"Yes, and before this—last week some time in the market-place. He was looking at old Dinah's tub of white lilies when I noticed him, and to me came a curious thinking of how he was so unlike them, many people having for me flower-likeness, and this man, being of a yellow swarthiness and squat-browed, 'minded me soon of the toadstool you call a corpse-light."
"Perhaps we shall know some time; but here is home, and will he speak of it to Mistress White, do you think?"
"Not ever, I suppose," said Schmidt; and we went in.
The sight we saw troubled me. In the little back parlor, at a round mahogany table with scrolled edges and claw toes, sat facing the light Mistress White. She was clad in a gray silk with tight sleeves, and her profusion of rich chestnut hair, with its willful curliness that forbade it to be smooth on her temples, was coiled in a great knot at the back of her head. Its double tints and strange changefulness, and the smooth creamy cheeks with their moving islets of roses that would come and go at a word, were pretty protests of Nature, I used to think, against the demure tints of her pearl-gray silken gown. She was looking out into the garden, quite heedless of the older dame, who sat as her wont was between the windows, and chirruped now and then, mechanically, "Has thee a four-leaved clover?" As I learned some time after, one of our older clerks, perhaps with a little malice of self-comfort at the fall of his senior's principles, had, on coming home, told her laughingly all the story of the morning. Perhaps one should be a woman and a Friend to enter into her feelings. She was tied by a promise and by a sense of personal pledge to a low and disgraced man, and then coming to love another despite herself she had grown greatly to honor him. She might reason as she would that only a sense of right and a yearning for the fullness of a righteous life had made him give up his profession and fellows and turn aside to follow the harder creed of Fox, but she well knew with a woman's keenness of view that she herself had gone for something in this change; and now, as sometimes before, she reproached herself with his failures. As we came in she hastily dried her eyes and went out of the room. At dinner little was said, but in the afternoon there was a scene of which I came to know all a good while later.
Some of us had gone back to the afternoon work when Mr. Wholesome, who had lingered behind, strayed thoughtfully into the little back garden. There under a thin-leaved apricot tree sat Mistress White, very pretty, with her long fair fingers clasped over a book which lay face down on her lap. Presently she was aware of Richard Wholesome walking to and fro and smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe, then, as yet in England, called a churchwarden. These were two more than commonly good-looking persons, come of sturdy English breeds, fined down by that in this climate which has taken the coarseness of line and feature out of so many of our broods, and has made more than one English painter regret that the Vandyke faces had crossed the ocean to return no more.
Schmidt and I looked out a moment into the long vista where, between the rose-boughs bending from either wall under the apricot, we could see the gray silvery shimmer of the woman's dress, and beyond it, passing to and fro, the broad shoulders of the ex-captain.
"Come," I said, "walk down with me to the wharf."
"Yet leave me," he returned. "I shall wisely do to sit here on the step over the council-fire of my pipe. Besides, when there are not markets and flowers, and only a straight-down, early-afternoon sun, I shall find it a more noble usage of time to see of my drama another scene. The actors are good;" and he pointed with his pipe-stem down to the garden. "And this," he said, "is the mute chorus of the play," indicating a kitten which had made prey of the grand-dame's ball of worsted, and was rolling it here and there with delight.
"But," I answered, "it is not right or decent to spy upon others' actions."
"For right!" he said. "Ach! what I find right to me is my right; and for decent, I understand you not. But if I tell you what is true, I find my pleasure to sit here and see the maiden when at times the winds pull up the curtain of the leaves."