Chapter 24

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.