"I wanted to finish a shock, mother. But it isn't much later than usual; it's the clouds. Here's some good kindling for you in the morning and a basket of cobs," he added tenderly.

She received in silence the feed basket he held out to her, and watched him as he kneeled, busily piling up the last of the f.a.gots.

"I hope you haven't cut any more of that green oak; your father couldn't keep warm."

"This is hickory, dead hickory, with some seasoned oak. Father'll have to take his coat off and you'll have to get a fan."

There was a moment of silence.

"Supper's over," she said simply.

She held in one hand a partly eaten biscuit.

"I'll be in soon now. I've nothing to do but kindle my fire."

After another short interval she asked:

"Is it going, to snow?"

"It's going to do something."

She stepped slowly back into the warm room and closed the door.

David hurried to the woodpile and carried the sticks for his own grate upstairs, making two trips of it. The stairway was dark; his room dark and damp, and filled with the smell of farm boots and working clothes left wet in the closets. Groping his way to the mantelpiece, he struck a sulphur match, lighted a half-burned candle, and kneeling down, began to kindle his fire.

As it started and spread, little by little it brought out of the cheerless darkness all the features of the rough, homely, kind face, bent over and watching it so impatiently and yet half absently. It gave definition to the shapeless black hat, around the brim of which still hung filaments of tow, in the folds of which lay white splinters of hemp stalk. There was the dust of field and barn on the edges of the thick hair about the ears; dust around the eyes and the nostrils. He was resting on one knee; over the other his hands were crossed--enormous, powerful, coa.r.s.ened hands, the skin so frayed and chapped that around the finger-nails and along the cracks here and there a little blood had oozed out and dried.

XII

When David came down to his supper, all traces of the day's labor that were removable had disappeared. He was clean; and his working clothes had been laid aside for the cheap black-cloth suit, which he had been used to wear on Sundays while he was a student. Grave, gentle, looking tired but looking happy, with his big shock head of hair and a face rugged and majestical like a youthful Beethoven. A kind mouth, most of all, and an eye of wonderfully deep intelligence.

The narrow, uncarpeted stairway down which he had noisily twisted his enormous figure, with some amus.e.m.e.nt, as always, had brought him to the dining room. This was situated between the kitchen and his father's and mother's bedroom. The door of each of these stood ajar, and some of the warmth of the stove on one side and of the grate on the other dried and tempered the atmosphere.

His mother sat in her place at the head of the table, quietly waiting for him, and still holding in one hand the partially eaten biscuit As he took his seat, she rose, and, walking listlessly to the kitchen door, made a listless request of one of the two negro women. When the coffee had been brought in, standing, she poured out a cup, sweetened, stirred, and tasted it, and putting the spoon into it, placed it before him. Then she resumed her seat (and the biscuit) and looked on, occasionally scrutinizing his face, with an expression perhaps the most tragic that can ever be worn by maternal eyes: the expression of a lowly mother who has given birth to a lofty son, and who has neither the power to understand him, nor the grace to realize her own inferiority.

She wore, as usual, a dress of plain mourning, although she had not the slightest occasion to mourn--at least, from the matter of death. In the throat of this was caught a large, thin, oval-shaped breastpin, containing a plait of her own and her husband's hair, braided together; and through these there ran a silky strand cut from David's head when an infant, and long before the parents discovered how unlike their child was to themselves. This breastpin, with the hair of the three heads of the house intertwined, was the only symbol in all the world of their harmony or union.

Around her shoulders she had thrown, according to her wont, a home-knit crewel shawl of black and purple. Her hair, thick and straight and pasted down over the temples of her small head, looked like a long-used wig. Her contracted face seemed to have acc.u.mulated the wrinkles of the most drawn-out, careworn life. Yet she was not old; and these were not the lines of care; for her years had been singularly uneventful and--for her--happy. The markings were, perhaps, inherited from the generations of her weather-beaten, toiling, plain ancestors--with the added creases of her own personal habits. For she lived in her house with the regularity and contentment of an insect in a dead log. And few causes age the body faster than such wilful indolence and monotony of mind as hers--the mind, that very principle of physical youthfulness.

Save only that it can also kill the body ere it age it; either by too great rankness breaking down at once the framework on which it has been reared, or afterward causing this to give way slowly under the fruitage of thoughts, too heavy any longer to be borne.

That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have emerged such a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are the perpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This did not seem one of those instances--also a secret of the great Creatress--in which she produces upon the stem of a common rose a bud of alien splendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived marble. The explanation of David did not lie in the fact that such a mother had produced him.

One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid tyranny exercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not sat beside her son while he ate, had she not denied herself the comfort of the fireside in the adjoining room, in order that she might pour out for him the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she would have charged herself with being an unfaithful, undutiful mother. But this done, she saw no further, beheld nothing of the neglect, the carelessness, the cruelty, of all the rest, part of which this very moment was outspread beneath her eyes.

For at the foot of the table, where David's father had sat, were two partly eaten dishes: one of spare-rib, one of sausage. The gravy in each had begun to whiten into lard. Plates heaped with cornbread and with biscuit, poorly baked and now cold, were placed on each side. In front of him had been set a pitcher of milk; this rattled, as he poured it, with its own bluish ice. On all that homely, neglected board one thing only put everything else to shame. A single candle, in a low, bra.s.s candlestick in the middle of the table, scarce threw enough light to reveal the scene; but its flame shot deep into the golden, crystalline depths of a jar of honey standing close beside it--honey from the bees in the garden--a scathing but unnoticed rebuke from the food and housekeeping of the bee to the food and housekeeping of the woman.

Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue for restoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before his eye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. In him was the hunger, not of toil alone, but of youth still growing to manhood, of absolute health. Whether he felt any mortification at his mother's indifference is doubtful. a.s.suredly life-long experience had taught him that nothing better was to be expected from her. How far he had unconsciously grown callous to things as they were at home, there is no telling. Ordinarily we become in such matters what we must; but it is likewise true that the first and last proof of high personal superiority is the native, irrepressible power of the mind to create standards which rise above all experience and surroundings; to carry everywhere with itself, whether it will or not, a blazing, scorching censorship of the facts that offend it. Regarding the household management of his mother, David at least never murmured; what he secretly felt he alone knew, perhaps not even he, since he was no self-examiner. As to those shortcomings of hers which he could not fail to see, for them he unconsciously showed tenderest compa.s.sion.

She had indulged so long her sloth even in the operation of thinking, that few ideas now rose from the inner void to disturb the apathetic surface; and she did not hesitate to recur to any one of these any number of times in a conversation with the same person.

"What makes you so late?"

"I wanted to finish a shock. Then there was the feeding, and the wood to cut. And I had to warm my room up a little before I could wash."

"Is it going to snow?"

"It's hard to say. The weather looks very unsettled and threatening.

That's one reason why I wanted to finish my shock."

There was silence for a while. David was too ravenous to talk; and his mother's habit was to utter one sentence at a time.

"I got three fresh eggs to-day; one had dropped from the roost and frozen; it was cracked, but it will do for the coffee in the morning."

"Winter must be nearly over if the hens are beginning to lay: THEY know. They must have some fresh nests."

"The cook wants to kill one of the old ones for soup to-morrow."

"What an evil-minded cook!"

It was with his mother only that David showed the new cheerfulness that had begun to manifest itself in him since his return from college. She, however, did not understand the reasons of this and viewed it unfavorably.

"We opened a hole in the last hill of turnips to-day."

She spoke with uneasiness.

"There'll be enough to last, I reckon, mother."

"You needn't pack any more chips to the smoke-house: the last meat's smoked enough."

"Very well, then. You shall have every basketful of them for your own fire."

"If you can keep them from the negroes: negroes love chips."

"I'll save them while I chop. You shall have them, if I have to catch them as they fly."

His hunger had been satisfied: his spirits began to rise.

"Mother, are you going to eat that piece of biscuit? If not, just hand it over to me, please."

She looked dryly down at the bread in her fingers: humor was denied her--that playfulness of purest reason.

David had commenced to collect a plateful of sc.r.a.ps--the most appetizing of the morsels that he himself had not devoured. He rose and went out into the porch to the dog.

"Now, mother," he said, reentering; and with quiet dignity he preceded her into the room adjoining.