“Wha—wha—what ye goin’ ter do ’bout’n it, Jane Ann?” sputtered Tubal Cain, seeing her ponderously rising, determination on her strong features.
“I be goin’ ter ax him what he means by it, that’s what,” said Jane Ann. And before Tubal Cain could protest, she was leaning out of the window and wheezily calling to the young people slowly strolling along the slope before the door.
“Kem in, chil’n. I want ter ax John Leonard a kestion.”
She met him at the entrance of the passage, the tallow dip in her hand, glowing with a divergent aureola of white rays against the dusky brown shadows and green leaves of the vines opposite. He paused, expectant, while Euphemia, in her green dress, stood on the sill amongst the swaying vines, hardly distinguishable from them save for her fair ethereal face, looking in as if from elf-land, so subtly sweet was its reminiscent expression. But he was intent of attitude, with a question in his waiting eyes; not dallying mentally with the thoughts he had had in contemplation, but altogether receptive to a new theme.
His face changed subtly as Jane Ann Sims, watching him narrowly, repeated the words of his somnolent speech. “What air ye talkin’ ’bout, John Leonard, whenst ye say them words agin an’ agin an’ agin, night arter night?” she asked him inquisitively.
He did not hesitate. Still, he had a strange look on his face, as if summoned many and many a mile thence. “I dream that I am dead, sometimes, and others need me back again, and I cannot go. I can do nothing. I often dream that I am dead.”
It so fell out the next day that this seemed no dream. He was so surely dead that he walked the ways of this world an alien. He was not more of it than if the turf in the far cemetery, beside the marble that bore his name, grew green and lush with its first summer veritably above his breast. He had no premonition of the deterioration of the spurious animation which had of late informed the days. The dawn came early, as was its wont in these slow diurnal measures of July, and cheer came with it. The explanation he had given of his strange words was more than satisfactory, and all about him was instinct with a sort of radiant pleasure in him which diffused its glow into his own heart.
As he stood in the passage lighting his pipe, after breakfast, he noticed a salient change in the landscape. No smoke was rising from the high promontory where was situated the primitive kiln of the lime-burners.
“Ye jes’ f’und that out?” said Tubal Cain, with a chuckle, as, tilted against the wall in his chair, he listlessly dangled his feet. “Thar ain’t been no lime bu’nt thar fur six weeks.” He chuckled anew, so cordially did he accept the sentimental cause of the juggler’s lapse of observation. “I reckon that thar lime is made up inter morter an’ air settin’ up prideful ez plaister now, an’ hev done furgot it ever war rock.”
The young man placidly endured the raillery; in fact he relished it, for it was proof how genuine had been his absorption, and he was deprecatory of self-deception. That alert commercial interest never quite moribund prompted his next question.