As the days went on, the emptiness in the house became to him like that of the grave, and he learned presently that the peevish and exacting old lady who had not stirred for years from her sick-bed had left a vacancy larger than all the rest of them could fill.Cynthia, who had borne most of the burden, began now to bear, in its place, the heavier share of the loss.Released from her daily sacrifice and her patient drudgery, she looked about her with dazed eyes, like one whose future has been suddenly swept away.There was nothing for her to do any longer --no risings in the gray dawn to prepare the day's stealthy work, no running on aching feet to answer unreasonable complaints, no numberless small lies to plan in secret, no stinting of herself that her mother might have her little luxuries.Her work was over, and she pined away in the first freedom of her life.The very fact that deception was no longer necessary seemed to sweep her accustomed moorings from beneath her feet.She had lied so long that lying had become at last a second nature to her, and to her surprise she found almost an indecency in the aspect of the naked truth.
"I don't know how it is, Uncle Tucker," she said one day toward the end of June, when the deadly drought which had kept back the transplanting of the tobacco had ended in three days of heavy rain--"I don't know how it is, but the thing I miss most--and Imiss her every minute--is the lying I had to do.It gave me something to think about, somehow.I used to stay awake at night and plan all sorts of pleasant lies that I could tell about the house and the garden, and the way the war ended, and the Presidents of the Confederacy--I made up all their names--and the fuss with which each one was inaugurated, and the dresses their wives and daughters wore.It's all so dull when you have to stop pretending and begin to face things just as they are.I've lied for almost thirty years, and I reckon I've lost my taste for the truth.""Well, it will come back, dear," responded Tucker reassuringly;"but I think you need a change if a woman ever did.What about that week you're to spend with the Weatherbys?""I'm going to-morrow," answered Cynthia shortly."Lila is sick with a cold and wants me; but how you and Christopher will manage to get on is more than I can say.""Oh, we'll worry along with Docia, never fear," replied Tucker, hobbling into his seat at the supper table, as Christopher came in from the woods with the heavy moisture dripping from his clothes.
"It's cleared off fine and there's to be a full moon tonight,"said the young man, hanging up his hat."If the rain had come a week later the tobacco would have been ruined.I've just been taking it up out of the plant-bed.""You'll begin setting it out to-morrow, I reckon, then," observed Tucker, watching Cynthia as she cut up his food.
"Oh, I'm afraid to wait--the ground dries so quickly.Jacob Weatherby is going to set his out to-night, and I think I'll do the same.There's a fine moon, and I shouldn't wonder if every farmer in the county was in the fields till daybreak."He ate his supper hurriedly, and then, taking down his hat, went out to resume his work.At the door he had left his big split basket of plants, and, slipping his arm through the handle, he crossed the yard in the direction of the field.As he turned into the little path which trailed in wet grass along the "worm"fence, Jacob Weatherby came stepping briskly through the mud in the road and stopped to ask him if he had got his ground ready for the setting out."I've been lookin' for hands myself," added the old man in his cheery voice, "for I could find work for a dozen men to-night, but to save my life I can't scrape up more'n a nigger here an' thar.Bill Fletcher has been out ahead of me, it seems.""Well, I'll be able to help you to-morrow, I think," answered Christopher."I hope to get my own work done to-night." Then he asked.with a trifling hesitation: "How is Lila's cold?"A sudden light broke over old Jacob's face, and he nodded in his genial fashion.
"Ah, bless her pretty eyes, I sometimes think she's too good to put her foot down on this here common earth," he said, "an' to think that only this mornin' she was wantin' to help Sarah wipe the dishes.Why, I reckon Sarah would ruther work her fingers to the bone than have that gal take a single dishcloth in her hand.
Oh, we know how to value her, Mr.Christopher, never fear.Her word's law in our house, and always will be."He passed on with his hearty chuckle, and Christopher followed the wet path and began planting his tobacco plants in the small holes he bored in the moist earth.
It was the most solemn hour of day, when the division between light and darkness seems less a gradation than a sudden blur.Afaint yellow line still lingered across the western horizon, and against it the belt of pines rose like an advancing army.The wind, which blew toward him from the woods, filled his nostrils with a spicy tang.
Slowly the moon rose higher, flooding the hollows and the low green hills with light.In the outlying fields around the Hall he saw Fletcher's planters at work in the tobacco, each man so closely followed by his shadow that it was impossible at a little distance to distinguish the living labourer from his airy double.
All the harsh irregularities of the landscape were submerged in a general softness of tone, and the shapes of hill and meadow, of road and tree, of shrub and rock, were dissolved in a magical and enchanting beauty.
Several hours had passed, and he had stopped to rest a moment from his planting, when Maria came in the moonlight along the road and paused breathlessly to lean upon the fence beneath the locust tree.
