CHAPTER XXII.[ToC]
For some months after Celia's return to her native town, her friends gathered gladly about her. A little visit! That was natural enough. They welcomed her with open arms.
As the visit lengthened, questions ensued.
The child. What of him. Was he not very young to leave for such a length of time? Was not that a strange mother who could thus separate herself from a babe in arms; who could deprive him of the warmth and comfort of her embrace?
And Seth? What of him? For Seth had many friends among them who knew his great heart and his worth.
How was it possible for her to remain apart from her husband and child so long?
Contented in the soft and balmy clime, in the land of her birth, she told them of the terror of the winds, of the sunbaked prairie, of the plague of the grasshoppers, of the hot winds that blistered, of the scorch of the simoons, of the withering blasts of summer and the freezing storms of winter, and thought that sufficient explanation until she beheld herself reflected in the coldness of their glances as in a mirror, set aloof outside their lives as a thing abnormal, as a worthless instrument whose leading string is somehow out of tune, which has snapped with a discordant twang.
However, this did not greatly distress her. She turned to her mother for companionship. The mother filled what small need she had of love until she died. She was soon followed, this mother of hers, into the land of shadows by the loving shadow of herself, Celia's black Mammy. Then Celia was left alone in the old house, which, for lack of funds, was fast falling into ruin, the wrinkled shingles of the roof letting in the rain in dismal drops to flood the cellar and the kitchen, the grass growing desolately up between the bricks of the pavement that led from door to gate for lack of the tread of neighborly feet.
Life, which is never the same, which is ever changing, changes by degrees. Not all at once did Celia's soul shrivel but gradually. Now and again in the early days following upon her return to her home, at the cry of a child in the street, she would start to her feet, then remember and shrug her shoulders and forget. And there were some nights that were filled for her with the remembered moan of the prairie winds. She heard them shriek and howl and whistle with all their old time force and terror. She sprang wildly out of bed and ran to the window to look out on the slumbrous quiet of the Southern night, to clasp her hand and thank her good fortune that she looked not out on the wide weird waste of the trackless prairie.