“They probably don’t work if you do. I don’t want a maid, Elijah. You can hire a woman to come in and clean for a couple of hours in the morning, but I don’t want to see her.”
“Yes, suh,” said the negro, in a tone of aggrieved resignation. But he got over it almost at once, with quick forgetfulness, and was presently babbling on as before.
When at last they approached the Carroll property Stacey looked about him more attentively, with a wistful sense of what was past, such as one might feel in reading over old letters, full of youthful affection, to some one all but forgotten now.
The house, three miles distant from the town, was low and rambling, with deep verandahs and numerous sleeping-porches. It sat on a knoll among ten acres of sloping lawn and perhaps ninety of oak and pine woods; and from its front verandah one looked away, west, for miles up a narrowing valley between tree-clad mountains. “Valley Ridge,” Stacey remembered, half humorously, half painfully, Julie had tried to call the place in her boarding-school days, and had come down one Christmas vacation with heavy blue stationery embossed in silver with that legend; at which their father had remarked that if she ever used any of that “Princess Alice abomination” he’d get some pink paper for himself, have “The Pig Sty” engraved for a heading, and write letters on it to the principal of Julie’s school.
It was odd, Stacey thought, that the recollection of this trivial incident should remain in his mind as something touching, more touching than the memory of really emotional events—his mother’s death, for instance. How things clung—the absurdest things! One could never get rid of them. They were like tattered cobwebs in corners.
But they had reached the end of the driveway by now, and Stacey sprang out.
After supper he sat, huddled in an overcoat, on the wide front verandah of the house. The low mountains, only a mile to the north, were hazy blue in the twilight. Later the moon rose, and soft brightness spread over everything. Straight ahead the narrow valley took on shimmering pearly tints, range after luminous range of mountains intersecting its sides, like filmy theatre-drops in a stage setting.
In the midst of this pale silence a sense of reposefulness came over Stacey. It did not spring from any achieved harmony. He had harmonized nothing. He had, as he was perfectly aware, merely bolted. And nothing that he had felt was gone. His pain at Phil’s death, his compassion for Catherine, his hatred of men, his resentment at this rag of a world,—all this and everything was still alive within him, but submerged beneath his isolation. When he thought of men he still thought of them as greedy beasts of prey; but it was possible for him now, he believed, not to see them and be one of them.
At last, when it had grown very late, he went up to the bed Elijah had made for him on a sleeping-porch, from which, too, he had the same view of the shining valley; and so fell asleep.
And now began for Stacey as solitary a life as that of any medieval hermit. Every morning he went out on Duke for a fifteen- or twenty-mile ride over mountain roads and paths, returning splashed with mud and frequently drenched through, for the season was exceptionally rainy. And after the late cold luncheon which he trained Elijah to leave spread out for him, he would set off again, on foot, for the woods.