She glanced at her husband and returned her attention inquisitively to
Hugo. "Are you interested?"
"I'll try it."
Cane frowned nervously, walked to his wife, and nodded with averted
face. Then he addressed Hugo: "You can sleep in the barn. We have
quarters there. I don't think we'll be in for any more cold weather. If
you'll come with me now, I'll start you right in."
Until noon Hugo cleaned stables. There were two dozen cows--animals that
would have seemed beautiful to a rustic connoisseur--and one lordly bull
with malignant horns and bloodshot eyes. He shoveled the pungent and not
offensive débris into a wheelbarrow and transferred it to a dung-heap
that sweated with internal humidity. At noon Cane came into the barn.
"Pretty good," he said, viewing floors fairly shaved by Hugo's
diligence. "Lunch is ready. You'll eat in the kitchen."
Hugo saw the woman again. She was toiling over a stove, her hair in
disarray, a spotted apron covering her long body. He realized that they
had no servants, that the three of them constituted the human
inhabitants of the estate--but there were shades, innumerable shades, of
a long past, and some of those ghosts had crept into Roseanne's slaty
eyes. She carried lunch for herself and her husband into a front room
and left him to eat in the soft silence.