As the rain beat against the windows and the evening fell, the trio thought many a loitering-place less attractive than the chimney-nook behind the stove in Aunt Chaney's kitchen, regaled with her stories as she cooked, and now and then a spoonful of some dainty, administered with the curt command, "Open yer mouf, ladies!"
Thus it was that the library was almost deserted when Colonel Ashley called more than once. Captain Baynell he found, and occasionally the judge also. He always selected the afternoons, and after a time he was wont to glance about with such a keen, predatory expression that the truth began to dawn vaguely on Captain Baynell. Vanity is so robust an endowment that it had been easy enough for the recipient of these visits to appropriate wholly the interest that prompted them. It struck Baynell with an indignant sense of impropriety when he began to remember Ashley's ardent desire to meet Mrs. Gwynn, his admiration of the glimpse of her beauty that had once been vouchsafed him, and to connect this with his manifestation of good comradeship and eager solicitude concerning his friend's health. Baynell was infinitely out of countenance for a moment.
"Why, confound the fellow! He doesn't care a fig whether I live or die." Then he was sensible of a rising anger, that he should be made the subterfuge of a systematic endeavor to casually meet Mrs. Gwynn,—likely to prove successful in the last instance. For lowering clouds overspread the sky when Ashley entered late in the afternoon, and a storm so violent, so tumultuous, broke with such sudden fury that it was impossible for him to take leave had he desired this. Baynell knew that nothing was further from his comrade's wish. Ashley reconciled himself so swiftly to Judge Roscoe's insistence that he should remain to tea that it might seem he had come for that express purpose.
"Dat man," soliloquized the "double-faced Janus" impressively, "mus' hev' smelled de perfume of dat ar flummery plumb ter de camp. Chaney wuz jes' dishin' up when he ring de door-bell!"
CHAPTER IV
Now, face to face with the long-sought opportunity, Colonel Ashley was grievously disappointed. A woman—young, singularly beautiful, dressed like a middle-aged frump, with the manners of a matron of fifty, staid, reserved, inattentive, uninterested!
The incongruity affected him like a discourtesy; its rarity had no attractions for him, nor in the slightest degree roused his curiosity. He had expected charm, glow, responsiveness, coquetry,—all the various traits that attend on beauty and youth. Even a conscious hauteur would have had its special grace and piqued an effort to win her to cordiality, but here was the inexpressiveness, the indifference, of an elderly woman, one tired, despondent, done with the world—civil, indeed, as behooved her rearing, her station, but unnoting—really apart from all the interests of the present and all thought for the future. And, certainly, Mrs. Gwynn's life might be considered already lived out in her past.
The rain fell in sheets, and Colonel Ashley wished himself back in camp, despite the flavor of the flummery. As they sat at table, now and again a vivid glare of lightning revealed through the windows the expanse of falling water, closely wrought as a silver-gray fabric, and the flash of white foam from its impact with the ground. The house seemed to rock with the reverberations of the bursts of thunder.