He was thinking of her and the mile walk she would have to take with him into the very teeth of the buffeting gale when this visit was over. He sighed. She had come to this wretched little town from a great city where there were horse-cars and cable-trains and hacks without number; where houses and flats were warm and snug; where the shrieking storms from off the lake were defied by staunch brick walls; where the nights were short and the days were told by hours; where there were lights and life, restaurants and theaters, music and dancing. He thought of the cheap but respectable boarding-house on the cross-street just off Lincoln Park and the warm little room on the third floor where he had lived and studied for two full years. It was in this house that he had met Josephine Judge. She was the daughter of the kindly widow who conducted the boarding-house—a tall, slim girl who used slang and was gay and blithesome, and had ambitions!
Ambitions? She wanted to become an actress. She was stage-struck. It was quite wonderful, the way she could mimic people, and “recite,” and sing the sprightly songs from “Pinafore,” “La Mascotte,” “Fra Diavolo,” “Fatinitza,” “The Bohemian Girl,” and could quote with real unction the choicest lines of “Rosalind,” “Viola,” “Juliet” and other rare young women of a flowery age. And she had made him and all the rest of the boarders laugh when she “took off” Pat Rooney, Joe Murphy, the Kernells, Gus Williams, “Oofty Gooft” and the immortal “Colonel Mulberry Sellers.”
He was not a theatre-going youth. He had been brought up with an abhorrence for the stage and all its iniquities. So he devoted himself, heart and soul, to the saving of the misguided maiden, with astonishing results. They fell in love with each other and were married. He often smiled—and he smiled even now as he gazed pensively out into the night—when he recalled the alternative she proposed and continued to defend up to within a day or two of the wedding. She wanted him to give up the pulpit and go on the stage with her! She argued that he was so good-looking and had such a wonderful voice, that nothing—absolutely nothing!—could keep him from becoming one of the most popular “leading men” in the profession. She went so far as to declare that he would make a much better actor than a preacher anyhow—and, besides, the stage needed clean, upright young men quite as badly as the church needed them!
And now she was down here in this desolate little town, loyally doing her best to be all that a country parson’s wife should be, working for him, loving him,—and, if the truth must be told—surreptitiously delighting him with frequent backslidings to Pat and Joe and Gus, including occasional terpsichorean extravagances that would have got her “churched” if any one else had witnessed them.
He was always wondering what the people of Rumley thought of her. He knew, alas, what she thought of the people of Rumley. His heart swelled a little as he glanced over his shoulder and saw her patting the hand of the distracted Baxter. She was his Josephine, and she was a warm-hearted, beautiful creature who was bound to be misunderstood by these—He was conscious of a sudden, unchristian-like hardening of his jaws, and was instantly ashamed of the hot little spasm of resentment that caused it.
The political adversaries were now shouting at each other with all the ridiculous intensity of mid-campaign lunatics, and there was a great deal of finger-shaking and pounding of clenched fists upon open palms. Young Mr. Sage cringed as he turned his face to the window again, and if he had given utterance to his feelings he would have petrified the arguers by roaring:
“Oh, shut up, you jackasses!”
He drew back with an exclamation. The light fell full upon a face close to the window pane, a face so startling and so vivid that it did not appear to be real. A pair of dark, gleaming eyes met his for a few seconds; then swiftly the face was withdrawn, retreating mysteriously into the shadowy wall beyond the circle of light. He leaned forward and peered intently. Two indistinct figures took shape in the unrelieved darkness at the corner of the porch—two women, he made out, huddled close together, their faces barely discernible through the swirling veil of snow.
He experienced a queer little sensation of alarm, a foreboding of evil. The face—that of a person he had never seen before, some one strange to Rumley—was swarthy and as clean-cut as if fashioned with a chisel. It was framed in scarlet—a bright scarlet speckled with vanishing blotches of white.
He turned quickly and spoke to Sikes.