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A white-tiled stove for winter-time filled the fireplace of the room into which he was shown, the room's bare floor was laid together in a neat pattern of several ordinary woods, the room had a prevalent air of surface bareness and much scrubbing; and the little square of flowery carpet by the sofa, and the velvet chimney-board with its capacious clock and vases of artificial flowers, contended with that tone, as if, in bringing out the whole effect, a Parisian had adapted a dairy to domestic purposes.
Marcia was aware of many servants and retainers; and she could see the soldierly form of Lord William kneeling in the distance, with Lady William beside him. The chapel seemed to her large and splendid. It was covered with painting and mosaic; and she felt the sharp contrast between it and the simple bareness of the house to which it was attached.
This made its bareness all the more apparent; for, with the exception of having a long table stretching from end to end now covered with a semi-brownish white table-cloth, and cups and saucers and plates, not forgetting a monstrous big tin teapot like a Chinese junk, in the centre, and a couple of narrow deal forms without backs placed on either side for seats the apartment had no other furniture, a broad shelf attached to the wall opposite the fireplace serving as a buffet, and an armchair at the head of the festal board, for the presiding master, completing its equipment.
"Vulgar," said I. "We used to say," said I, "that the ugliness and vulgarity of the rich men's dwellings was a necessary reflection from the sordidness and bareness of life which they forced upon the poor people." She knit her brows as in thought; then turned a brightened face on me, as if she had caught the idea, and said: "Yes, friend, I see what you mean.
The bareness of the ground rendered any kind of ambush impossible, and the man who has reason to fear that at any moment he may see a gun-barrel thrust out of a thicket straight at his own chest, looks on a stretch of smooth ground, with nothing on it to intercept his view, as a kind of oasis.
Towards seven o'clock that evening, many operatives began to assemble in a room in the Weavers' Arms public-house, a room appropriated for "festive occasions," as the landlord, in his circular, on opening the premises, had described it. But, alas! it was on no festive occasion that they met there this night. The room was not large, but its bareness of furniture made it appear so.
The narrow, little-traveled road went on upon the edge of this, but a bridle-path led into and across the bareness. Alexander followed it. Before him, across the waste, sprang cliffs with forest at their feet. But the waste was wide, and in the sun they showed like nothing more than a burnished, distant wall. His path would turn before he reached them.
As it happened, Rodney not only took the responsibility of stripping his own station to the verge of bareness in favor of the general interest, but in so doing he came very near traversing, unwittingly, the plans of the general government by his local action, laudable and proper as that certainly was.
Weston, sitting down, contrasted its luxury with the grim bareness of his match-boarded cubicle in the boarding-house, and with the log shanties of the railroad and logging camps. He frowned as he did so, for all that his eyes rested on made unpleasantly plain the distinction between himself and the girl whose room it evidently was.
Yet now to Peter Uniacke it was tragedy, and his own situation, left in the safety of ignorance preaching to the ignorant, tragedy too, because of the night, and the winds and the sea noises, and the bareness of this Isle. Beyond the church a light shone out, and a bearded shadow towered and dwindled upon a white blind.
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