FullReads

As they ate they furtively looked with great curiosity and admiration up at the dainty woman. Their eyes were bright and large, and gleamed out of the obscure brown of their dimly lighted faces with savage intensity–so it seemed to Mrs. Field, and she dropped her eyes before their glare.

Her husband and Ridgeley tried to enter into conversation with those sitting near. Ridgeley seemed on good terms with them all, and ventured a joke or word, at which they laughed with terrific energy, and fell as suddenly silent again.

As Mrs. Field looked up the second time she saw the dark, strange face of Williams a few places down, and opposite her. His eyes were fixed on her husband’s hands with a singular intensity. Her eyes followed his, and the beauty of her husband’s hands came to her again with new force. They were perfectly shaped, supple, warm-colored, and strong. Their color and deftness stood out in vivid contrast to the heavy, brown, cracked, and calloused, paw-like hands of the workmen.

Why should Williams study her husband’s hands? If he had looked at her she would not have been surprised. The other men she could read. They expressed either frank, simple admiration or furtive desire. But this man looked at her husband, and his eyes fell often upon his own hands, which trembled with fatigue. He handled his knife clumsily, and yet she could see he, too, had a fine hand–a slender, powerful hand, like that people call an artist hand–a craftsman-like hand.

He saw her looking at him, and he flashed one enigmatical glance into her eyes, and rose to go out.

“How you getting on, Williams?” Ridgeley asked.

Williams resented his question. “Oh, I’m all right,” he said, sullenly.

The meal was all over in an incredibly short time. One by one, two by two, they rose heavily and lumbered out with one last, wistful look at Mrs. Field. She will never know how seraphic she seemed sitting there amid those rough surroundings–the dim, red light of the kerosene lamp falling across her clear pallor, out of which her dark eyes shone with liquid softness, made deeper and darker by her half-sorrowful tenderness for these homeless fellows.

An hour later, as they were standing at the door, just ready to take to their sleigh, they heard the scraping of a fiddle.

“Oh, some one is going to play!” Mrs. Field cried, with visions of the rollicking good times she had heard so much about, and of which she had seen nothing so far. “Can’t I look in?”

Ridgeley was dubious. “I’ll go and see,” he said, and entered the door. “Boys, Mrs. Field wants to look in a minute. Go on with your fiddling, Sam–only I wanted to see that you weren’t sitting around in dishabill.”

This seemed a good joke, and they all howled and haw-hawed gleefully.

“So go right ahead with your evening prayers. All but–you understand!”

“All right, captain,” said Sam, the man with the fiddle.

When Mrs. Field looked in, two men were furiously grinding axes; several were sewing on ragged garments; all were smoking; some were dressing chapped or bruised fingers. The atmosphere was horrible. The socks and shirts were steaming above the huge stove; the smoke and stench for a moment were sickening, but Ridgeley pushed them just inside the door.

“It’s better out of the draught.”

Sam jigged away on the violin. The men kept time with the cranks of the grindstone, and all faces turned with bashful smiles and bold grins at Mrs. Field. Most of them shrank a little from her look, like shy animals.

Ridgeley threw open the window. “In the old days,” he explained to Mrs. Field, “we used a fireplace, and that kept the air better.”

As her sense of smell became deadened the air seemed a little more tolerable to Mrs. Field.

“Oh, we must change all this,” she said. “It is horrible.”

“Play us a tune,” said Sam, extending the violin to Field. He did not think Field could play. It was merely a shot in the dark on his part.