To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense
"second growth" springing from earth where had once stood, decorously
apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young
trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender,
bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting,
ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine.
It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland,
thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken
away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue
sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of
birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, where
tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle bushes.
Later in the year women and children would venture in upon the unstable earth for the sake of the
myrtle berries and their yield of fragrant wax, and once and again an
outlying slave had been tracked by men and dogs to the dark recesses of
the place; but for the most part it was given over to its immemorial
silence. To the south and the west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed
in upon the glebe, taking the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the
crooked, slow-moving, deeply shadowed creek, upon whose farther bank
stood the house of the Rev. Gideon Darden.
A more retired spot, a completer sequestration from the world of mart and
highway, it would have been hard to find. In the quiet of the early
morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy grass, it was
an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of
anchorite could wish. On one side of the house lay a tiny orchard, and the
windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of pink and white apple
blooms. The fragrance of the blossoms had been in the room, but could not
prevail against the odor of tobacco and rum lately introduced by the
master of the house and minister of the parish. Audrey, sitting beside a
table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside,
and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the
midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above.
Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco
smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the
window.