On the top of a low hill, a wind from the dawn struck him, and the paper
in the bottom of the buggy began to snap against the dashboard. He
reached down to keep it from being whisked into the road, and he saw
again that Judith Page had come home. When he sat up again, his face was
quite changed. His head fell a little forward, his shoulders drooped
slightly and, for a moment, his buoyancy was gone. The corners of the
mouth showed a settled melancholy where before was sunny humour. The
eyes, which were dreamy, kindly, gray, looked backward in a morbid glow
of concentration; and over the rather reckless cast of his features, lay
at once the shadow of suffering and the light of a great tenderness.
Slowly, a little hardness came into his eyes and a little bitterness
about his mouth. His upper lip curved in upon his teeth with
self-scorn--for he had had little cause to be pleased with himself while
Judith was gone, and his eyes showed now how proud was the scorn--and he
shook himself sharply and sat upright. He had forgotten again. That part
of his life belonged to the past and, like the past, was gone, and was
not to come back again. The present had life and hope now, and the
purpose born that day from five blank years was like the sudden birth of
a flower in a desert.
The sun had burst from the horizon now and was shining through the tops
of the trees in the lovely woodland into which Crittenden turned, and
through which a road of brown creek-sand ran to the pasture beyond and
through that to the long avenue of locusts, up which the noble portico
of his old homestead, Canewood, was visible among cedars and firs and
old forest trees. His mother was not up yet--the shutters of her window
were still closed--but the servants were astir and busy. He could see
men and plough-horses on their way to the fields; and, that far away, he
could hear the sound of old Ephraim's axe at the woodpile, the noises
around the barn and cowpens, and old Aunt Keziah singing a hymn in the
kitchen, the old wailing cry of the mother-slave.
"Oh I wonder whur my baby's done gone,
Oh Lawd!
An' I git on my knees an' pray."
The song stopped, a negro boy sprang out the kitchen-door and ran for
the stiles--a tall, strong, and very black boy with a dancing eye, white
teeth, and a look of welcome that was little short of dumb idolatry.
"Howdy, Bob."