"Phoebe would have taken excellent care of you!" she said, demurely, casting down her eyes to hide the gleam of mischief darting up to the surface. "She wanted to make brown gravy soup, and roast a fat duck for your dinner, with mince-pie—'to leave a nice taste in his mouth, ma'am.' And she persists in the belief that a gargle of red-pepper tea, with mustard-draughts upon your feet, and a cayenne poultice about your throat 'would pull you through,' when doctor's stuffs fail. As to society, your cousin, or, maybe, Dr. Baxter would have come in to cheer you up. What a godsend a big linen sheet would be to the good President, on a day like this, with a listener who is hors du combat with a hoarse cold!"
"I have not needed to be cheered up, since I saw the first glimpse of your face, this morning!" answered Roy, unguardedly. Conscious that he was trenching upon forbidden ground, he diverted the conversation. "What a flow of spirits Orrin has! I did hurt my throat laughing at his tragico-comico envy of my surroundings. I wish he had a home, one like this, if it were shared by a congenial companion, a woman who was more nearly his equal, mentally and morally, than the one he has chosen. He would be much happier than he can hope to be in the splendid pile he calls by that name."
"He seems perfectly satisfied with wife and house," returned Jessie, dryly. "And the marriage was certainly one of preference on Miss Sanford's part. Not that I admire or like her, and I know her better than you do. But I am persuaded that we waste our pity when we expend it on either of them."
They chatted, then, of various matters in the familiar style in which their conversations were generally carried on, until the day closing in about them, the fire spread a mellow radiance over the area immediately around it; the white bed and the noble head laid high on the pillows; upon Jessie's earnest face and crown of raven hair. It was the hour and the scene for the confidential talk of husband and wife; the outpouring of true soul to true; the only unrestrained heart-communion this side the Land where subterfuge and disguise are unknown; speech as far more excellent and satisfying than the language of unwedded lovers as the perfume from the unfolded lily surpasses that which steals from the bud.
Between these two, love was neither named nor hinted at. The wife's hands lay crossed upon her knees, and the husband did not offer to hold or touch them, or stroke the beautiful hair with which the betrothed had toyed unrebuked. It was an anomalous intimacy, the restraints and courtesies of which would have been laughed at as affectations, if the story of them were not totally discredited by the world outside "the great white veil" that shut them into their home,—theirs in name and in fact.
Jessie got up, at length, stepping over the carpet without rustle or jar, "the poetry of motion," thought the looker-on, and laid more coals upon the fiery mass in the grate. Many-colored flames shot up through and darted, like living serpents, along the pile; the low crackling and hissing of the igniting lumps awoke a cricket in the chimney-corner. Jessie, kneeling on the rug, glanced over her shoulder, on hearing the cheery chirp, and smiled at Roy.
"You don't treat the crickets on your hearth as Gruffand Tackleton boasted that he did—'crunch 'em, sir!' I like to hear the little busybodies—don't you?"
Without rising, when she had seemed to hearken for a while, she began to sing. Roy had not heard a note from her, even in church, since their marriage, and he held his breath, lay motionless, lest she should awaken from her reverie. It was an old ballad she was crooning—half Scotch, and with a thought of pathos in the melody, although the words were not plaintive.
"Tis rare to see the morning bleeze,
Like a bonfire, frae the sea;
'Tis fair to see the burnie kiss
The lip o' the flowery lea.