CHAPTER XXXVII
T was the second night after Henley's return to Chester. He was alon at the farm-house. It was a desolate place now, despite his constant self-assurance that he was accustomed, in his travels, to depend upon his own resources for company and entertainment, and would now find nothing lacking. He was in the kitchen cooking his supper in the same crude way he had cooked his meals in the Western mining-camps where he had once prospected.
He took down a rasher of bacon from a hook on a rafter, and with his big pocket-knife deftly cut some thin slices into a frying-pan on the smoky stove, and into the hot grease he broke some fresh eggs which he had purloined from a hen's nest in the stable-loft. He had a loaf of baker's bread, and he made some coffee of exactly the strength he liked. These things ready, he took them to the big, empty dining-room, resting the smoking frying-pan on an inverted plate on the clothless table. He sat down and ate and drank, but somehow not with his usual relish, for there was upon him a heavy sense of isolation from his kind. In spite of his effort to regard his condition in a philosophical light, he found himself unaccountably depressed. After all his youthful dreams of the domestic happiness which was to round out his life, it had ended in this. He could, he knew, go to live on the big plantation his wife had inherited, but it would be at the cost of the pride of manhood which had been his mainstay so far. She was acting out the part which had fallen to her, and what was there to justify him in altering his plans—in giving up the mode of life which had become a part of himself? Marriage, such as his had become, through no fault of his own, was an acknowledged failure.
Lighting his pipe, he blew out the lamp and sought the cooler air of the front porch. There was something depressing, rather than helpful, in the profound stillness of the night, the expanse of the star-filled heavens, the shadowy outlines of the foot-hills of the invisible mountains beyond. He heard his horses pawing in their stalls, old Wrinkle's pig grunting in its pen; the chickens roosting in a cherry-tree hard by chirped and flapped their wings as they jostled one another on the boughs; all nature seemed normal and at peace save himself. What was wrong? How could it go on? Where was it to end?
Presently his attention was drawn to a figure advancing along the front fence to the gate. The latch was lifted; it was opened, and the figure, with a light, confident tread, began to cross the grass toward him. It was Dixie Hart, and he rose from his chair and went to the steps, a throbbing sense of relief upon him.
She laughed softly, with a slight ring of affectation in her voice, as she paused with her foot on the lowest step. "You must excuse me, Alfred," she said. "I ought not to have come. I ought to have waited till to-morrow, but I'm getting to be a regular slave to Joe. He was worrying over you, and I was afraid he wouldn't go to sleep at all unless—unless I set his mind at rest. Children are so funny."
"What's wrong with the little chap?" Henley came down the steps and stood beside her. There was an inverted flour-barrel on the ground near her, and Dixie sat upon it, and swung her feet back and forth for a little while without seeming to have heard his question. He repeated it, bending toward her the better to see her face in the starlight.
"Oh, I hardly know how—how to say it." She was studying his face with a strange, hungry eagerness, which he failed to fathom. "Children are so odd, Alfred, and have so many fancies that they conjure up themselves. I reckon he's heard Ma and Aunt Mandy talking about—well, about the big piece of luck that has come to you all. You know women that have never had a windfall in any shape through their whole lives naturally make a lot of the good-fortune that comes to a neighbor, and little Joe has just set and listened to it all till—well, I reckon even you've changed from—from his plain friend to—well, something like a king in royal robes."