“Mrs. Warmington!” he called, very gently.
No answer, of course.
“Are you asleep?” more gently still.
His housekeeper’s afternoon doze was a very common occurrence apparently, for he uttered a little petulant sound, and disappeared into the kitchen. In the dusk of a wet afternoon the girl’s ruse had succeeded perfectly. But the obscurity which had favored her was not equally kind to him, for Olivia heard much chinking of china and clattering of plate before he re-entered the room. Instead of going through to his own domain, however, he stood still between the fireplace and the door, and Olivia, not daring to look, guessed that he was eating. Trembling as she was with the fear of discovery, it seemed to her a long time before she heard him take up the poker and proceed very noiselessly to break the red-hot coals. She seized the opportunity to turn her head a little, and to steal a frightened glance at him through her eyelashes. He had on the shabbiest of threadbare and ragged house coats, and was hungrily eating bread and cheese and a piece of dry and crumbling cake. When he had built up the fire to please him, he dragged an old church hassock from under the table, and seating himself on it, drew as near to the grate as possible, and went on with his improvised meal.
He was so close to Olivia that she could detect the coaly smell which constant contact with his mining parishioners had imparted to his old clothes; so close that she felt that he was cold as well as hungry; so close that his hair brushed Mrs. Warmington’s brown stuff gown as he bent forward, with his elbows on his knees, and looked into the fire.
And as they sat thus, in the darkening twilight, side by side, he unconscious of her presence, she grew less afraid that he should discover it, altogether less anxious for the safety of her disguise. Her thoughts turned instead to consideration of his loneliness. What a cheerless existence was implied in this creeping up to the side of a rather cold and cross-grained old woman for warmth and companionship! The close contact seemed to help Olivia to feel her way into the mind of the solitary man. She pictured him innocent, laboring under a charge which for some unaccountable reason he was unable to refute; she pictured him guilty, torn with remorse, and working out a weary expiation. In the latter case, she began to feel, even more strongly than before her interview with Mrs. Warmington, that the horror of the deed was swallowed up in compassion for the doer. When he had finished his very frugal dinner, he sat so still that she was able to open her eyes and so gain all the information concerning the state of his mind which a careful study of the back of his head could impart. He was dejected, weary, unhappy; probably smarting still, so she told herself, from the pain her step-mother’s treatment had caused him. Presently he rested his head on his left hand, and so came nearer still to her. She could feel that she was trembling from the force of an aching pity, and that her hands seemed to tingle with the wish to lie with consoling touch on his bent head. She had forgotten Mrs. Warmington and the dry clothes—forgotten to wonder how she was going to get out of the house and home again without discovering herself to Mr. Brander. She soon discovered, however, that her feelings were more acute than those of the object of her pity; for his head tilted slowly further and further in her direction until at last it rested on her knee. Mr. Brander, who, after a fierce battle with certain very unclerical feelings, had tried to subdue the mind to the flesh by a long stretch over the hills, had succeeded in tiring himself out.
He was fast asleep.
And if he had but known it, he might have had sweeter dreams than he was used to. For the resting-place he had found was the creature who cared most about him of any in the world.
Olivia had an inkling of this, and it made the touch of her hand almost motherly as she bent down and held it very, very gently just near enough to feel his hair against her fingers. Only thirty-four or thereabouts, and his hair so grey! She could dare now, as he slept, to bend right down, and to see by the firelight how thickly the white threads grew among the dark behind his ears and near the temples. So curly his hair was, she noticed; quite soft, too, and silky, like a child’s: quite out of keeping with the worn, lined face, that looked so sad and so old as the dancing flames threw deep shadows upon it. And her fingers moved involuntarily through the wavy mass, as she thought, as women will, that there had been a time, long ago, when he lay, a helpless child, depending on the kindness of a woman. And she tried to fancy what that poor mother would have felt if she had known what evil rumors would some day darken the name of her curly-haired boy. Olivia was by nature more impulsive and passionate than sentimental; therefore these unaccustomed feelings and fancies instead of finding vent in a gentle sigh, made her breast heave and her eyes fill, until a broken whisper slipped through her trembling lips—
“Poor mother—poor son!”