He made an awkward but deep and obsequious reverence, turned and went out of the door, passing Juba, who was entering with a salver laden with bread and meat and a couple of bottles. "Put down the food, Juba," said Haward, "and see this gentleman out of the house."
An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside the table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The overseer had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by a message from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business; the negro women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the noises from the quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still. In his rich, figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward sat and drank his wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying and the filling of the slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was open, and the wind blowing in made the candles to flicker. With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the wash of the river,—stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity: a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed them, and would have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The past had its ghosts,—not many; what spectres the future might raise only itself could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored future; but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of loneliness that was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness without, of lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of roses that one thought.
Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat looked out into the windy, starlit night. This was the eastern face of the house, and, beyond the waving trees, there were visible both the river and the second and narrower creek which on this side bounded the plantation. The voice with which the waters swept to the sea came strongly to him. A large white moth sailed out of the darkness to the lit window, but his presence scared it away.
Looking through the walnut branches, he could see a light that burned steadily, like a candle set in a window. For a moment he wondered whence it shone; then he remembered that the glebe lands lay in that direction. The parish was building a house for its new minister, when he left Virginia, those many years ago. Suddenly he recalled that the minister—who had seemed to him a bluff, downright, honest fellow—had told him of a little room looking out upon an orchard, and had said that it should be the child's.
It was possible that the star which pierced the darkness might mark that room. He knit his brows in an effort to remember when, before this day, he had last thought of a child whom he had held in his arms and comforted, one splendid dawn, upon a hilltop, in a mountainous region. He came to the conclusion that he must have forgotten her quite six years ago. Well, she would seem to have thriven under his neglect,—and he saw again the girl who had run for the golden guinea. It was true that when he had put her there where that light was shining, it was with some shadowy idea of giving her gentle breeding, of making a lady of her. But man's purposes are fleeting, and often gone with the morrow. He had forgotten his purpose; and perhaps it was best this way,—perhaps it was best this way.
For a little longer he looked at the light and listened to the voice of the river; then he rose from the window seat, drew the curtains, and began thoughtfully to prepare for bed.
CHAPTER VII
THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON
To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense "second growth" springing from earth where had once stood, decorously apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine. It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, where tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle bushes. Later in the year women and children would venture in upon the unstable earth for the sake of the myrtle berries and their yield of fragrant wax, and once and again an outlying slave had been tracked by men and dogs to the dark recesses of the place; but for the most part it was given over to its immemorial silence. To the south and the west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed in upon the glebe, taking the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the crooked, slow-moving, deeply shadowed creek, upon whose farther bank stood the house of the Rev. Gideon Darden.
A more retired spot, a completer sequestration from the world of mart and highway, it would have been hard to find. In the quiet of the early morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy grass, it was an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of anchorite could wish. On one side of the house lay a tiny orchard, and the windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of pink and white apple blooms. The fragrance of the blossoms had been in the room, but could not prevail against the odor of tobacco and rum lately introduced by the master of the house and minister of the parish. Audrey, sitting beside a table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside, and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above. Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the window.