After dinner father and I sat out on the porch in the soft, warm breeze
that waved a misty spring moonlight around us, and talked garden until
after ten o'clock. He was brilliant and delightful, but three times he
made trips to ice bowl and decanter on the sideboard.
"It will be a great relief and happiness to me if Nickols does sanction
and set the seal of artistic approval upon our plans," he said, with
feverish but happy eyes. "You see, Nickols will represent the
cosmopolitan in judgment upon the normally developed insular. I remember
once that Mr. Justice Harlan said that in an opinion on freight rates I
had sent up to him I had represented both the cosmopolitan and the
insular interest with astonishing equity, and I told him that I
considered that it took at least six generations of insular mind culture
to see any kind of national equity. The same thing holds good with a
garden. It takes the sixth generation on a piece of land to produce a
garden, and then it has to be laid out around a library full of the
ideals of poet and scholar. In about three years I can, with your
permission, present the American nation with a garden that will
represent the best ideals of Americans; and I must go to bed if I expect
to get up and hunt the early worm. I can never decide which is the
harder work, the capture of that creature of tradition or the arousing
of Dabney to perform that task. You, Dabney."
"Yes, sir," came a sleepy groan from just within the door, and in a
second the old black face was lit up with father's candle until the
white wool above shone like a halo as it appeared from out the gloom.
And I sat and watched the two old gentlemen, one black and one white,
toil slowly up the steps and down the wide hall of the Poplars.
"Father must come back; the nation needs him," I said fiercely under
my breath as I noticed that in Dabney's hand swung the ice bucket where
I had been accustomed to see it swing for years, but which I had not
seen him carry before since I came home. "And that's how you help him
fight to come back," I arraigned myself with bitter scorn. "You have no
faith nor spiritual sources yourself, and you throw him back into
degradation when something is helping him crawl out. What's helping him?
No matter what it is, you are a coward to obstruct it."
And for a long hour I sat thus raging at myself and questioning
hopelessly, while the young moon rose higher and higher over the tops of
the silvery poplars and young spring slipped about in the lights and
shadows, invisible except for perfumed wreathings of gossamer mist.
Above, I heard father pacing up and down his rooms, slowly, almost
feebly. Sometimes he would hesitate; then I would hear him stop beside
the window, where I knew the ice bowl and the decanter were placed upon
a table which had stood beside the head of his bed so burdened since my
early childhood. I had always dreaded his moroseness and instinctively
felt the cause of it. I had never really loved him until just the last
few days, and now I felt my love rise in a tide that threatened to
overwhelm me.