Suddenly everything seemed changed, she no longer wept; she felt sluggish, cold. “Don’t I care any more?” she thought, surprised. She rose and went back to her bed, glad to creep into its warmth, and leaving the letters on a chair by her bedside. Then, duly, she put them under her pillow again.
IV.
ON Christmas Day, Eve was out with little Jack and Dilsey. Dilsey was a negro woman of sixty, small and thin, with a wise, experienced face; she increased her dignity as much as she could by a high stiff white turban, but the rest of her attire was poor and old, though she was not bare-legged like Powlyne; she wore stockings and shoes. Little Jack’s wagon was a rude cart with solid wooden wheels; but the hoops of its hood had been twined with holly by the negroes, so that the child’s face was enshrined in a bower of green.
“We will go to the sea,” said Eve. “Unless it is too far for you and the wagon?”
“No, ’m; push ’em easy ’nuff.”
The narrow road, passing between unbroken thickets of glittering evergreen bushes, breast-high, went straight towards the east, like an unroofed tunnel; in twenty minutes it brought them to the shore. The beach, broad, firm, and silver white, stretched towards the north and the south, dotted here and there with drift-wood; a breeze from the water touched their cheeks coolly; the ocean was calm, little foam-crested wavelets coming gurgling up to curl over and flatten themselves out on the wet sand. “Do you see it, Jack?” said Eve, kneeling down by the wagon. “It’s the sea, the great big sea.”
But Jack preferred to blow his whistle, and that done, he proceeded to examine it carefully, putting his little fat forefinger into all the holes. Eve sat down on the sand beside him; if he scorned the sea, for the moment she did too.
“I’s des sauntered ober, Dilsey; dey ’ain’t no hurry ‘bout comin’ back,” said a voice. “En I ’low’d miss might be tired, so I fotched a cheer.” It was old Temp’rance, the cook.
“Did you bring that chair all the way for me?” asked Eve, surprised.