CHAPTER XIII
On the evening of the great day, Jerry and Judith took the baby and his bottles over to Aunt Mary Blackford, who was only too glad to have charge of the little darling. Judith felt as happy and excited as though to-morrow was to be her wedding day. She was unrestrainedly voluble even to Aunt Mary. When she and Jerry got home, they scrubbed themselves in the washtub, laid out their clean clothes, and went to bed, setting the alarm for two o'clock.
When they heard the alarm clock's noisy ting-a-ling, they jumped out of bed as eagerly as two children on Christmas morning. It was one thing to get up early to set tobacco and a much easier thing to get up early to make a trip to Georgetown. They had breakfast and did up the morning chores by lamp and lantern light; and it was still night, with no light but that of the stars when Jerry tied the lantern underneath the cart and they clambered in and started Nip up the steep path that led to the ridge road.
The path was full of the smell of damp earth and growing grass, mingled from time to time with the heavy scent of flowering locust trees. As they swung out onto the smooth pike, the first rays of the sun came slanting across the fields, casting long morning shadows. To Judith there was something vastly exhilarating about this driving out of the night, out of the creeping gray, out of the dimly growing twilight into the full blue and gold glory of the morning. She had a sense of infinite freedom and gaiety, as though the whole world had become a holiday place. It was the first time that she had been away from the baby since he was born eleven months before. Out of pure exuberance she began to sing:
Oh, the bumblebee is a busy bird,
He bumbles all araoun',
He sucks the honey off'n the flower
An' puts it in the graoun'.
Jerry too whistled with joy of the spring morning. But it did not mean to him what it did to Judith. His nature did not respond to the stimulation of natural things; and he had not been shut up in the little house in the hollow all winter. To him the drive was only a little more enjoyable than many other recent drives; and the sway of the cart, the rattle of the wheels and the rhythmic pounding of Nip's hoofs did not mean to him, as to Judith, a triumphal progress.
She was wearing a new dress of white with tiny red dots, and a sunbonnet that she had cunningly contrived out of a big red bandana handkerchief. Under the red sunbonnet her dark yet delicate beauty glowed like the silken flame of a poppy.