Chapter 5

PLAIN TALK.

At last the sound of mirth and laughter ceased, and the house became quiet.

Lottie sat warming her feet at the glowing coals in her room, before retiring. A dreamy smile played upon her face, coming and going with passing thoughts, even as the firelight flickered upon it.

She was in an unusually amiable mood, for this affair with Hemstead promised richly. If he had been an ordinary and polished society-man, the flirtation would have been humdrum, like a score of others. But he was so delightfully fresh and honest, and yet so clever withal, that her eyes sparkled with anticipating mirth as she saw him in various attitudes of awkward love-making, and then dropping helplessly into the abyss of his own great, but empty heart, on learning the vainness of his passion.

"He finds me 'more interesting than some doctrines,' indeed! I'll put all his dry doctrines to rout in less than a week. I'll drive text-books and professors out of his head, and everything else (save myself) out of his heart, for a little while. But after he gets back to Michigan, the doctrines will come creeping back into their old place, and he will get comfortably over it like the rest. In the mean while, as substantial and useful results, I will have my rare bit of sport, and he will know more about the wicked world against which he is to preach. By and by he will marry a pious Western giantess, whose worst dissipation is a Sunday-school picnic, and will often petrify her soul with horror and wonder by describing that awful little pagan, Lottie Marsden.

"And a heathen I am in very truth. Where are missionaries needed more than in Fifth Avenue? They had better not come, though; for if we would not eat them, we would freeze them."

"What are you thinking about, Lottie, that you are smiling so sweetly?" asked her room-mate, Bel Parton.

"In truth, it was a sweet thought," said Lottie, her laugh awakening sudden echoes in the still house, and sounding as oddly as a bird's song at night. "I'm glad Frank Hemstead doesn't know. If he did, I should appall instead of fascinating him."

"I think your plot against him is very wrong,--wicked, indeed. He is such a sincere, good young man, that I like it less and less. I couldn't do such a thing."

"Still you can look on and enjoy the fun, and that is all you have to do. Poor Bel, you are always in need of an M. D.'s or a D. D.'s care. I have forsworn both."

So spoke Lottie in the arrogance of her perfect health and abounding beauty, and then (such are the seeming contradictions of character) she knelt and appeared as a white-robed saint at her devotions. But the parrot-like prayer that she hastily mumbled was of no possible value to any one. She had continued the habit from childhood, and it was mainly habit. The other motive was something like the feeling of a careless Catholic, who crosses himself, though he cannot explain what good it does him.

A moment later she might have been taken as a model of sleeping innocence.

This world is evidently sadly out of joint. We all know of the most gentle, lovely, unselfish spirits, beautiful to Heaven's eye, that are enshrined in painfully plain caskets. In the instance of Lottie Marsden, the casket was of nature's most exquisite workmanship, but it held a tarnished jewel.

It was with some misgivings that Hemstead looked forward to meeting his "cousin," on the following morning. Would she be as radiantly beautiful, as piquant, and withal as kindly and frank as on the previous evening? Even his limited experience of the world had shown him that in the matter-of-fact and searching light of the morning many of the illusions of the night vanish. He had noted with no little surprise that ladies seemingly young and blooming had come down to breakfast looking ten years older; so he had said to himself, "She dazzled me last night. I shall see her as she is to-day."

Being an early riser he entered the cheerful breakfast-room considerably before the others, and in a moment was entranced by the view from the windows.

The severe north-east storm had expended itself during the night, and its fine, sharp crystals had changed into snowflakes. As an angry man after many hard cutting words relents somewhat and speaks calmly if still coldly, so nature, that had been stingingly severe the evening before, was now quietly letting fall a few final hints of the harsh mood that was passing away. Even while he looked, the sun broke through a rift over the eastern mountains, and lighted up the landscape as with genial smiles. It shone, not on an ordinary and prosaic world, but rather on one that had been touched by magic during the night and transformed into the wonder-land of dreams.

The trees that in the dusk of the previous night had writhed and groaned and struck their frozen branches together, gesticulating like despairing anguish, now stood serene, and decked more daintily than June would robe them. Whiter even than the pink-tinged blossoms of May, was the soft wet snow that incased every twig, limb, and spray. The more he looked, the more the beauty and the wonder of the scene grew upon him. The sun was dispersing the clouds and adding the element of splendor to that of beauty. It became one of the supreme moments of his life, and in the vanishing beauty of an earthly scene he received an earnest of the perfect world beyond.

"With the exception of the broad dark river," he thought, "this might be the Millennial morn, and nature standing decked in her spotless ascension robes, waiting in breathless expectancy."

But his musings were unexpectedly interrupted, for just at this moment Lottie Marsden put her hand lightly on his arm and said, "Cousin Frank--pardon me--Mr. Hemstead, what is the matter? You look as rapt as if you saw a vision."

He turned and seemed as startled as if he had, for standing by him and looking inquiringly into his face was a being that, with her brilliant eyes and exquisitely clear and delicate complexion, seemed as beautiful, and at the same time as frail and ready to vanish, as the snow-wreaths without.

She saw the strong admiration and almost wonder depicted on his open face, though she seemed so innocently oblivious of it, and for a moment left him under the spell, then said, "Are you so resentful at my desertion last evening that you won't speak to me?"

"Look there," he replied, and he pointed to the fairy-land without.

Lottie's wonder and delight were almost equal to his own, for she had never witnessed such a scene before.

"I am so glad I came!" she said. "We see nothing like this in the city. Look at those snowy mountains. How vast and white they are!"

"And look at that little tree with its red berries gleaming against the snowy foil. They look like those rulsy ear-rings against the whiteness of your neck."

She looked at him quickly and humorously, asking, "Where did you learn the art of complimenting?"

"I had no thought of trivial compliment in the presence of a scene like this," he answered gravely; "I was awed by the beauty I saw, and it seemed as if the Great Artist must be near. I wished to call your attention to the truth that, like all His work, the least thing is perfect. That little tree with its red berries is beautiful as well as the mountain. I now am glad too that you came, though I dreaded any one's coming before, and the necessity of returning to common-place life. But suddenly, and as silently as one of those snow-flakes, you appear, and I am startled to find you in keeping with the scene, instead of an intrusion."

"And do I seem to you like a snow-flake--as pure and as cold?" she asked, bending upon him her brilliant eyes.

"Not as cold, I trust, and if you were as pure you would not be human. But your beauty seemed to me as marvellous as that of the