"I was thinkin' ez ye mought ez well," she replied. Her answer was not so ungracious as irrelevant. He was a man of keen intuitions, and he was realising that their thoughts did not meet. She spoke of somewhat else than the storm. He was not a well-bred man in any sense. The impersonations of the stage comprised his tuition of conduct and courtesy, but he had the veneer which even the observation of the customs of gentility afford, the manners of the street, the trains, the theatre, and, as she threw down the bars of the fence and came into the road, he lifted his hat again, and prepared to walk by her side, and proposed to carry her pail. She said nothing. She only gave him a wide, uncomprehending stare, then fell into the road several paces behind him. For his life he could not avoid turning, and slackening his gait, that she might come up alongside.
"Keep right ahead," she said severely, and thus admonished he took up his line of march for the cabin on the hill.
She herded him along as a canine guardian of a flock might regulate the progress of a stray sheep. Once he again stepped instinctively to one side of the path in the expectation that she would join him, but she instantly crossed to the same side, and kept the distance the same between them, some two paces, even when the drops began to fall, and he quickened his gait to a speedy run. Only a short interval elapsed before they were at the bars of the pasture fence, which were already on the ground, and traversing the absolutely bare and hard-trodden dooryard to a log cabin of a most uninviting aspect.
He had scant opportunity to mark its details till he was on the rickety little porch where, looking over his shoulder, he had a cursory glimpse of its stereotyped features—strange enough to him; the wood-pile, situated on a sea of chips; the bee-gums, ranged along the fence; the grindstone; the ash-hopper; the rooting pigs in a corner; the cow, standing in a shed at one side waiting to be milked; a good strong waggon also under that shelter; a bevy of poultry, big and little, pecking about the door; a dozen curs of low degree noisily yelping around him, with so spurious an affectation of fierceness that it could not impose even on a stranger's fears; and a big bulldog, of a most ferocious silence, slowly dragging a block and chain from under the house. Infinitely incongruous the whole seemed with the imperial, august aspect of the purple, storm-dominated mountains beyond and the smiling serenity of the far sunlit valleys, their variant tones of green enriched by the burnished golden afternoon glamours, and by the silver glintings of the river coursing through the coves in the distance. The next moment the clouds fell like a curtain before them all. The thunder pealed; the torrents descended; the dooryard was a network of puddles, and the clamorous beat of the rain on the roof made the room into which he was ushered resound like a drum.
CHAPTER II
Hilary Lloyd had never seen aught like this apartment. The beams of the low, unplastered ceiling, brown with smoke and age, were hung with strings of red peppers and bunches of herbs; the two beds, high and plump, were covered with gay patchwork quilts of marvellous design; the vast fireplace—he could hardly believe his eyes when he marked the clay-and-stick materials of its construction—looked as if it had been built by some big bird; the quaint pots, and ovens, and skillets, and trivets ranged in one corner he appraised as cooking utensils, but their like he had never before beheld; for a moment he did not recognise the use of a queer box-like cradle, which a faded young woman, with a snuff-brush in her mouth, was rocking with one foot, delegated to maternal duty, while she sat staring with lack-lustre eyes at the advent of the stranger with the daughter of the house.
"Hi!" he exclaimed delightedly. "Hello, Baby!" He did not wait to make sure of his welcome or for any formalities of introduction. He pounced down on the cradle, yanked out the infant from the coverlets, tossed it up to the ceiling, and then set it on the tall mantelpiece, holding it there with both hands to take a good look at it, while the members of the family stood around in wonder. Whether the child fancied that it had already met the showman and mistook his identity, whether this boisterous method of address accorded with its undeveloped sense of manners, whether the nap to which it had been consigned were compulsory and it rejoiced in its release, it responded genially to the demonstration in the spirit in which this was tendered. It was an attractive object as it sat on the high mantelpiece and flopped its very fat legs to and fro, frankly exhibited by its short pink calico skirt, and laughed widely with two pearly white teeth all agleam in a very red mouth. It had red hair, curling in very seductive ringlets about a fair brow, and its big blue eyes were as merry as a clown's. At every jocose movement of Lloyd's thumbs on its fat stomach, tickling it surreptitiously as he held the child on its perch, it burst into repeated peals of infantile laughter, and no one cared how hard the rain came down, or listened to the thunder roll.
"By George, you're a peach! you're a daisy!" cried Lloyd hilariously.
"Be you uns a family man, stranger?" a high vibratory voice queried, and Lloyd glancing down beheld at one side of the fire an ancient wrinkled face, surrounded by the crinkled ruffle of a great white cap, a venous hand, holding a pipe of strong tobacco at arm's length, and a thin bent figure attired in a blue and white checked homespun gown, with a little red plaid shoulder shawl.
"Good-evenin', madam," he said, snatching off his hat—one hand could hold the baby. "Family man?—nope!" he replied emphatically, and he shook his head sagely. "The kind of biz I'm in don't give a feller much chance at the domestic altar—winter and summer, night and day, on the go. As to the lydies—they ain't disposed to marry a man on the road."