She moved to and fro with set lips and white face and shot no single glance in the direction of her master. The womanly instinct for grace and neatness, that not the most debased intellect altogether foregoes, led her to give what order to the arrangement of the meal its poor accessories allowed.
When all was finished, she went softly from the room and closed the door.
Mr. Tuke did not permit a certain pity in his heart for this tender bud he had so lacerated to interfere with his appetite. But, his dinner over, he fell, as men will, to a more genial view of circumstances, and, as he sipped his wine, was inclined to regret his precipitancy of the morning.
“Yet, after all,” he thought, “the monstrosities were incompatible with any forms of feminine attractiveness, and she will soon learn to find her pleasure in more wholesome interests.”
He laughed, reviewing the items of the hideous collection.
“From the gallows!” quoth he. “And a relic of twenty years standing! And did she let the rest of the good gentleman lie—only plucking the head, like a withered medlar, from the stalk it dropped with? I am made a receiver of stolen property, by Gad—Herodias to some bloody cut-purse! What a dreary-minded wench, and what a pretty!”
The sweet old wine flushed his brain with a glamour of roses. He was inclined to take a more humorous view of his state and position.
No doubt, withheld for the time being from considerations of worldliness, he felt that relapse from reclaimed barbarism which, coming to us all in certain moods and before certain aspects of nature, restores us momentarily to the primitive joy in life untamed and unmalignant, that is our proper heritage.
After all, it is not for the trimmed parterres of existence to yield those glad surprises that are the basis of our yearning to the immortal. Who ever, wandering in an ordered garden, lost himself in a luminous mist of paganism?
Here, the infinite possibilities of Nature were before him—the search for her glimmering and elusive shrine in an endless variety of thickets. He would slough the skin of conventions, and, plunging naked into the green glooms of enchantment, pursue the way from which only is hedged off by leafiness the menacing face of Death. More than this, work—the work that should be in touch with that of the great Mother, adapting her harmonies, imitating her lines—appealed to him with sudden force, so that he was to find a purpose in living that he had never guessed at hitherto. He was fascinated—absorbed in a dream of sun and woodlands and the mossy sparkle of innocent springs.