“For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and undreamlike person? I do. And now, since you will not put me quite at my ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly ‘chaperoned’ here, I must inform you that my father waits hard by—is, as my riotous young brother says, ‘without on the mat.’”
“I am very glad,” he replied with more politeness than exactness.
“That I was duly escorted, or that my father is ‘without on the mat’? ... However, you do not appear glad one way or the other. And now I must explain our business. It is to ask your company at dinner (do consider yourself honoured—actually a formal dinner party in the Rockies!) to meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our famous Viking and Sunburst.... But you are expected to go out where my father feeds his—there, see—his horse on your ‘trim parterre.’ And now that I have done my duty as page and messenger without a word of assistance, Mr. Roscoe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that you will be vis-a-vis to his excellency?” She lightly beat the air with her whip, while I took a good look at the charming scene.
Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant. He understood too well the source of such gay social banter. He knew it covered a hurt. He said to her: “Is this Ruth Devlin or another?”
And she replied very gravely: “It is Ruth Devlin and another too,” and she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes were troubled.
He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but, after a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he came. “And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?” she said; “and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and field?”
His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch of mock irony: “The sailor shall play his part—the obedient retainer of the house of Devlin.”
“Oh,” she said, “you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished satire on a woman.” And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had ever happened to her.
“No, indeed no,” he replied, “though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am malicious—just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: ‘Rome turned upon itself.’”
“But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of it. Yours did not seem applied to yourself,” was her slow answer, and she seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.