It was now late afternoon, the sun's rays coming slantingly into the
forest, and the warmth of the day past and gone. To Haward, riding at a
gallop down the road that was scarce more than a bridle path, the rush of
the cool air was grateful; the sharp striking of protruding twigs, the
violent brushing aside of hanging vines, not unwelcome.
It was of the man that the uppermost feeling in his mind was one of
disgust at his late infelicity of speech, and at the blindness which had
prompted it. That he had not divined, that he had been so dull as to
assume that as he felt, or did not feel, so must she, annoyed him like the
jar of rude noises or like sand blowing into face and eyes. It was of him,
too, that the annoyance was purely with himself; for her, when at last he
came to think of her, he found only the old, placid affection, as far
removed from love as from hate. If he knew himself, it would always be as
far removed from love as from hate.
All the days of her youth he had come and gone, a welcome guest at her
father's house in London. He had grown to be her friend, watching the
crescent beauty of face and mind with something of the pride and
tenderness which a man might feel for a young and favorite sister; and
then, at last, when some turn of affairs sent them all home to Virginia
to take lot and part there, he had thought of marriage.
His mind had turned, not unwillingly, from the town and its apples of
Sodom to his Virginia plantation that he had not seen for more than ten
years. It was his birthplace, and there he had spent his boyhood.
Sometimes, in heated rooms, when the candles in the sconces were guttering
down, and the dawn looked palely in upon gaming tables and heaped gold,
and seamed faces, haggardly triumphant, haggardly despairing, determinedly
indifferent, there had come to him visions of cool dawns upon the river,
wide, misty expanses of marsh and forest, indistinct and cold and pure.
The lonely "great house," too,--the house which his father had built with
so much love and pains, that his son and his son's sons should have a
worthy home,--appealed to him, and the garden, and the fishing-boats, and
the old slaves in the quarters. He told himself that he was glad to go
back.
Had men called him ambitious, he would have smiled, and felt truly that
they had bungled in the word. Such and such things were simply his
appurtenances; in London, the regard due to a gentleman who to a certain
distinction in his manner of amusing himself added the achievement of a
successful comedy, three lampoons quoted at all London tea-tables, and a
piece of Whig invective, so able, stern, and sustained that many cried
that the Dean had met his match; in Virginia, the deferential esteem of
the colony at large, a place in the Council, and a great estate. An
alliance with the master of Westover was in itself a desirable thing,
advantageous to purse and to credit; his house must have a mistress, and
that mistress must please at every point his fastidious taste.