A Modern Instance eBook

As she turned, she started to see her father coming down the stairs with a candle in his hand.  He had his black cravat tied around his throat, but no collar; otherwise, he had on the rusty black clothes in which he ordinarily went about his affairs,—­the cassimere pantaloons, the satin vest, and the dress-coat which old-fashioned country lawyers still wore ten years ago, in preference to a frock or sack.  He stopped on one of the lower steps, and looked sharply down into her uplifted face, and, as they stood confronted, their consanguinity came out in vivid resemblances and contrasts; his high, hawk-like profile was translated into the fine aquiline outline of hers; the harsh rings of black hair, now grizzled with age, which clustered tightly over his head, except where they had retreated from his deeply seamed and wrinkled forehead, were the crinkled flow above her smooth white brow; and the line of the bristly tufts that overhung his eyes was the same as that of the low arches above hers.  Her complexion was from her mother; his skin was dusky yellow; but they had the same mouth, and hers showed how sweet his mouth must have been in his youth.  His eyes, deep sunk in their cavernous sockets, had rekindled their dark fires in hers; his whole visage, softened to her sex and girlish years, looked up at him in his daughter’s face.

“Why, father!  Did we wake you?”

“No.  I hadn’t been asleep at all.  I was coming down to read.  But it’s time you were in bed, Marcia.”

“Yes, I’m going, now.  There’s a good fire in the parlor stove.”

The old man descended the remaining steps, but turned at the parlor door, and looked again at his daughter with a glance that arrested her, with her foot on the lowest stair.

“Marcia,” he asked, grimly, “are you engaged to Bartley Hubbard?”

The blood flashed up from her heart into her face like fire, and then, as suddenly, fell back again, and left her white.  She let her head droop and turn, till her eyes were wholly averted from him, and she did not speak.  He closed the door behind him, and she went upstairs to her own room; in her shame, she seemed to herself to crawl thither, with her father’s glance burning upon her.

II.

Bartley Hubbard drove his sorrel colt back to the hotel stable through the moonlight, and woke up the hostler, asleep behind the counter, on a bunk covered with buffalo-robes.  The half-grown boy did not wake easily; he conceived of the affair as a joke, and bade Bartley quit his fooling, till the young man took him by his collar, and stood him on his feet.  Then he fumbled about the button of the lamp, turned low and smelling rankly, and lit his lantern, which contributed a rival stench to the choking air.  He kicked together the embers that smouldered on the hearth of the Franklin stove, sitting down before it for his greater convenience, and, having put a fresh pine-root on the fire, fell into a doze, with his lantern in his hand.  “Look here, young man!” said Bartley, shaking him by the shoulder, “you had better go out and put that colt up, and leave this sleeping before the fire to me.”