The birds were waking and chattering, as women chatter over their morning toilets. Some more hyacinths had bloomed in the night, and there was a great clump of iris, that she had not noticed the day before, on the hill-top. A cardinal-bird, sweeping downward like a flame fallen from some celestial fire, made his morning bath in the hollow of a tulip-tree leaf—a relic of vanished winter filled by kindly spring with fragrant rain.
As she neared the lawn gate she saw some one leaning over it. A swart, red-kerchiefed figure, clad in a dress whose stripes of blue and white circled her large body as its hoops a barrel. It was Aunt Tishy. She pushed upon the gate, jamming her stout proportions uncomfortably in her haste to reach the girl.
“Gord! Miss Faginia, whar is you ben? An’ gret day in de mawnin! what dat you got on, anyhow? Gord! Gord! ef de chile ain’ jes ez wet ’s ’f she’d ben caught in de Red Sea wid Phario. Honey, whar is you ben, in the name o’ Gord? Tell yo’ mammy. Is you been see a harnt? What de matter wid my baby? Gord! Gord! dem eyes sutney is ben look on suppn dradeful. Po’ lamb! po’ lamb! Look at dem little foots, an’ de stockin’s all war offen ’em same as de rats dun neaw ’em. Ain’ yo’ gwine tell yo’ mammy, my lady-bug? Come ’long so. Mammy kin ’mos’ kyar yo’ ter de house.”
Virginia submitted listlessly to the old black’s blandishments. She was not sorry to have Aunt Tishy’s massive arm about her. Her feet ached and smarted; there was a sharp pain in her side when she drew her breath, and that dreadful feeling of being a thing just born, a creature who had no past, still held her in its numbing grasp.
Aunt Tishy took her into the big kitchen—an out-house consisting of one room, and a fireplace in which one might have roasted a whole ox. It was lined on two sides with great smoke-darkened pine presses. The other walls and the ceiling had once been white, but were now stained the color of a half-seasoned meerschaum pipe. The two windows had casements with diamond-shaped panes of dingy glass set in lead. Enormous deal tables stood here and there. From the surrounding gloom came the glimmer of brightly polished tin, as brilliant in its effect as the glint of a negro’s teeth from the dusk of his face.
“I GWINE TAKE DAT DAR OUTLANDISH THING OFFEN YO’, HONEY.”
Aunt Tishy, having seated her nursling in an old wooden rocking-chair, dragged a basket of chips and shavings from the capacious ingle-nook, and set about making the fire. She first scooped away the yet warm ashes of yesterday with her shapely yellow-palmed hands. Negroes generally have well-formed hands and remarkably pretty finger-nails. Then she began laying a little foundation of shavings and lightwood splinters; here and there she stuck a broad locust-chip. When these preparations were all completed she went out to “fotch a light,” she said, assuring Virginia of her speedy return.