Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/285

 This cold park and the silent house, peopled by creatures that were dead, seemed a dark and sinister place, yet it had, too, a sense of splendor, of barren grandeur, that for more than half a century had dominated the Town. It existed still in the very midst of the clamorous Mills.

The stable was silent, save for the sound of the fat horses tramping in their stalls, and in his room overhead the stove still burned, filling the room with warmth. It was a plain enough room, empty save for the iron cot where he slept, a table, two chairs and his painting materials. Yet for him a pleasant place. He had for the first time in all his life a sense of coming home. It was his; and it suited him with its barren emptiness. It was like the cell of a monk, bare and cold, and free of everything which might distract from a contemplation of the great mystery.

He did not trouble to light the kerosene lamp. The cold moonlight flooded in through the window, casting in black filigrees on the bare floor the shadow of the drooping vines that fell across the panes. Against the walls and ceiling the flames in the belly of the stove cast another pattern, different, outlined of warm and glowing light.

For a long time he stood there, his hands clasped behind him, looking out of the window, seized once more by the enchantment of the beauty with which the night invested all the expanse of the Flats. Far off, under the shadow of one of the seven hills, the flames of the furnaces in the Jupiter plant raised an are of glowing light. He saw in his imagination all the spectacle that existed there—the bodies of the black men, the dancing shadows cast by the glaring lights, the angry hiss and