At times he sought to weigh this push that quickened his nature. He
began to think of himself as one of the iron men out of whom the New
South was being forged, painfully but surely. He was a Judson in all of
it; but he possessed, more than the rest, a driving ambition too strong
to be satisfied with the unfruitful life of a Southern aristocrat.
Changing conditions were rapidly eliminating this impossible and
antiquated incongruity. He was more than a Judson. His nature reacted
away from the typical Southern vices, which neither of his brothers had
escaped. He was continent, even in drinking. The endless object lesson
that had been given him by his crotchetty old father, who toward the
last drank himself into a daily querulousness, was not lost on the son.
Paul rarely took even a toddy; and the clear mind that this gave should
be of value in whatever harsh, lean years might follow.
All of his energy went toward the mountain. It was Mary whose
embroidering fancy christened the new home "Hillcrest Cottage," on her
one visit to the place, just before the completion of the interior.
Beyond this, she found her counsel unheeded in the designing, even in
the complicated arrangements for the moving.
What a time is moving! A self-willed chaos to familiar routines and
associations, an involuntary revisiting of dead hours and buried
sensations. It brings an endless plowing up of forgotten once-hallowed
trifles, which the fond heart would fain reject, but can not; it is a
rooted and ample world fitted into packing cases, hustled and baled into
temporary death. The old life was and is not, the new life is still to
begin. It warns of the shaky foundations beneath rooted habitudes; and
at the same time calls forth adventure and daring in the soul of man.
Such thoughts thronged Paul Judson's mind, in disjointed sequence, as
his busy steps took him through the large littered rooms of the family
mansion. He wore his old garden shoes, stained by grass and lime,
scuffed by cinders: a pair of carefully patched brown woolen trousers,
the lower half of a once prized suit; and a blue-figured shirt, turned
to a V at the neck, with a green paint blotch on one side which
strenuous laundryings had not been able to efface. A wall mirror gave
him a passing reflection of himself; he smiled as he pictured what would
have been his father's horror at such ungentlemanly garb. Boxes of
books, ropes for the extra trunks, piles of straw for the china--all
these must be arranged under his eyes. He packed the fragile Haviland
and the shaped fish set, used only on unusual occasions, with his own
hands. He knew negroes; you couldn't trust them with a thing.
He looked irritably under lumped old quilts, piles of table linen, and
cloth-shielded pictures. "Mary!" he demanded, sharply.
"Yes, dear?" She dropped what she had been doing at once.
A free hand gestured nervously. "The hammer--I had it just a moment
ago."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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