“It’s uncommonly quiet and peaceful, this camping out. As I have no other house to go to, since mine was burned down, it rather bridges over the gulf of appearances to say I am living in a log cabin by command of the most mighty Dr. Sam Jones.”
“And there is no loneliness like that of a half deserted house,” continued Pembroke, unconsciously dropping his voice in sympathy with the faint woodland murmur around them. “It seems to me at Malvern that I continually hear my mother’s voice, and my father’s footstep, and all the pleasant family commotion I remember. And Elizabeth—Cave, no woman I ever knew suffered like my sister—and she was not the woman to suffer patiently. Old Keturah tells me that my father would have yielded at any time after he saw that her heart and life were bound up in Waring—but she would not ask him—so while I was enjoying myself three thousand miles away, and only sad when I came home to Miles, Elizabeth and my father were fighting that dreary battle. Keturah says that everybody said she was sweetly and gently patient, but all night she would walk the floor sobbing and weeping, while my father below walked his floor. It killed them both.”
Cave had turned away his head. Who has watched one, dearly loved, waste and die for another, without knowing all there is of bitterness? And was Pembroke so forgetful? He was not, indeed—but he had begun telling of the things which troubled him, and because he could bear to speak of poor Elizabeth he thought that Cave could bear to hear it. But there was a pause—a pause in which Pembroke suddenly felt ashamed and heartless. Elizabeth’s death was much to him—but it was everything to Cave. So Pembroke continued, rather to excuse himself, “Your cabin in the woods is at least not haunted by the dead people you loved. Sometimes, when I go into my mother’s room and see everything as she left it—the mirror in which I have often seen her braid her hair—she had scarcely a gray lock in it when she died—I feel—I cannot describe to you what I feel.”
“You ought to marry,” remarked Cave, in a cold, quiet voice.
“Not I,” answered Pembroke, carelessly, glad to escape from the train he had himself started. “I suppose a man ought to marry some time or other—but forty is early enough. I wouldn’t mind waiting until I were fifty. At sixty a man is apt to make an infernal fool of himself.”
“How about Eliza Peyton—or Madame Koller—whom you followed here?”
Pembroke had lighted a cigar since they began talking, and had disposed of himself comfortably on the pine needles by the side of his friend. The silence was the unbroken silence of the autumn woods. There was not the faintest whisper of wind, but over their heads the solemn trees leaned together and rustled softly. A long pause came after Cave’s question. Into Pembroke’s sunburnt face a dark flush slowly mounted. It is not often that a man of his type, with his iron jaw and strong features, blushes—but this was a blush of consciousness, though not of shame.
“I did not follow her here,” he said. “But who believes me? I think the woman herself fancies I did follow her. As for that little haughty Olivia Berkeley, the girl gives me a look that is equivalent to a box on the ear every time Madame Koller is mentioned. If ever I marry, I shan’t take a woman of spirit, you may depend upon it. I shall take a placid, stout creature. An eaglet like Olivia Berkeley is well enough for a man to amuse himself with—but for steady matrimony give me a barnyard fowl.”
“God help you,” answered Cave piously.
“But what really brought me here—although I knew all the time that I ought not to be loitering in Europe, and would probably have come anyhow—was this poor devil, Bob Henry, in jail, charged with murdering Hackett, that scalawag the Hibbses brought here.”