II
The roast was burned. Dr. Lowell, at the head of the table, carved and dispensed it, with sly chuckles. His mild blue eyes beamed through his spectacles, and he kept up the slow flow of conversation, now addressing the minister, who sat alone on one side of the table, now Captain Carlin, who sat with Mary on the other side; and sending propitiatory glances at his wife, who loomed opposite, stonily indignant. She was outraged at having her dinner spoiled—in addition to everything else. And if looks could have done it, the whole company, except the minister, would have been annihilated.
Yes, her husband too. This was one of the times when he exasperated her beyond endurance. How ridiculous he was, with his perpetual good-humour, his everlasting jokes! As he carved the leathery beef he made a point of asking each person, "Will you have it well-done, or rare?" And then he would wink at her. She glared back at him, looking like a block of New England granite, as she was.
It was strange that in a long life together she had not been able to crush the light-mindedness out of that man. But she had not even made a church member of him. He treated the minister as he did anybody else, with gentle courtesy—beneath which, if you knew him well, you might suspect a sparkle of amusement. He laughed at everything, everybody! At times she suspected him of being an atheist. He had said that he was too busy correcting God's mistakes in people's bodies to think about their souls, or his own. Mrs. Lowell would not have dared repeat this remark to the minister, for if she had an atheist in the family she would conceal him to the last gasp, as she would a forger.
Whenever she spoke, during this meal, she addressed herself pointedly to the minister, for she was above being hypocritical or pretending that Captain Carlin's presence was welcome to her. From the deep respect of her manner toward the Reverend Mr. Robertson, he might have been a very venerable personage indeed. But he was a young man, under thirty and at first glance insignificant—slight and plain. His straw-coloured hair was smoothed back from a brow rather narrow than otherwise, his light eyebrows and lashes gave no emphasis to his grey-blue eyes, his complexion was sallow, his mouth straight and rather wide. Perhaps Mrs. Lowell's manner merely indicated respect to the cloth.
But when Hilary Robertson spoke, people listened to him—whether he was in his pulpit or in a chance crowd of strangers. Sometimes on the street, people would turn and look at him, at the sound of his voice. It had a deep, low-toned bell-like resonance. The commonest words, spoken in that rich voice, took on colour, might have an arresting power. Perhaps this remarkable organ accounted for Hilary Robertson as a minister of religion. No, it was only one of his qualifications.
A second glance was apt to dwell on his face with attention. There were deep lines from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth and across the forehead and between the eyebrows. The pale-coloured eyes had a luminous intensity, and the mouth a firm compression. A fiery irritable spirit under strong control had written its struggle there.
As he sat quietly, eating little, speaking less, but listening, glancing attentively at each of the family in turn and at Captain Carlin, only an uncommon pallor showed that he was feeling deeply. No one—not Mrs. Lowell, though she suspected much, not Mary—no one knew what the return of Carlin meant to Hilary Robertson. Two people at that table would have been glad if Carlin never had come back. Mrs. Lowell would have denied indignantly that she wished any ill to Laurence Carlin—only she did not want her daughter to marry a nobody, of unworthy foreign descent. But the minister faced the truth and knew that he, Hilary Robertson, sinner, had hoped that Laurence Carlin would die in battle; that when his imagination had shown him Carlin struck down by a bullet, he felt as a murderer feels. His heart had leaped and a deep feeling of solace had filled it, to think that Carlin might be out of his way. Why not, where so many better men had died? Why must just this man, whom his judgment condemned, come back to cross the one strong personal desire of his life, his one chance of happiness? Mary belonged to him already, in a sense—he shared the life of her soul, its first stirring was due to him. Not a word of love had ever been spoken between them. She was betrothed, he could not have spoken to her. But all the same he felt that only a frail bond held her to the other—the bond of her word and of a feeling less intense than the spiritual sympathy between her and himself.... But now it was all over—Carlin had come back and she would marry him. And a soul just beginning to be awakened to eternal things would perhaps slip back into the toils of the temporal and earthly....
Dr. Lowell asked questions about Washington city, the great review of the army, about General Grant, and Sherman and the new President. Carlin answered rather briefly, his natural buoyancy suppressed by the hostility of two of his auditors. But this he felt only vaguely, his happiness was like a bright cloud enfolding him, blurring his eyes. The other people were like shadows to him, he was really only conscious of Mary there beside him. He would have liked to be silent, as she was.