He smoked thoughtfully on awhile after this slight outburst of bitterness, amidst a silence that was presently broken by Mary.
“You’re fond of reading, aren’t you?” she inquired. “And music?”
His moody face cleared instantly, like the sun coming from behind a cloud.
“Aye! you just bet I am!” he said fervently. “I’ve read, and played, and sung every chance I’ve got—wherever I’ve been. Fond!—well, I should say I am. I fancy if it hadn’t been for that, I’d have gone to the devil long ago.”
He was sitting up on the grass, with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands. Neither of them spoke for a time and he, still gazing across at the distant “Rockies,” muttered, half unconsciously, to himself:
“No, just peace—that’s all I feel I want now. To have some steady job to work at, with a future, and a home ahead of it. Neither molesting, or being molested by any one.”
The girl leaned forward, listening wonderingly, as she watched the hard, clean-cut profile of his faraway, moody face, surprised to hear him ramble on so. He appeared to be entirely oblivious of her presence. He made a very long pause and then, when she thought he was thinking of something quite different, he suddenly said:
“I’m getting older now, and I’ve got more patience than I used to have but, all the same—I’ll take no abuse, back-lip, or stand for being imposed upon by any man. It’s been a word and a blow with me all my life, and I guess that’s the reason why I’m only a poor man today. For many’s the jackpot it’s landed me into. Aye! and many’s the good job I’ve had to quit through the same thing.
“Just peace!” he repeated again, dreamily. “You realize it in some of George Eliot’s tales of old-fashioned English country life, in Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ in Marie Corelli’s song of ‘The Lotus Lily.’ Ah, yes! she felt it when she wrote that beautiful thing in her Egyptian tale of ‘Ziska’:
“‘Oh, for the passionless peace of the Lotus-Lily!
It floats in a waking dream on the waters chilly,
With its leaves unfurled
To the wondering world,
Knowing naught of the sorrow and restless pain
That burns and tortures the human brain;
Oh, for the passionless peace of the Lotus-Lily!’”