Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/45

Rh "He won't come, Jim; he can't. He's never set foot in the house all these years, and the poor master did hate him so."

The woman was supporting the dying man's head and looking with tenderness into the face that had never smiled on her once.

Why is it that the dog loves most the hand that commands and never caresses; that the devotion of woman is most signally displayed for the husband who acts the brute; that honest Jim and his wife felt as if all the world was darkening for them as they bent, in the great dim room, over the man who had never given them ought but wages, food, and curses?

On their first and last visit in Mr. Leicester's time to the great White House, Mrs. Dowling insisted upon accompanying her husband. The moon bathed the avenue and orange grove, now neglected, with a ghostly light. The unused lounges set around the spacious high verandah seemed as seats for the dead. The great front-door creaked dolefully as, for the first time for many a month, Jane threw it open. In the wide hall were hung brass breastplates inscribed with the names of "Kings" "Billy" and "Bob," and other chieftains of a vanished race, whose spears, "waddys," and "nullahs" were disposed around a Walhalla from which all the heroes and the glory had departed!

As Jane, with trembling hand, flung open the drawingroom door a weird scene presented itself. The dim light of the rude "dip" which Jim had placed on the grand piano, that never sounded, threw a gruesome light on the long mirrors and curtains, high cornices and stencilled walls, the oleographs with gilt frames of immense proportions—a dim light before an unused shrine! Beside it a grizzled man lay dying, and another, with soiled