For a little longer he looked at the light and listened to the voice of the river; then he rose from the window seat, drew the curtains, and began thoughtfully to prepare for bed.

CHAPTER VII

THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON

To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense “second growth” springing from earth where had once stood, decorously apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender, bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting, ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine.  It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland, thorny and impenetrable:  here as tall as a ten years’ pine, there sunken away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of birds.  To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, where tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle bushes.  Later in the year women and children would venture in upon the unstable earth for the sake of the myrtle berries and their yield of fragrant wax, and once and again an outlying slave had been tracked by men and dogs to the dark recesses of the place; but for the most part it was given over to its immemorial silence.  To the south and the west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed in upon the glebe, taking the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the crooked, slow-moving, deeply shadowed creek, upon whose farther bank stood the house of the Rev. Gideon Darden.

A more retired spot, a completer sequestration from the world of mart and highway, it would have been hard to find.  In the quiet of the early morning, when the shadows of the trees lay across the dewy grass, it was an angle of the earth as cloistral and withdrawn as heart of scholar or of anchorite could wish.  On one side of the house lay a tiny orchard, and the windows of the living room looked out upon a mist of pink and white apple blooms.  The fragrance of the blossoms had been in the room, but could not prevail against the odor of tobacco and rum lately introduced by the master of the house and minister of the parish.  Audrey, sitting beside a table which had been drawn in front of the window, turned her face aside, and was away, sense and soul, out of the meanly furnished room into the midst of the great bouquets of bloom, with the blue between and above.  Darden, walking up and down, with his pipe in his mouth, and the tobacco smoke curling like an aureole around his bullet head, glanced toward the window.

“When you have written that which I have told you to write, say so, Audrey,” he commanded.  “Don’t sit there staring at nothing!”

Audrey came back to the present with a start, took up a pen, and drew the standish nearer. “’Answer of Gideon Darden, Minister of Fair View Parish, in Virginia, to the several Queries contained in my Lord Bishop of London’s Circular Letter to the Clergy in Virginia,’” she read, and poised her pen in air.