"I believe the boy is telling the truth," he said, and he added with one of his characteristic bursts of impulsiveness, "but whether he is or not, you are too drunk to judge."
There was going to be a battle, he saw, and in the swiftness with which he discerned this, he made his eternal choice between the preacher and the fighter. Stripping off his coat, he reached down for a stick from the roadside; then spinning round on the three of them he struck out with all his strength, while there floated before him the face of a man he had killed in his first charge at Manassas. The old fury, the old triumph, the old blood-stained splendour returned to him. He smelt the smoke again, he heard the boom of the cannon, the long sobbing rattle of musketry, and the thought stabbed through him, "God forgive me for loving a fight!"
Then the fight stopped. There was a patter of feet in the dust as the young negro fled like a hare up the road in the direction of Dinwiddie. One of the men leaped the fence and disappeared into the tangled thicket beyond; while the other two, sobered suddenly, began walking slowly over the ploughed ground on the right. Ten minutes later Gabriel was lying alone, with the blood oozing from his mouth, on the trodden weeds by the roadside. The shadow of the pine had not moved since he watched it; on the flat rock in front of the cabin the old negress stood, straining her eyes in the faint sunshine; and up the long road the March wind still blew, as soft, as provocative, as bud-scented.
BOOK THIRD
THE ADJUSTMENT
CHAPTER I
THE CHANGING ORDER
"So this is life," thought Virginia, while she folded her mourning veil, and laid it away in the top drawer of her bureau. Like all who are suddenly brought face to face with tragedy, she felt at the moment that there was nothing else in existence. All the sweetness of the past had vanished so utterly that she remembered it only as one remembers a dream from which one has abruptly awakened. Nothing remained except this horrible sense of the pitiful insufficiency of life, of the inexorable finality of death. It was a week since the rector's death, and in that week she had passed out of her girlhood forever. Of all the things that she had lived through, this alone had had the power to crush the hope in her and the odour of crape which floated through the crack of the drawer sickened her with its reminder of that agonized sense of loss which had settled over her at the funeral. She was only thirty—the best of her life should still be in the future—yet as she looked back at her white face in the mirror it seemed to her that she should never emerge from the leaden hopelessness which had descended like a weight on her body. Above the harsh black of her dress, which added ten years to her appearance, she saw the darkened circles rimming her eyes, the faded pallor of her skin, the lustreless wave of her hair, which had once had a satiny sheen on its ripples.