CHAPTER XXII.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 gra.s.shoppers, 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 tw.a.n.g.

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 gra.s.s 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.

Gradually, too, she descended to poverty and that without complaint.

To poverty dire as that from which she had fled, except that it was unaccompanied by the horror of simoon and blizzard, of hot winds and cold.

For her this sufficed.

Too proud to ask for help of those who pa.s.sed her by in coldness as a soulless creature of a nature impossible to understand and therefore to be shunned, she toiled and delved alone, a recluse and outcast in the home of her birth. She delved in the patch of a garden for the wherewithal to keep the poor roof over her head. She hoed and dug and drove hard bargains with the grocers to whom she sold her meagre products. She washed and ironed and mended and darned and cooked, coming at length perforce to the drudgery which throughout her brief life in the hole in the ground she had scornfully disdained.

Not once did the thought of asking help of Seth or of returning to him present itself.

And yet there were tardy times when the memory of the winds remained with her day in and day out, when at twilight she sat on the steps of her vine-covered, crumbling portico and communed with herself.

When, placing herself apart, she reviewed her life and observed herself with the critical eye of an uninterested outsider.

Invariably then she would say to herself, remembering the wail and shriek and moan of the hideous winds:

"I would leave them again, the winds and the child and him. If it happened a second time, and I again had the choice, I would leave them exactly the same."

Then aloud, in apology for what had the look to her own biased eyes of utter heartlessness:

"It was the fault of the winds," she would mutter, "it was the fault of the winds!"

CHAPTER XXIII.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Kentucky! G.o.d's country!

It was as if Seth had dropped out of a wind-blown cloud into a quiet garden, sweetly fenced about and away from the jar and fret of the world.

Placid, content, tranquil, standing stock-still in the delicacy of its old-fashioned beauty, as if the world outside and beyond had never progressed.

He wandered by old and rich plantations, carved by necessity into smaller farms, past big white stone gates opening to wide avenues which led up to them, looking wistfully in, still content to wander a s.p.a.ce before he should experience the rapture of seeing Celia's face, loitering, the white happiness of that within his reach, half fearing to hold out his hand for it, fearing it might vanish, escape phantasmagorically, turn out to be a will-o'-the-wisp.

Whip-poor-wills accompanied him in his wanderings, Bob Whites, Nightingales; and lazy ebon negroes, musical as birds, sang lilting Southern songs on the way to the tinkle of banjo and guitar.

The negroes were not so kind as the birds. From them he suffered humiliation.

More than once he was dubbed "Po' white!" by some haughty ebon creature from whose mouth he was supposedly taking the bread.

But here, as in Missouri, he looked for consolation to the wet woods, to the still, soft, straight rain, to the sighing trees that softly soughed him welcome.

After weary days and nights, working by day on rock-pile or in field, sleeping by night in the corner of a friendly fence of worm-eaten rails, fanned by the delicate hair of the pale blue gra.s.ses, he came to Burgin.

The driver of the bus that conveyed pa.s.sengers to Harrodsburg looked down upon him from the height of his perch. He was strange to Seth, but he recognized a something of the kinship of country in his face and manner.

"Have a lif'?" he asked.

Seth refused. It was bright daylight. He wished to steal into his old home under the covering of the twilight, he was so footsore and bedraggled.

"I'll walk," he smiled, "but thank you just the same."

Four miles, then, over hill, down dale, past dusty undergrowth, the brilliant blue of the skies above him, pa.s.sing negroes who looked strangely at him out of rolling eyes, who jerked black thumbs in his direction over shoulders, saying:

"See de po' white trash man, walkin' home!"

But there were some Bob Whites singing in the bushes over the rail fences, singing, singing!

A bird at the side of the road rested momentarily on a long, keen switch of a blackberry bush, the switch bent earthward, the bird flew off and the twig bent back again.

At sight of him ground squirrels sped into the underbrush.

Somewhere on the other side of the rail fences little negroes sang.

They were too young yet to jerk their thumbs at him and say:

"Po' white!"

Now that he was so near to Celia his heart misgave him. How would she receive him, coming home to her a tramp, a dusty, tired, footsore tramp, wet, chilled to the bone, footsore and tired! So tired!

He forged ahead, trying hard to throw off these thoughts. It was the scornful negroes who had engendered them.

A mile from Harrodsburg he came to the toll gate. A woman whose yellow hair showed streaks of gray, raised the pole for him, smiling at him.