Audrey

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an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of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.