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Updated: May 9, 2025
The room might have been a young hermit's cell in a cave, or a tunnel in the evergreens, it was so simple and bare of human appointments. Clethera stood with the broom in one hand, and tipped forward a piece of broken looking-glass on his shaving-shelf. A new, unforeseen Clethera, whom she had never been obliged to deal with before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face.
This incipient husband before he got drowned in a squall off Detour, thereby saving his aged wife some outlay visited her only when he needed funds, and she silently paid the levy if her toil had provided the means. He also inclined to offer delicate attentions to Clethera, who spat at him like a cat, and at sight of him ever afterwards took to the attic, locking the door.
Young men enlisted, and Honoré restlessly followed, with a friend from the North Shore, to look at the camp. His pulses beat with the drums. But he was carrying the burden of the family; to leave Jules and Jules's dependent wife would be deserting infants. Clethera gave little more thought to fleets sailing tropical seas than to La Salle's vanished Griffin on Northern waters.
The pair sitting with the broad top step betwixt them exchanged the smiling good-will of youth. "I take some more party out to-night for de light-moon sail," said Honoré, pleased to report his prosperity. "It is consider' gran' to sail in de light-moon." "Did you find de hot fish pie?" inquired Clethera, solicitous about man thrown on his own resources as cook.
With the readiness of custom, Honoré and Clethera met each other at the steps in the fence about dusk. She sat down on her side, and he sat down on his, the broad top of the stile separating them. Honoré was a stalwart Saxon-looking youth in his early twenties. Wind and weather had painted his large-featured countenance a rosy tan.
He appeared at the door, and it was Honoré! It was Honoré, shamefaced but laughing, back from the war within twenty-four hours! Clethera heard the broom-handle strike the floor as one hears the far-off fall of a spar on a ship in harbor. She put her palms together, without flying into his arms or even offering to shake hands. "You come back?" she cried out, her voice sharpened by joy.
All the women and children along the street would turn out to see him go to the war if his intention were known, and even summer idlers about the bazars would look at him with new interest. Clethera could not imagine the moist and horrid heat of those southern latitudes into which Honoré departed to throw himself.
When the old men parted, Clethera examined her grandmother with stealthy eyes in a kind of aboriginal reconnoitring. Melinda Cree's black hair and dark masses of wrinkles showed through a sashless shed window where she stood at her ironing-board. Her stoical eyelids were lowered, and she moved with the rhythmical motion of the smoothing-iron.
Clethera and Honoré sat silently enjoying each other's company, unconscious that their aboriginal forefathers had courted in that manner, sitting under arbors of branches. "Why do peop' want to get marry?" propound ed Clethera. "I don't know," said Honoré. "Me, if some man hask me, I box his ear! I have know you all my life but don' you never hask me to get marry!"
"It have no loft," responded Clethera, faintly, "but de chimney not smoke." "We not want de 'omesick some more, Clethera eh? You t'ink de fools is all marry yet?" Clethera laughed and raised her head from his arm, but not to look at him or box his ear. She looked through the open door at an oblong of little world, where the land was an amethyst strip betwixt lake and horizon.
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