The last Saturday morning of February did not really dawn, for the discouraged light merely struggled with a snowstorm so dense that the rays only penetrated by refraction. A little before noon the fall ceased, but the sky would not relax, and scowled dark and sullen as if with the pain of its recent effort, the snow lay heavy on hill and lowland, covering land and water alike; and, lodging on the ice, completely obliterated the boundary of the usually assertive Moosatuck.
A few crows, cawing dismally, straggled toward what had been down stream from their cedar roosts, but all other sounds were muffled. It was almost noon before the village, headed by the first selectman with two yokes of oxen and as many ploughs, dug itself out; and a great snow-plough bound north cleared the rails for the morning mail train, now hours late. Meanwhile Mr. Sweezy, the host of the “Depot Hotel,” the wit of the reconstructed Hattertown, did a thriving trade with many usually abstemious citizens exhausted by the wielding of snow shovels, in beverages that did not bear the label “soft drinks,” and the ticket agent’s wife in the little booth struggled with and made more incoherent the reports that came over the snow-laden wires.
In spite of the storm and the desirability of daylight, there were four souls under the magnetic influence, as it were, of those bands of steel rails, that wished it were night. Two that they might meet once more, and two in order that a distance might reach between them that it seemed likely would end in a more complete separation.
Neither couple had ever seen or heard of the other, and yet the strands were fast weaving to draw them together and make it impossible to blot either from the other’s memory.
The first couple were man and maid, the second, man and wife.
Jim Bradley,—working his way slowly on the morning trip from New York in dire apprehension that the return trip would be hopelessly delayed as far as the interval at Hattertown within visiting hours was concerned,—and Miranda Banks, who looked from her watch-tower of the kitchen window over the snow waves that had enveloped all below, through which the various hay-ricks and chimney stacks emerged and seemed to drift like bits of wreckage in an Arctic sea. As she gazed she brought New England thrift to bear, and decided that hat and feathers would be an unseemly head covering on such a night, even if the meeting should be possible, and straightway put it by and began the freshening of an old hood with scraps of ribbon.
The second couple, John Hasleton and Helen, his wife, stood looking at each other across a table in the richly furnished library of one of the best modern houses of the city that was the Sky Line Railroad’s eastern terminal.
Everything about the room indicated a soothing combination of good taste augmented by money; the soft but not too profuse draperies and rugs, black oak shelves holding books of enticing title and suitably clothed, unique specimens of bronze and porcelain on table and shelf, prints upon the walls that through skill of dry point and gravers’ tools reflected the faces of the past,—poet, king, warrior, gallant, and court beauty, all given an added touch of reality and animation by the glowing colours the hearth fire flashed upon them. But on the two faces that gazed across the table lay an expression of animal hatred,—no, not animal, for that is direct and primitive, while human hatred is so compounded that one unimportant ingredient is often the yeast that ferments the whole inert bulk.
The man was openly furious, both in speech and mien; the woman held herself verbally within that purely technical and outward quality of self-control that is so exasperating to the opposite side, who feels that something is at stake besides success or defeat in argument.
This couple, of the relative ages of twenty-seven and thirty odd, had been married five years, spent largely in travel and social pleasures, satisfying their various tastes by acquisitions, and passing brief winters in the city house given by an indulgent father to his only daughter on her marriage.