[Illustration]
Seen from afar off by the loving eyes of memory, the cows' horns are
longer than they are close by.
The kitchen was old and smoky. Once on a time it had been regularly
calcimined, twice a year, or three times, but it had been many years
now since it had undergone this cleanly process.
Celia's welcome of Seth had been according to her nature, all the more
hardened now by seclusion and poverty. She heard without emotion of
the death of the child. It mattered little to her. She had never known
him. Seth, come back to her a failure, a tramp, was deserving of scant
courtesy. She meted it out to him as it seemed to her he deserved.
The miles he had travelled counted little. Since he had proven himself
too great a failure to travel as men do, it was only just that he
should work his way, sleep in fence corners, live on crusts and walk.
It was one of her theories that, given sufficient time, all men and
animals sink to their level.
Who was Seth that he should be exempt from this law?
The thought occurred to her that he had come to her as a last
recourse. That, unable to make his own living, he had come to share
hers.
That thought scarcely served to add warmth to her welcome.
Seth sat on a chair against the blackened wall in the position of the
tramp who has covered weary distances, whose every bone aches with the
extreme intensity of fatigue.
He was like a rag that had been thrown there.
As Celia had watched him get their first supper in the dugout, so he
now watched her. As she had sat bitterly disillusioned in the darkness
of the hole in the ground, so he sat within the four close walls of
the smoke-begrimed kitchen of her old Kentucky home, disillusioned
beyond compare.
In the once sunny hair there were streaks of gray, but it was not
that. There were wrinkles beneath the blue eyes that had not lost
their sternness, the cold blue of their intensity, the chill and
penetrating frost of their gaze. Somehow, too, those large and
beautiful eyes had appeared to grow smaller with the passing of the
years, not with tears, for there are tears that wash out all else but
beauty in some women's eyes, but with the barren drought of feeling
which goes to sap the very fount of loveliness.
And it was this barren drought of feeling which at last served to
disillusion him, whose existence he at last realized in this creature
who had been his cherished idol. He realized it in her apathy upon
hearing of the death of the child. He realized it in the look she
turned upon him in which he saw her stern suspicion that he had come
homeless to her in the hope of a home.
Formerly, in the days of her mother and her old black Mammy, they had
taken tea in the dining-room, which had looked out on a green sward
brightened by flowers.
Gay and cheerful teas these were, enlivened by guests.
In the absence of guests, Celia had fallen into the slack habit of
eating in the kitchen of the smoke-begrimed ceiling and the dark bare
walls. There was a small deal table against the window. It was covered
with an abbreviated cloth.
Celia walked about setting this table for Seth and herself, laying
with palpable reluctance the extra plate, cup, saucer, knife and fork.
Her movements were no longer girlish. They were heavy and slow.
When tea was ready she bade Seth draw up his chair. They then ate
their supper, Seth too tired to talk and Celia busy with the problem
of this added mouth destined to consume the contents of her scant
larder.
When supper was over Seth left her to clear the table, went out in the
dark on the front porch away from the cold steel blue of her eye and
sat down on the step.
Men seldom shed tears, or he would have found it in his heart to
weep.