The Argonauts of North Liberty | Page 7

sight more than you are.
You don't understand women, Ned. That's what's the matter with you."
It required all of Blandford's fond memories of his wife's conservative
habits, Puritan practicality, religious domesticity, and strong family
attachments, to withstand Demorest's dogmatic convictions. He smiled,
however, with a certain complacency, as he also recalled the previous
autumn when the first news of the California gold discovery had
penetrated North Liberty, and he had expressed to her his belief that it
would offer an outlet to Demorest's adventurous energy. She had
received it with ill- disguised satisfaction, and the remark that if this
exodus of Mammon cleared the community of the godless and
unregenerate it would only be another proof of God's mysterious
providence.
With the tumultuous wind at their backs it was not long before the
buggy rattled once more over the cobble-stones of the town. Under the
direction of his friend, Demorest, who still retained possession of the
reins, drove briskly down a side street of more pretentious dwellings,
where Blandford lived. One or two wayfarers looked up.
"Not so fast, Dick."
"Why? I want to bring you up to your door in style."
"Yes--but--it's Sunday. That's my house, the corner one."

They had stopped before a square, two-storied brick house, with an
equally square wooden porch supported by two plain, rigid wooden
columns, and a hollow sweep of dull concavity above the door,
evidently of the same architectural order as the church. There was no
corner or projection to break the force of the wind that swept its smooth
glacial surface; there was no indication of light or warmth behind its six
closed windows.
"There seems to be nobody at home," said Demorest, briefly. "Come
along with me to the hotel."
"Joan sits in the back parlor, Sundays," explained the husband.
"Shall I drive round to the barn and leave the horse and buggy there
while you go in?" continued Demorest, good-humoredly, pointing to
the stable gate at the side.
"No, thank you," returned Blandford, "it's locked, and I'll have to open
it from the other side after I go in. The horse will stand until then. I
think I'll have to say good-night, now," he added, with a sudden
half-ashamed consciousness of the forbidding aspect of the house, and
his own inhospitality. "I'm sorry I can't ask you in--but you understand
why."
"All right," returned Demorest, stoutly, turning up his coat- collar, and
unfurling his umbrella. "The hotel is only four blocks away--you'll find
me there to-morrow morning if you call. But mind you tell your wife
just what I told you--and no meandering of your own--you hear! She'll
strike out some idea with her woman's wits, you bet. Good-night, old
man! He reached out his hand, pressed Blandford's strongly and
potentially, and strode down the street.
Blandford hitched his steaming horse to a sleet-covered horse block
with a quick sigh of impatient sympathy over the animal and himself,
and after fumbling in his pocket for a latchkey, opened the front door.
A vista of well-ordered obscurity with shadowy trestle-like objects
against the walls, and an odor of chill decorum, as if of a damp but
respectable funeral, greeted him on entering. A faint light, like a cold

dawn, broke through the glass pane of a door leading to the kitchen.
Blandford paused in the mid-darkness and hesitated. Should he first go
to his wife in the back parlor, or pass silently through the kitchen, open
the back gate, and mercifully bestow his sweating beast in the stable?
With the reflection that an immediate conjugal greeting, while his horse
was still exposed to the fury of the blast in the street, would necessarily
be curtailed and limited, he compromised by quickly passing through
the kitchen into the stable yard, opening the gate, and driving horse and
vehicle under the shed to await later and more thorough ministration.
As he entered the back door, a faint hope that his wife might have heard
him and would be waiting for him in the hall for an instant thrilled him;
but he remembered it was Sunday, and that she was probably engaged
in some devotional reading or exercise. He hesitatingly opened the
back-parlor door with a consciousness of committing some
unreasonable trespass, and entered.
She was there, sitting quietly before a large, round, shining centre-table,
whose sterile emptiness was relieved only by a shaded lamp and a large
black and gilt open volume. A single picture on the opposite wall--the
portrait of an elderly gentleman stiffened over a corresponding volume,
which he held in invincible mortmain in his rigid hand, and apparently
defied posterity to take from him--seemed to offer a not uncongenial
companionship. Yet the greenish light of the shade fell upon a young
and pretty face, despite the color it extracted from