At this the man turned sharply, letting the reins fall on the backs of the horses. “The old coloured woman?” he repeated inquiringly.
“I mean the tall one in the black dress, with the white apron and the red turban on her head.” There was a slight asperity in my tone, for it seemed to me the man was incredibly stupid.
The blankness—or was it suspicion?—in his face deepened. “I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody,” he answered presently.
Turning his head away from me again, he gathered up the reins and urged the horses with a clucking noise into the long avenue of cedars.
Dusk, dusk, dusk. As we drove on rapidly beneath the high, closely woven arch of the cedars, I was conscious again of a deep intuitive feeling that the world in which I moved was as unreal as the surroundings in a dream. Dreamlike, too, were my own sensations as I passed into that greenish twilight which shut out the light of the afterglow. Feathery branches edged with brighter green brushed my cheeks like the wings of a bird; and though I knew it must be only my fancy, I seemed to hear a hundred jubilant notes in the enchanted gloom of the trees.
Presently, as if the thought were suggested by that imaginary music, I found myself returning to the old negress. Surely, if she had merely hastened on in front of us, we must overtake her before we reached the end of the avenue. Wherever the shadows crowded more thickly, wherever there was a sudden stir in the underbrush, I peered eagerly into the obscurity, hoping that we had at last come up with the old woman, and that I might offer her a place in the carriage. Though I had had only the briefest glimpse of her, I had found her serene leaf-brown face strangely attractive, almost, I thought oddly enough, as if her mysterious black eyes, under the heavy brows, had penetrated to some secret chamber of my memory. I had never seen her before, and yet I felt as if I had known her all my life, particularly in some half-forgotten childhood which haunted me like a dream. Could it be that she had nursed my mother and my grandmother, and that she saw a resemblance to the children she had trained in her youth? Stranger still, I felt not only that she recognized me, but that she possessed some secret which she wished to confide to me, that she was charged with a profoundly significant message which, sooner or later, she would find an opportunity to deliver.
As we went on, the hope that we should overtake her increased with every foot of the road. I stared into the mass of shadows. I started at every rustle on the scented ground. But still I caught no further glimpse of her; and at last, while I was gazing breathlessly beneath the cedars, we came out of the avenue on the edge of an open lawn, which was sown with small star-shaped flowers of palest blue. In front of me there were other ancient cedars, seven in number; and farther off, beyond the row of cedars, there was a long white house standing against the pomegranate-coloured afterglow, where a little horned moon was sailing.
I can shut my eyes now, after all these years, and summon back the scene as vividly as I saw it when we emerged from the long stretch of twilight. I can still see the blue glimmer of the flowers in the grass; the low house, with deep wings, where the stucco was peeling from the red brick beneath a delicate tracery of Virginia creeper; the seven pyramidal cedars guarding the hooded roof of gray shingles; and the clear afterglow in which the little moon sailed like a ship. Fifteen years ago! And I have not forgotten so much as the spiral pattern the Virginia creeper made on the pinkish white of the wall.
“Are there no trees,” I asked, “except cedars?” The driver lifted his whip and pointed over the roof. “You never saw such elms. I reckon there ain’t any finer trees in the country, but they’re all at the back, every last one of ’em. Mr. Blanton’s grandfather had a notion that cedars didn’t mix, and he wouldn’t have any other trees planted in front.”
I understood as I looked, in the flushed evening air, at the dark trees presiding over the approach to the house, with its Ionic columns and its quaint wings, added, one could see, long after the original walls were built. The drooping eaves, I knew, sheltered a multitude of wrens and phoebes, and the whole place was alive with swallows, which dipped and wheeled under the glowing sky.