“YOU SAY BEAUTIFUL THINGS!” HE REPLIED QUIETLY. “MY ROUGH QUARTERS ARE GLORIFIED FOR ME.”
Lydia stood up, with a quick indrawn breath. “I don’t know,” she said, “what it is. It seems as though I’d been here before. It looks so familiar to me—so good—” She went closer to where, still holding out the rain-coat, he stood on the other side of a table strewn with papers. She leaned on this, fingering a pen and looking at him with a shy eagerness. She was struggling, as so often, with an indefinable feeling which she had no words to express. “Don’t you know,” she went on, “every once in a while you see somebody—an old man or woman, perhaps, on the street cars, in the street—and somehow the face goes home to you. It seems as though you’d been waiting to see that face again. Well, it’s just so with this room. It has a face. I like it very—” She broke off, helplessly inarticulate before the confusion of her thoughts, and looked timidly at the man. She was used to kindly, amused laughter when she tried, stumblingly, to phrase some of the quickly varying impressions which made her life so full of invisible incidents.
But Rankin did not laugh, even kindly. His clear eyes were more than serious. They seemed to show him moved to an answering emotion. “You say beautiful things!” he replied quietly. “My rough quarters are glorified for me. I’ve been fond of them before—they’re the background to a good many inward struggles and a considerable amount of inward peace, but now—” He looked about him with new eyes, noting the dull gleam of gold with which the chestnut ceiling answered the searching flicker of the fire, the brighter sparkles which were struck out from the gilded lettering on the books which lined the walls, and the diamond-like flashes from the polished steel of the tools on the work-bench at the other end of the room. There was a pause in which the silence within the house brought out the different themes composing the rich harmony of the rain, the steady, resonant downpour on the roof, the sweet whispers of the dried grass under the torrent, the muted thuddings of the big drops on the beaten earth of the veranda floor, and the hurried liquid overflow of the eaves. It was still light enough to see the fine color of the leather that covered the armchairs, and the glossy black of a piano, heaped with a litter of music. Near the piano, leaning against the wall, a violoncello curved its brown crook-neck over the shapeless bag that sheltered it.
Lydia pointed to it. “You’re musical!” she said, as if she had made an important discovery.
Rankin roused himself, followed the direction of her gaze, and shook his head. “No; I can’t play a note,” he said cheerfully, laying the rain-coat down and going to look over the pile of overshoes in a box; “but I like it. My queer old great-aunt left me that ’cello. It had belonged to her grandfather. I believe being so old makes it quite valuable. The piano belongs to an old German friend of mine who has seen better days and has now no place to keep it. Two or three times a week he comes out here with an old crony who plays the ’cello, and they make music till they get to crying on each other’s necks.”
“Do you cry, too?” Lydia smiled at the picture.
Rankin came back to the fire with a pair of rubbers in his hand. “No; I’m an American. I only blow my nose hard,” he said gravely.
“Well, it must be lovely!” She sighed this out ardently, sinking back in her chair. “I love music so it ’most kills me, but I don’t get very much of it. I took piano lessons when I was little, but there were always so many other things to do I never got time to practice as much as I wanted to, and so I didn’t get very far. Anyhow, after I heard a good orchestra play, my little tinklings were worse than nothing. I wish I could hear more. But perhaps it’s just as well, Mother says. It always gets me so excited. I’m sure I should cry, along with the Germans.”