[Illustration]
For some months after Celia's return to her native town, her friends
gathered gladly about her. A little visit! That was natural enough.
They welcomed her with open arms.
As the visit lengthened, questions ensued.
The child. What of him. Was he not very young to leave for such a
length of time? Was not that a strange mother who could thus separate
herself from a babe in arms; who could deprive him of the warmth and
comfort of her embrace?
And Seth? What of him? For Seth had many friends among them who knew
his great heart and his worth.
How was it possible for her to remain apart from her husband and child
so long?
Contented in the soft and balmy clime, in the land of her birth, she
told them of the terror of the winds, of the sunbaked prairie, of the
plague of the grasshoppers, of the hot winds that blistered, of the
scorch of the simoons, of the withering blasts of summer and the
freezing storms of winter, and thought that sufficient explanation
until she beheld herself reflected in the coldness of their glances as
in a mirror, set aloof outside their lives as a thing abnormal, as a
worthless instrument whose leading string is somehow out of tune,
which has snapped with a discordant twang.
However, this did not greatly distress her. She turned to her mother
for companionship. The mother filled what small need she had of love
until she died. She was soon followed, this mother of hers, into the
land of shadows by the loving shadow of herself, Celia's black Mammy.
Then Celia was left alone in the old house, which, for lack of funds,
was fast falling into ruin, the wrinkled shingles of the roof letting
in the rain in dismal drops to flood the cellar and the kitchen, the
grass growing desolately up between the bricks of the pavement that
led from door to gate for lack of the tread of neighborly feet.
Life, which is never the same, which is ever changing, changes by
degrees. Not all at once did Celia's soul shrivel but gradually. Now
and again in the early days following upon her return to her home, at
the cry of a child in the street, she would start to her feet, then
remember and shrug her shoulders and forget. And there were some
nights that were filled for her with the remembered moan of the
prairie winds. She heard them shriek and howl and whistle with all
their old time force and terror. She sprang wildly out of bed and ran
to the window to look out on the slumbrous quiet of the Southern
night, to clasp her hand and thank her good fortune that she looked
not out on the wide weird waste of the trackless prairie.
Gradually, too, she descended to poverty and that without complaint.
To poverty dire as that from which she had fled, except that it was
unaccompanied by the horror of simoon and blizzard, of hot winds and
cold.
For her this sufficed.
Too proud to ask for help of those who passed her by in coldness as a
soulless creature of a nature impossible to understand and therefore
to be shunned, she toiled and delved alone, a recluse and outcast in
the home of her birth. She delved in the patch of a garden for the
wherewithal to keep the poor roof over her head. She hoed and dug and
drove hard bargains with the grocers to whom she sold her meagre
products. She washed and ironed and mended and darned and cooked,
coming at length perforce to the drudgery which throughout her brief
life in the hole in the ground she had scornfully disdained.
Not once did the thought of asking help of Seth or of returning to him
present itself.
And yet there were tardy times when the memory of the winds remained
with her day in and day out, when at twilight she sat on the steps of
her vine-covered, crumbling portico and communed with herself.
When, placing herself apart, she reviewed her life and observed
herself with the critical eye of an uninterested outsider.
Invariably then she would say to herself, remembering the wail and
shriek and moan of the hideous winds:
"I would leave them again, the winds and the child and him. If it
happened a second time, and I again had the choice, I would leave
them exactly the same."
Then aloud, in apology for what had the look to her own biased eyes of
utter heartlessness:
"It was the fault of the winds," she would mutter, "it was the fault
of the winds!"