Old Nichola’s face, with its little unremembering eyes beneath her gray moss hair, seldom changes expression save to look angry. I think that Nichola, like the carriageman slamming the doors, relieves all emotion by anger. When I die I expect that in proof of her grief she will drive every one out of the house with the broom. Therefore I was not surprised to see her look at me now with a sudden frown and flush that should have terrorized me.
“Heaven over us!” she said, turning abruptly. “The silly folks that dream. I never dreamed a thing in my life. Do you want more pudding-sauce?”
“No,” I said gently, “no, Nichola.”
I was not deceived. Nichola knew it, and went in the pantry, muttering. But I was not deceived. I knew what she had meant. Nichola, that old woman whose life had some way been cast up on this barren coast near the citadel of the love of Pelleas and me; Nichola, who had lived lonely in the grim company of the duties of a household not her own; Nichola, at more than sixty, was welcoming the belief that the love which she never had inspired was some way about her all the time.
Where was my side of the argument to be held with Pelleas? Where, indeed? But I was glad to see it go. And I serenely put away until another time the case of Hobart Eddy.
All the evening I sat quietly before the hearth. There was no need for books. The drawing-room was warm and bright; supper for Pelleas was drawn to the open fire and my rose was on the tray. When I heard him close the front door it seemed to me that I must welcome him for us three, for Miss Willie and Nichola and me.
III
THE PATH OF IN-THE-SPRING
The case of Hobart Eddy had always interested us,—dear Hobart Eddy with whom matters stood like this: Heaven had manifestly intended him to be a Young Husband, and yet he was thirty-five and walked the world alone.
Pelleas and I were wont to talk of him before our drawing-room fire. Hobart Eddy, we were agreed, was one of the men who look like a young husband. By that I cannot in the least explain what I mean, but he was wont to bend above a book or lean toward a picture exactly as another man would say: “And how are you to-day, dear?” If he were to have entered a coach in which I was traveling I think that I should involuntarily have looked about for some girlish face to be lighting at his coming. Therefore we two had been wont to amuse ourselves by picturing, but without much hope, his possible wife; she must be so many things to him that we found it difficult to select any one in whom to rest our expectation, faint yet persistent. Though I knew no one save Pelleas himself who would have been as a lover so adorable, as a husband so tender, the problem was not quite so simple; for Hobart Eddy was a king of the social hour and a ruler of many.