Possibly it was because he himself performed his out-of-door duties well that he demanded, and felt he had the right to demand a similar perfection within doors. In fact, he drew the lines of demarkation between the masculine and feminine spheres of service so sharply that his sisters would have died before they would have asked his aid in any domestic difficulty. Faithfully he met every obligation he considered to be within a man’s province,—bringing wood, coal, and kindlings with the courtesy of a courtier; but the fowl browning in the oven might have burned to ebony before Martin would have lifted a finger to rescue it. To 36 oversee the cooking was not his duty. No autocrat ever reigned with more absolute power than did Martin Howe; and no monarch ever maintained a more sincere faith in his divine right to rule. He simply set the crown of sovereignty upon his own brows because he believed it to belong there. And had his faith in his destiny wavered, there were always his slaves Mary, Eliza, and Jane to bow their foreheads in the dust at his feet and murmur with true Oriental submissiveness:
| Oh, King, Live Forever! |
His lordship being thus acknowledged, was it any wonder that Martin cast about himself a mantle of aloofness and dignity and rated as trivial the household routine and petty gossip of his sisters? When he listened to their chatter at all it was with the tolerance of a superior being toward a less intelligent rabble.
Hence when he returned from the field one night and was greeted by the breathless announcement that a strange young woman with her trunk had just arrived at the Websters’, it was characteristic of him to quiet the excited 37 outburst of his sisters with the chilling and stately reply:
“What does it matter to us who she is, or what she’s come for? Ellen Webster’s visitors are no concern of ours.”
CHAPTER III
LUCY
In the meantime the being whom Martin had dismissed with this majestic wave of his hand stood in the middle of the Webster kitchen, confronting the critical eyes of its mistress.