Audrey

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.