Audrey

An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside the

table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The overseer

had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by a message

from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business; the negro

women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the noises from the

quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still. In his rich,

figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward sat and drank his

wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying and the filling of the

slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was open, and the wind blowing in

made the candles to flicker. With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the

wash of the river,--stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the

lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the

gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity:

a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred

and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned

him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed

them, and would have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the

walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the

creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and

began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The

past had its ghosts,--not many; what spectres the future might raise only

itself could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored

future; but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of

loneliness that was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness

without, of lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of

roses that one thought.

Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat

looked out into the windy, starlit night. This was the eastern face of the

house, and, beyond the waving trees, there were visible both the river and

the second and narrower creek which on this side bounded the plantation.

The voice with which the waters swept to the sea came strongly to him. A

large white moth sailed out of the darkness to the lit window, but his

presence scared it away.

Looking through the walnut branches, he could see a light that burned

steadily, like a candle set in a window. For a moment he wondered whence

it shone; then he remembered that the glebe lands lay in that direction.

The parish was building a house for its new minister, when he left

Virginia, those many years ago. Suddenly he recalled that the

minister--who had seemed to him a bluff, downright, honest fellow--had

told him of a little room looking out upon an orchard, and had said that

it should be the child's.