Tom Mocket, who was on the way to become his partner, or not busied with affairs of his patron, or not keenly observant of the methods of the poor whites whom he hired to tend his tobacco, he read.  He read history:  Clarendon, Gibbon, and Hume; Aristotle, Bacon, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, Rousseau, and Tom Paine.  His Ossian, Caesar, and Plutarch belonged to his younger days.  A translation of the Divina Commedia fell into his hands, and once he chanced to take up, and then read with the closest attention, Godwin’s Caleb Williams.  From Monticello he received the hot and clamorous journals of the day, Federalist and Republican.  He studied the conditions they portrayed with the intentness of a gladiator surveying his arena.  The Examiner, the Argus, the Aurora, the Gazette gave, besides the home conflict, the foreign news.  He missed no step of Buonaparte’s.

Thrice in these two years he had seen Jacqueline.  Once he rode to church at Saint Anne’s that he might see her.  She had been at the great race when Major Churchill’s Mustapha won over Nonpareil and Buckeye.  The third time was a month ago in Charlottesville.  She was walking, and Ludwell Cary was with her.  When she bowed to Rand, Cary had looked surprised, but his hat was instantly off.  Rand bowed in return, and passed them, going on to the Court House.  He had not seen her again until four days ago, when he opened his eyes upon her face.  The golden finger on his bed became a shining lance that struck across to the wall.  There were ivy and a climbing rose about the window through which he looked to the shimmering poplars and the distant hills.  Many birds were singing, and from the direction of the quarters sounded the faint blowing of a horn.  A bee came droning in to the pansies in a bowl.  Rand’s dark eyes made a journey through the room, from the flowered curtains to the mandarin on the screen, from the screen to the willowed china and the easy chair, from the chair to the picture of General Washington on the wall, the vases on the mantel-shelf, and the green hemlock branches masking for the summer the fireplace below.  Over all the blue room and the landscape without was a sense of home, of order and familiar sweetness.  It struck to the soul of a too lonely and too self-reliant man.  Suddenly, without warning, tears were in his eyes.  Raising his uninjured arm, he brushed them away, settled his bandaged head upon the pillows, and stared at the clock.  The half-shut door of a small adjoining room opened very slowly and softly, and Joab entered on tiptoe, elaborate caution surrounding him like an atmosphere.

“You, Joab,” said Rand.  “It’s time you were in the field.”

Joab’s preternaturally lengthened countenance became short, broad, and genial.  He threw back his head and breathed relief.  “Dar now!  What I tell em?  Cyarn Selim nor no urr boss kill you, Marse Lewis!  Mornin’, sah.  I reckon hit is time I wuz in de field, but I reckon I got to stay heah to tek care of you.  How yo ahm, Marse Lewis?”