He paced up and down the porch under the great gray columns, his steps spiritless and lagging. The Virginia creeper, trailing over its end, waved to and fro with a sound like a sigh. How long would it be before the lawn was once more unkempt and draggled? Before burdock and thistle, mullein and Spanish-needle would return to smother the clover? Before Damory Court, on which he had spent such loving labor, would lie again as it lay that afternoon when he had rattled thither on Uncle Jefferson’s crazy hack? Before there would be for him, in some far-away corner of the world, only Wishing-House and the Never-Never Land? In the hall he stood a moment before the fireplace, his eyes on its carven motto, I clinge: the phrase was like a spear-thrust. He began to wander restlessly through the house, up and down, like a prowling animal. The dining-room looked austere and chill—only the little lady in hoops and love-curls who had been his great-grandmother smiled wistfully down from her gilt frame above the console—and in the library a melancholy deeper than that of yesterday’s tragedy seemed to hang, through which Devil-John, drawing closer the leash of his leaping hound, glared sardonically at him from his one cold eye. The shutters of the parlor were [Pg 405]closed, but he threw them open and let the rich light pierce the yellow gloom, glinting from the figures in the cabinet and weaving a thousand tiny rainbows in the prisms of the great chandelier. He went up-stairs, into the bedrooms one by one, now and then passing his hand over a polished chair-back or touching an ornament or a frame on the wall: into The Hilarium with its records of childish study and play. The dolls stood now on dress-parade in glass cases, and prints in bright colors, dear to little people, were on the walls. He opened the shutters here, too, and stood some time on the threshold before he turned and went heavily down-stairs. Through the rear door he could see the kitchens, and Aunt Daphne sitting under the trumpet-vine piecing a nine-patch calico quilt with little squares of orange and red and green cloth. Two diminutive darkies were sprawled on the ground looking up at her with round serious eyes, while a wary bantam pecked industriously about their bare legs. “En den whut de roostah say, Aunt Daph?” “Ol’ roostah he hollah ter all he wifes, ‘Oo—ooo! Oo—ooo! Young Mars’ come!—Young Mars’ come! Young Mars’ come!’ En dey all mighty skeered, ’case Mars’ John he cert’n’y fond ob fried chick’n. But de big tuhkey gobbler he don’ b’leeve et ’tall. ‘Doubtful—doubtful—doubtful!’ he say, lak dat. Den de drake he peep [Pg 406]eroun’ de cornah, en he say, ‘Haish! Haish! Haish!’ Fo’ he done seed Mars’ John comin’, sho’ nuff. But et too late by den, fo’ Aunt Daph she done grab Mis’ Pullet, en Mars’ John he gwineter eat huh dis bery evenin’ fo’ he suppah. Now you chillen run erlong home ter yo’ mammies, en don’ yo’ pick none ob dem green apples on de way, neidah.”