CHAPTER IV. In Which Mrs. Blake's Eyes are Opened
Before the beauty of Maria's high magnanimity Christopher had felt himself thrust further into the abasement of his self-contempt. Had she met his confession with reproach, with righteous aversion, with the horror he had half expected, it is possible that his heart might have recoiled into a last expression of defiance. But there had been none of these things. In his memory her face shone moonlike from its cloud of dark hair, and he saw upon it only the look of a great and sorrowful passion. His wretchedness had drawn her closer, not put her further away, and he had felt the quiet of her tolerance not less gratefully than he had felt the fervour of her love. Her forgiveness had been of the grandeur of her own nature, and its height and breadth had appealed, even apart from her emotion, to a mind that was accustomed to dwell daily on long reaches of unbroken space. He had been bred on large things from his birth—large horizons, large stretches of field and sky, large impulses, and large powers of hating, and he found now that a woman's presence filled to overflowing the empty vastness of his moods.
Reaching the yard, he saw Tucker sitting placidly on his bench, and, crossing the long grass, he flung himself down beside him with a sigh of pleasure in the beauty of the scene.
"You're right, Uncle Tucker; it's all wonderful. I never saw such a sunset in my life."
"Ah, but you haven't seen it yet," said Tucker. "I've been looking at it since it first caught that pile of clouds, and it grows more splendid every instant. I'm not an overreligious body, I reckon, and I've always held that the best compliment you can pay God Almighty is to let Him go His own gait and quit advising Him; but, I declare, as I sat here just now I couldn't help being impertinent enough to pray that I might live to see another."
"Well, it's a first-rate one; that's so. It seems to shake a body out of the muck, somehow."
"I shouldn't wonder if it did; and that's what I told two young fools who were up here just now asking me to patch up their first married quarrel. 'For heaven's sake, stop playing with mud and sit down and watch that sunset,' I said to 'em, and if you'll believe it, the girl actually dropped her jaws and replied she had to hurry back to shell her beans while the light lasted. Beans! Why, they'll make beans enough of their marriage, and so I told 'em."
Tapping his crutch gently on the ground, he paused and sat smiling broadly at the sunset.
For a time Christopher watched with him while the gold- and-crimson glory flamed beyond the twisted boughs of the old pine; then, turning his troubled face on Tucker's cheerful one, he asked deliberately:
"Do you sometimes regret that you never married, Uncle Tucker?"