All afternoon she drenched herself with soapsuds in the ferocity of her washing. By the time Jules returned with the boat, the lake was black as ink under a storm cloud, with glints of steel; a dull bar stretched diagonally across the water. Beyond that a whitening of rain showed against the horizon. Points of cedars on the opposite island pricked a sullen sky.
Clethera's tubs were under the trees. She paid no attention to what befell her, or to her grandmother, who called her out of the rain. It came like a powder of dust, and then a moving, blanched wall, pushing islands of flattened mist before it. Under a steady pour the waters turned dull green, and lightened shade by shade as if diluting an infusion of grass. Waves began to come in regular windrows. Though Clethera told herself savagely she not care for anything in de world, her Indian eye took joy of these sights. The shower-bath from the trees she endured without a shiver.
Jules sat beside Melinda to be comforted He wept for Honoré, and praised his boy, gasconading with time-worn boasts.
“I got de hang of him, and now I got to part! But de war will end, now Honoré have gone into it. His gran'fodder was such a fighter when de British come to take de island, he turn' de cannon and blow de British off. The gran'fodder of Honoré was a fine man. He always keep de bes' liquors and by wines on his sideboa'd.”
When Honoré had been gone twenty-four hours, and Jules was still idling like a boy undriven by his task-master, leaving the boat to rock under bare poles at anchor on the rise and fall of the water, Clethera went into their empty house. It contained three rooms, and she laid violent hands on male housekeeping. The service was almost religious, like preparing linen for an altar. It comforted her unacknowledged anguish, which increased rather than diminished, the unrest of which she resented with all her stoic Indian nature.
Nets, sledge-harness, and Honoré's every-day clothes hung on his whitewashed wall. The most touching relic of any man is the hat he has worn. Honoré's cap crowned the post of his bed like a wraith. The room might have been a young hermit's cell in a cave, or a tunnel in the evergreens, it was so simple and bare of human appointments. Clethera stood with the broom in one hand, and tipped forward a piece of broken looking-glass on his shaving-shelf. A new, unforeseen Clethera, whom she had never been obliged to deal with before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face. She was young, her skin had not a line. But it was as if she had changed places with her wrinkled grandmother, to whom the expression of complacent maidenhood now belonged.
As Clethera propped the glass again in place, she heard Jules come in. She resumed her sweeping with resolute strokes on the bare boards, which would explain to his ear the necessity of her presence. He appeared at the door, and it was Honoré!
It was Honoré, shamefaced but laughing, back from the war within twenty-four hours! Clethera heard the broom-handle strike the floor as one hears the far-off fall of a spar on a ship in harbor. She put her palms together, without flying into his arms or even offering to shake hands.