The mention of Selby's name stirred old associations which time and adventure had long deprived of bitterness; and now he looked back with only a plaintive yearning to the happiness which might have been, if he had had his way, and pitied himself in his solitary estate. If he had married, what wealth of love was his to have bestowed! And how he could have enjoyed being cosseted and purred to by a wife of his own, instead of depending on hirelings whose servile smile betrayed the hollowness of their attentions. The smoking-room at his club, and his own rooms at the hotel rose before his eye in their dull solid unsatisfying comfort, and he could not but compare them with the clean, unsmoky freshness and brightness of the woman's world around him, and confess the two as different and apart as the close warm stuffiness of a winter sick-room, from the clear keen day out of doors in early spring.
"What ails you, gineral? You look that glum you might have been hearing of your brother's death," said Martha, making room for him on the garden seat where she sat.
"I am well, madam. I heard you allude just now to a Mr. Selby as having married the sister of Mrs. Bunce. Are you acquainted with the lady?"
"To be sure I am. She is Ralph's aunt. A dear good soul as ever lived, but real sorrowful-like and sickly now--she that used to be as peart and blooming as the flowers in May. It's heart-breaking to see her. She has never got over the loss of her child ten years ago, and it has fairly broke her up. Her hair is white like a woman of sixty. She might be older than Judy, there; and yet she is just one age with Ralph--not forty yet."
"I recollect her very distinctly in her brother Gerald's lifetime--a beautiful young lady. That was before the war; the first time I was in Canada."
"Were you in Canady then? But to be sure you were! You were Gerald's friend, and are a trustee of his property. Ah, yes! I recollect. And you were----"
But she did not say any more; only she looked in his face with a new interest, and what would have been a kind and sympathizing smile if good manners had not restrained the manifestation. Nothing awakens the interest of a good woman so warmly as a story of true enduring love. If the love have been unrequited, its constancy seems but the more rarely and touchingly beautiful. It is something to be dealt with delicately, and spoken to in low, soft, ambiguous words that may soothe but will not flutter the tender thing. It was such love that Martha dreamed of in her youth, and humbly hoped for; and when Ralph, young, eager and impetuous, found her in the New England homestead, she dreamed the divine influence had descended to stir the hushed and waiting waters of her life. She cheerfully left home and kindred to dwell with the man who loved her, and she had been his true and devoted wife. Yet often when she recalled the enthusiasm of that early time it seemed to her that the love-feast had been but a Barmecide's banquet after all, or like the husks with which another adventurer had to stay his hunger when he left the shelter of the paternal home. She lavished the wealth of her own affection, but the return had seemed but slender and humdrum to her high-wrought expectations. The young couple went to housekeeping, which is something quite different from the life of the hummingbirds among the flowers: Love's dainty fare of sighs and kisses gave place to the grosser nourishment of bread and beef. The bread had to be earned, the house had to be kept, and very soon the pair of Arcadians found themselves toilers like the rest of the world. He toiled with a will, nay with a relish; it was what he was better fitted for than the fantastic joys of feeling; and she did her part at least without repining. It was what she had promised, and she did it loyally, if wearily at times, in the colourless greyness of daily life, when she recalled the rosy dawn of maiden love, with the heavens above all shining and the world sparkling with dew. So Eve, mayhap, looked back on Paradise when she was sent forth with her lord into common life, and doubtless she would sigh at times to remember it, even with her boys growing up around her. And so with Martha in her prosperity, to fancy Considine cherishing the ashes of a blighted love, stirred feelings not dead, but long since grown to be a mere luxurious pain--a poignancy of plaintive delight.