He was sorry for himself,—to gauge the joy, the comfort, that the very sight of the humble and familiar room afforded him. The fire had been covered with ashes, but Mrs. Purvine promptly pulled out the coals and piled on the pine knots, and the white flare showed the low-ceiled apartment, the walls covered with the old advertisements; the puncheon floor; the many strings of pepper and hanks of yarn hanging from the beams, and the quilting-frame clinging to them like a huge bat; the two high beds; the glister of the ostentatious mirror; the prideful clock, silent on the shelf. As the interior became brilliantly illuminated, Mink looked suspiciously at the glass in the windows; he experienced a relief to note that the batten shutters were closed.
“I didn’t want nobody ter git a glimge o’ me,” he said, “’kase I dunno but what they mought try ter hold ye ’sponsible fur feedin’ me, cornsiderin’ I be a runaway.”
“They ain’t never ter goin’ ter find out ez ye hev been hyar now,” said Mrs. Purvine.
“They mought ax ye,” suggested Mink.
“Waal, lies air healthy.” Mrs. Purvine accommodated her singular ethics to many emergencies. “Church-yards air toler’ble full, but thar ain’t nobody thar ez died from tellin’ lies. Not but what I’m a perfessin’ member,” she qualified, with a qualm of conscience, “an’ hev renounced deceit in gineral; but ef ennybody kems hyar inquirin’ roun’ ’bout my business,—what I done with this little mite o’ meat, an’ that biscuit, an’ the t’other pot o’ coffee,—I answer the foolish accordin’ ter his folly, like the Bible tells me, an’ send him reji’cin’ on his way.”
Mink, his every fear relieved, thought it a snug haven after the storms that he had weathered, as he sat in Mrs. Purvine’s own rocking-chair, and felt the grateful warmth of the blaze. He had hardly hoped ever again to know the simple domestic comforts of the chimney-corner. The coffee put new life into him, and after he had eaten the hot ash cake and bacon, broiled on the coals, he took, at her insistence, another cup, and drank it as she sat opposite him near the hearth. In this last potation she joined him, having poured her coffee into a gourd, to save the trouble, as she explained, of washing another cup and saucer.
“How do Lethe keep her health?” he asked.
“Fust-rate,” said Mrs. Purvine. Her tone had changed. She looked at him speculatively from under the brim of her sun-bonnet, which she wore much of the time in the house. “She air peart an’ lively ez ever.”
His lip curled slightly. He was sarcastic and critical concerning Alethea’s mental attitude,—the reaction, perhaps, of much rebuke and criticism received at her hands.