The clouded sky permitted only a cold gray light, in which everything stood out with wonderful distinctness. Even the dried weeds with their shrivelled seed-vessels were sharply defined against the snow. The beech leaves which still clung to the trees were bleached and white, but the foliage on the lower branches of the oaks was almost black against the hillside. Not a breath of air rustled them. At times Leonard would stop his horse, and when the jingle of the sleigh-bells ceased the silence was profound. Every vestige of life had disappeared in the still woods, or was hidden by the snow.
"How lonely and dreary it all looks!" said Amy, with a sigh.
"That is why I like to look at a scene like this," Leonard replied. "When I get home I see it all again—all its cold desolation—and it makes Maggie's room, with her and the children around me, seem like heaven."
But oh, the contrast to Maggie's room that Amy looked upon after a ride over a wood-road so rough that even the deep snow could not relieve its rugged inequalities! A dim glow of firelight shone through the frosted window-panes of a miserable dwelling, as they emerged in the twilight from the narrow track in the growing timber. In response to a rap on the door, a gruff, thick voice said, "Come in."
Leonard, with a heavy basket on his arm, entered, followed closely by Amy, who, in her surprise, looked with undisguised wonder at the scene before her. Never had she even imagined such a home. Indeed, it seemed like profanation of the word to call the bare, uncleanly room by that sweetest of English words. It contained not a home-like feature. Her eyes were not resting on decent poverty, but upon uncouth, repulsive want; and this awful impoverishment was not seen in the few articles of cheap, dilapidated furniture so clearly as in the dull, sodden faces of the man and woman who kennelled there. No trace of manhood or womanhood was visible—and no animal is so repulsive as a man or woman imbruted.
The man rose unsteadily to his feet and said: "Evenin', Mr. Clifford.
Will yer take a cheer?"
The woman had not the grace or the power to acknowledge their presence, but after staring stolidly for a moment or two at her visitors through her dishevelled hair, turned and cowered over the hearth again, her elfish locks falling forward and hiding her face.
The wretched smoky fire they maintained was the final triumph and revelation of their utter shiftlessness. With square miles of woodland all about them, they had prepared no billets of suitable size. The man had merely cut down two small trees, lopped off their branches, and dragged them into the room. Their butt-ends were placed together on the hearth, whence the logs stretched like the legs of a compass to the two further corners of the room. Amy, in the uncertain light, had nearly stumbled over one of them. As the logs burned away they were shoved together on the hearth from time to time, the woman mechanically throwing on dry sticks from a pile near her when the greed wood ceased to blaze. Both man and woman were partially intoxicated, and the latter was so stupefied as to be indifferent to the presence of strangers. While Leonard was seeking to obtain from the man some intelligible account of their condition, and bringing in his gifts, Amy gazed around, with her fair young face full of horror and disgust. Then her attention was arrested by a feeble cry from a cradle in a dusky corner beyond the woman, and to the girl's heart it was indeed a cry of distress, all the more pathetic because of the child's helplessness, and unconsciousness of the wretched life to which it seemed inevitably destined.
She stepped to the cradle's side, and saw a pallid little creature, puny and feeble from neglect. Its mother paid no attention to its wailing, and when Amy asked if she might take it up, the woman's mumbled reply was unintelligible.
After hesitating a moment Amy lifted the child, and found it scarcely more than a little skeleton. Sitting down on the only chair in the room, which the man had vacated—the woman crouched on an inverted box—Amy said, "Leonard, please bring me the milk we brought."