style="font-size:15px;"> “No,” she said, with a timid smile. “I only put it on just before you came. It's the one I used to wear in the ballroom scene in 'Gay Times in 'Frisco.' You don't know it, I know. I thought I would wear it tonight, and then,” she suddenly grasped his hand, “you'll let me put all these things away forever! Won't you, Josh? I've seen such nice pretty calico at the store to-day, and I can make up one or two home dresses, like Jane's, only better fitting, of course. In fact, I asked them to send the roll up here to-morrow for you to see.”
Mr. Rylands felt relieved. Perhaps his views had changed about the moral effect of her retaining these symbols of her past, for he consented to the calico dresses, not, however, without an inward suspicion that she would not look so well in them, and that the one she had on was more becoming.
Meantime she tried another piece of music. It was equally incongruous and slightly Bacchantic.
“There used to be a mighty pretty dance went to that,” she said, nodding her head in time with the music, and assisting the heavily spasmodic attempts of the instrument with the pleasant levity of her voice. “I used to do it.”
“Ye might try it now, Ellen,” suggested her husband, with a half-frightened, half-amused tolerance.
“YOU play, then,” said Mrs. Rylands quickly, offering her seat to him.
Mr. Rylands sat down to the harmonium, as Mrs. Rylands briskly moved the table and chairs against the wall. Mr. Rylands played slowly and strenuously, as from a conscientious regard of the instrument. Mrs. Rylands stood in the centre of the floor, making a rather pretty, animated picture, as she again stimulated the heavy harmonium swell not only with her voice but her hands and feet. Presently she began to skip.
I should warn the reader here that this was before the “shawl” or “skirt” dancing was in vogue, and I am afraid that pretty Mrs. Rylands's performances would now be voted slow. Her silk skirt and frilled petticoat were lifted just over her small ankles and tiny bronze-kid shoes. In the course of a pirouette or two, there was a slight further revelation of blue silk stockings and some delicate embroidery, but really nothing more than may be seen in the sweep of a modern waltz. Suddenly the music ceased. Mr. Rylands had left the harmonium and walked over to the hearth. Mrs. Rylands stopped, and came towards him with a flushed, anxious face.
“It don't seem to go right, does it?” she said, with her nervous laugh. “I suppose I'm getting too old now, and I don't quite remember it.”
“Better forget it altogether,” he replied gravely. He stopped at seeing a singular change in her face, and added awkwardly, “When I told you I didn't want you to be ashamed of your past, nor to try to forget what you were, I didn't mean such things as that!”
“What did you mean?” she said timidly.
The truth was that Mr. Rylands did not know. He had known this sort of thing only in the abstract. He had never had the least acquaintance with the class to which his wife had belonged, nor known anything of their methods. It was a revelation to him now, in the woman he loved, and who was his wife. He was not shocked so much as he was frightened.
“You shall have the dress to-morrow, Ellen,” he said gently, “and you can put away these gewgaws. You don't need to look like Tinkie Clifford.”
He did not see the look of triumph that lit up her eye, but added, “Go on and play.”
She sat down obediently to the instrument. He watched her for a few moments from the toe of her kid slipper on the pedals to the swell of her shoulders above the keyboard, with a strange, abstracted face. Presently she stopped and came over to him.
“And when I've got these nice calico frocks, and you can't tell me from Jane, and I'm a good housekeeper, and settle down to be a farmer's wife, maybe I'll have a secret to tell you.”
“A secret?” he repeated gravely. “Why not now?”
Her face was quite aglow with excitement and a certain timid mischief as she laughed: “Not while you are so solemn. It can wait.”
He looked at his watch. “I must give some orders to Jim about the stock before he turns in,” he said.
“He's gone to the stables already,” said Mrs. Rylands.
“No matter; I can go there and find him.”
“Shall I bring your boots?” she said quickly.
“I'll put them on when I pass through the kitchen. I won't be long away. Now go to bed. You are looking tired,” he said gently, as he gazed at the drawn lines about her eyes and mouth. Her former pretty color struck him also as having changed of late, and as being irregular and inharmonious.
As Mrs. Rylands obediently ascended the stairs she heaved a faint sigh, her only recognition of her husband's criticism. He turned and passed quickly into the kitchen. He wanted to be alone to collect his thoughts. But he was surprised to find Jane still there, sitting bolt upright in a chair in the corner. Apparently she had been expecting him, for as he entered she stood up, and wiped her cheek and mouth with one hand, as if to compress her lips the more tightly.
“I reckoned,” she began, “that unless you war for forgettin' everythin' in these yer goings on, ye'd be passin' through here to tend to your stock. I've got a word to say to ye, Mr. Rylands. When I first kem over here to help, I got word from the folks around that your wife afore you married her was just one o' them bally dancers. Well, that was YOUR lookout, not mine! Jane Mackinnon ain't the kind to take everybody's sayin' as gospil, but she kalkilates to treat folks ez she finds 'em. When she finds 'em lyin' and deceivin'; when she finds em purtendin' one thing and doin' another; when she finds 'em makin' fools tumble to 'em; playing soots on their own husbands, and turnin' an honest house into a music-hall and a fandango shop, she kicks! You hear me! Jane Mackinnon kicks!”
“What do you mean?” said Mr. Rylands sternly.
“I mean,” said Miss Mackinnon, striking her hips with the back of her hands smartly, and accenting each word that dropped like a bullet from her mouth with an additional blow—“I—mean—that—your—wife—had one—of—her—old—hangers-on—from—'Frisco—here—in—this very—kitchen—all—the—arternoon; there! I mean that whiles she was waitin' here for you, she was canoodlin' and cryin' over old times with him! I saw her myself through the winder. That's what I mean, Mr. Joshua Rylands.”
“It's false! She had some poor stranger here with a lame horse. She told me so herself.”
Jane Mackinnon laughed shrilly.
“Did she tell you that the poor stranger was young and pretty-faced, with black moustarches? that his store clothes must have cost a fortin, saying nothing of his gold-lined, broadcloth sarrapper? Did she say that his horse was so lame that when I went to get another he wouldn't WAIT for it? Did she tell you WHO he was?”
“No, she did not know,” said Rylands sternly, but with a whitening face.
“Well, I'll tell you! The gambler, the shooter!—the man whose name is black enough to stain any woman he knows. Jim recognized him like a shot; he sez, the moment he clapped eyes on him at the door, 'Dod blasted, if it ain't Jack Hamlin!'”
Little as Mr. Rylands knew of the world, he had heard that name. But it was not THAT he was thinking of. He was thinking of the camp-fire in
