The Crocodile | Page 2

fulfillment of its bright colonial promise -- was itself moribund. In the swamps, still showing traces of the dikes, which had once divided it into quadrilaterals, the rice which had been our chief source of income no longer flourished. The slave quarters, a long double row of diminutive brick cubes, each with one chimney, one door, and one window at the side of the door such dwellings as children draw painfully on slates -- still standing, for the most part, damp and silent, showed that the labor which had made the rice profitable was also a thing of other days. The house itself, a vastly tall block of burned bricks, laid side by side instead of end to end, as in modern building, stood on a slight rise of ground with its back to the river, among lofty and rugged red oaks, rotten throughout their tops with mistletoe. An avenue, roughened by disuse into a going worse than that of a lumber road, nearly a mile long, straight as justice, shaded by a double row of enormous live oaks, choked and strangled with plumes and beards of gray moss, led from the county road through the scant cotton fields and strawberry fields to the circle in front of the house. I used to fancy, and I think Bluebeard's closet lent me the notion, that the moss in the live oaks was the hair of unfortunate princesses turned gray by suffering and hung among the trees in wanton and cruel ostentation by their enemies.
Nothing but a happy and cheerful woman, a good housewife, ready-tongued and loving, could have lent a touch of home to our melancholy disestablishment. Women we had in the house, two black and ancient Negresses, rheumatic and complaining, one to cook and one to make the beds, and old Ann, my mother's Scots nurse, a hard, rickety female, whose mind, voice, and memory were pitched in the minor key. We had a horse, no mean animal, for my father had known and loved horses before his misfortune, but ugly and unkempt, and it was the duty of an old Negro named Ecclesiastes, the one lively influence about the place, to look after the interests of this little-used creature. My father and myself completed the disquieting group of living things. Concerning things inanimate, we had enough to eat, enough to wear, and enough to read. And the clothes of all of us were black. Until I was twelve years old I believed fervently that to mourn all his life long for dead wives and mothers was the whole end and destiny of man. In my twelfth year, however, my Uncle Richard, a florid, affectionate, and testy sportsman, paid us a visit on matters connected with the mismanagement of the estate. He stayed three days. On the first he shot duck, on the second quail; on the morning of the third he talked with my father in the library; in the afternoon he took me for a walk. In the evening he went away and I never saw him again.
"Richard," he had said, for I had been given his name, "I want to see the vault before I go. I haven't seen it since your mother was buried."
It was a warm, bright, still December day, the day before Christmas, and my uncle seated himself nonchalantly on the low wall which surrounded the vault, his knees crossed, his mouth closed on a big cigar, and his eyes fixed on the "legended door."
"People who go into that place in boxes," he said, "never come out. Has that ever occurred to you, Richard?"
I said that it had.
"You never saw your mother, my boy," he went on, "but you wear mourning for her."
"It seems to me almost as if I had known her," I said, "because ----"
"Yes," cut in my uncle, "your father has kept her memory alive. He has neglected everything else in order to do that. Now tell what was your mother like?"
I hesitated, and said finally, "She was very tall and beautiful."
My uncle smiled grimly.
"You would know her then," he said, "if you saw her? Answer me truthfully, and remember that other women are sometimes tall and beautiful."
I admitted a little ruefully, that I should not know my mother if I saw her.
"No, you wouldn't," said my uncle, "and for this reason, too: your mother had an amusing little face, but she was neither beautiful nor tall."
"But ----" I began.
"Your father," my uncle interrupted, "has come to believe that his wife was tall and beautiful because he thinks that the idea of lifelong devotion to a memory is tall and beautiful. He is a little hipped about himself, my boy, and it makes me rather sick. I will tell you an anecdote. Once there was a man. He met a girl.