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Page 55
The old negro's eyes, gleaming from under shaggy sheds of eyebrows,
watched him, and he caught the words.
"Is you a Fahfiel', boss?" he asked eagerly. "Is you my young Marse?" He
jumped at the conclusion promptly. "You favors de fam'ly mightily, sah.
I heard you was comin'"; the rag of a hat went off and he bowed low.
"Hit's cert'nly good news fo' Fahfiel', Marse Philip, hit's mighty good
news fo' us niggers, sah. I'se b'longed to the Fahfiel' fam'ly a hund'ed
years, Marse--me and my folks, and I wishes yo' a welcome home,
sah--welcome home, Marse Philip."
Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse, and gripped the
twisted old black hand, speechless. This humble welcome on the highway
caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to
Southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal
race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without
bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood. It touched him to be
taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he
should be "Marse Philip" as a matter of course, because there had always
been a Marse Philip at the place. It was bred deeper in the bone of him
than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was
made of had been Southern two hundred years.
The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself,
and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive,
grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland
three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park,
through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt
like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at
last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of
desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it
with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with
cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and
comfortable. If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the
place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that
seemed marked out for him--the life of a writer.
The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as
the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of
his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight
with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes--the great white
house of Fairfield. Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings
stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves
played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of
paint cracked away, window-panes gone here and there. It stood as if too
proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as
stately as in its prime. And its master, looking at it for the first
time, loved it.
He rode around to the side and tied his mount to an old horse-rack, and
then walked up the wide front steps as if each lift were an event. He
turned the handle of the big door without much hope that it would yield,
but it opened willingly, and he stood inside. A broom lay in a corner,
windows were open--his cousin had been making ready for him. There was
the huge mahogany sofa, horse-hair-covered, in the window under the
stairs, where his mother had read "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." Philip
stepped softly across the wide hall and laid his head where must have
rested the brown hair of the little girl who had come to be, first all
of his life, and then its dearest memory. Half an hour he spent in the
old house, and its walls echoed to his footsteps as if in ready homage,
and each empty room whose door he opened met him with a sweet half
familiarity. The whole place was filled with the presence of the child
who had loved it and left it, and for whom this tall man, her child,
longed now as if for a little sister who should be here, and whom he
missed. With her memory came the thought of the five-year-old uncle who
had made history for the family so disastrously. He must see the garden
where that other Philip had gone with his father to hide the money on
the fated Christmas morning. He closed the house door behind him
carefully, as if he would not disturb a little girl reading in the
window, a little boy sleeping perhaps in the nursery above. Then he
walked down the broad sweep of the driveway, the gravel crunching under
the grass, and across what had been a bit of velvet lawn, and stood for
a moment with his hand on a broken vase, weed-filled, which capped the
stone post of a gateway.
All the garden was misty with memories. Where a tall golden flower
nodded alone, from out of the tangled thicket of an old flower-bed, a
bright-haired child might have laughed with just that air of startled,
gay naughtiness, from the forbidden centre of the blossoms. In the
moulded tan-bark of the path was a vague print, like the ghost of a
footprint that had passed down the way a lifetime ago. The box, half
dead, half sprouted into high unkept growth, still stood stiffly against
the riotous overflow of weeds as if it yet held loyally to its business
of guarding the borders, Philip shifted his gaze slowly, lingering over
the dim contours, the shadowy shape of what the garden had been.
Suddenly his eyes opened wide. How was this? There was a hedge as neat,
as clipped, as any of Southampton in mid-season, and over it a glory of
roses, red and white and pink and yellow, waved gay banners to him in
trim luxuriance. He swung toward them, and the breeze brought him for
the first time in his life the fragrance of box in sunshine.
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