreciate them as Nathan could appreciate them now.
He moved across. From the carved black cherry box on the end of the reading table he found a Havana. His evening paper was there also. He picked up the paper and went round the divan. He sank down before the fire, but after lighting the cigar with all the ceremony of a priest kindling a sacred altar flame, he did not read.
The wind rose and drew the flames higher into the deep, broad flue. Somewhere out on the Avenue rose the gear-clack and purr of a ’bus. It was a wild, melancholy night outside. It would rain or snow before morning. But wind nor weather had no part or parcel with that home, inside. The room might have been in a castle in Spain for all the drear outside weather had to do with its comfort. The man felt with an overwhelming emotion that he had reached a safe harbor,—the hinterland of peace.
Madelaine had been overseeing bedtime rites in the nursery. Nathan’s cigar had scarcely an inch of finely powdered ash before he heard his wife’s step on the stair. As though he had never been in the room before, as though it were all a dream, he turned his head as she came across.
She had put off her dinner frock and was clothed now in silken lingerie—soft, trailing, beautiful things that accentuated her height and perfect figure. Like a cameo against ebony she fitted into that room; had she not been its creator? She paused and adjusted her hair. Beautiful hands they were, that gleamed white and deft in the half-light,—slender, characterful hands for taste and resolute purpose.
“Junior was a perfect dear about going to bed,” she remarked as she gave her tresses a final pat and turned toward her husband. “I’ll flatter your conceit enough, Mr. Man, to say that he grows more like his dad every day.”
Her voice was vibrant and mellow, like the room and the house. Queer how thoughts enter a man’s mind. Nathan could not help contrasting Madelaine’s ordering of her home and child with Milly’s. Milly—given even the same setting—would have had books, papers, interrupted sewing, baby’s clothing—oh, damn Milly. A vast sense of fulfillment welled up in Nathan’s throat. It veiled his vision for a moment. What if he had missed Madelaine that morning on the Hill Top?
Madelaine saw her husband was pensive. She drew a low cushion across before Nathan could get it for her. She sank down at his feet, and with a faint expression of amusement, her dark eyes fastened on the flames. She remained that way for a time, then leaned her head over against the man’s knee. Nathan’s hand stole down and smoothed her hair.
“Happy, dear?” she asked, as she had asked a thousand nights.
“I’m very happy, Madelaine,” he said huskily, like a boy.
“It pleases me to have you say that,” was the woman’s comment.
“At the door, a few moments ago, I had to stand for a time and ‘drink in’ my ‘art drawing-room softly shaded at midnight.’ This sort of thing was what I’d dreamed of, so long, it—well, it hurt. Even now it hurts. But it’s a sweet hurt. That’s the ‘hick’ in me, I suppose. I can’t get over it.”
Madelaine smiled, a bit sadly. Reaching up, she drew the hand despoiling her hair down beside her cheek and patted it. (Milly would have reminded him curtly that he was “mussing her” or asked him if he thought she could do her hair a dozen times a day just for him to yank out of place—oh, damn Milly!)
“Nathan, dear,” the wife whispered, calm eyes looking deep in the flames, “pride in one’s home—appreciation of the efforts of loved ones to please, is never provincial; neither should a lifelong hunger for beautiful things hurt. I say that, Nathan, and yet you make me confess that you’ve not been alone in that hunger; you haven’t been the only one who has come into a heritage of such things, to know that sweet hurt. And remember too, dear, without earthly shadows we see no high lights. It’s the wealth of life to measure our happiness at last by the price attainment has cost us.”