Mrs. Timberlake turned slowly toward her, and Caroline was aware of a spasmodic stiffening of her figure, as if she were nerving herself for an outburst. When the explosion came, however, it was in the nature of an anti-climax.
"I expect you are going to be very useful to her," she said; and in answer to a hurried summons at the door, she made one of her nervous gestures, and went out into the hall.
"It would be perfect," thought Caroline, "if I didn't have to meet Mr. Blackburn"; and she concluded, with a flash of her mother's unquenchable optimism, "Well, perhaps I shan't see him to-night!"
The sun had set, and almost imperceptibly the afterglow had dissolved into the twilight. Outside, the lawn and the evergreens were in shadow; but from the house a misty circle of light fell on the drive, and on a narrow strip of turf, from which each separate blade of grass emerged with exaggerated distinctness as if it were illuminated. Within this circle, with its mysterious penumbra, human life also seemed exaggerated by the luminous haze which divided it from the partial shadow of the evening. The house stood enclosed in light as in a garden; and beyond it, where the obscurity began, there was the space and silence of the universe. While she stood there, she felt, with a certainty more profound than a mere mental conviction, that this lighted house contained, for her, all the joy and tragedy of human experience; that her life would be interwoven with these other lives as closely as branches of trees in a forest. The appeal of Mrs. Blackburn had stirred her heart and intensified her perceptions. From the bleakness of the last seven years, she had awakened with revived emotions.
"It is just my fancy," she thought, "but I feel as if something wonderful had really happened—as if life were beginning all over again to-night."
The words were still in her mind, when a child's laugh rang out from a window below, and the figure of a man passed from the outlying obscurity across the illuminated grass. Though he moved so hurriedly out of the light, she caught the suggestion of a smile; and she had a singular feeling that he was the same man, and yet not the same man, that she had seen in the motor.
"I do hope I shan't have to meet him to-night," she repeated at the very instant that a knock fell on her door, and an old coloured woman came in to bring a message from Mrs. Blackburn.
She was a benevolent looking, aristocratic negress, with a fine, glossy skin as brown as a chestnut, and traces of Indian blood in her high cheekbones. A white handkerchief was bound over her head like a turban, and her black bombazine dress hung in full, stately folds from her narrow waist line. For a minute, before delivering her message, she peered gravely at Caroline by the dim light of the window.
"Ain't you Miss Carrie Warwick's chile, honey? You ax 'er ef'n she's done forgot de Fitzhugh chillun's mammy? I riz all er de Fitzhugh chillun."
"Then you must be Mammy Riah? Mother used to tell me about you when I was a little girl. You told stories just like Bible ones."