And he wanted also to run toward her, to kneel at her feet, not because she was Sue but because she was human and like himself filled with human perplexities.
He did neither of the two things. The boy of Caxton was still alive within him. With a boyish lift of the head he went boldly to her. “Nothing but boldness will answer now,” he kept saying to himself.
They walked in the gravel path before the house and he tried lamely to tell his story, the story of his wanderings, of his seeking. When he came to the tale of the finding of the children she stopped in the path and stood listening, pale and tense in the half light.
Then she threw back her head and laughed, nervously, half hysterically. “I have taken them and you, of course,” she said, after he had stepped to her and had put his arm about her waist. “My life alone hasn’t turned out to be a very inspiring affair. I had made up my mind to take them and you, in the house there. The two years you have been gone have seemed like an age. What a foolish mistake my mind has made. I thought they must be your own children by some other woman, some woman you had found to take my place. It was an odd notion. Why, the older of the two must be nearly fourteen.”
They went toward the house, the Negro woman having, at Sue’s command, found food for Sam and respread the table, but at the door he stopped and excusing himself stepped again into the darkness under the trees.
In the house lamps had been lighted and he could see Sue’s figure going through a room at the front of the house toward the dining-room. Presently she returned and pulled the shades at the front windows. A place was being prepared for him inside there, a shut-in place in which he was to live what was left of his life.
With the pulling of the shades darkness dropped down over the figure of the man standing just within the grove of trees and darkness dropped down over the inner man also. The struggle within him became more intense.
Could he surrender to others, live for others? There was the house darkly seen before him. It was a symbol. Within the house was the woman, Sue, ready and willing to begin the task of rebuilding their lives together. Upstairs in the house now were the three children, three children who must begin life as he had once done, who must listen to his voice, the voice of Sue and all the other voices they would hear speaking words in the world. They would grow up and thrust out into a world of people as he had done.
To what end?