Stacey was roused from meditation by a sense that Elijah had been saying the same words a great many times, and that the words were a question.
“I was jes’ sayin’, Mistuh Stacey, as how I reckoned you’d be wantin’ some colohed girl to cook foh you an’ make youah bed?”
“No,” said Stacey calmly, “I don’t want any one. You’ll do that, Elijah.”
The old man grew melancholy. “Shuah, Mistuh Stacey, if you say so,” he replied sadly. “I’ll wohk myself to the bone foh you, but I jes’ don’ know if I positively got the time to do everythin’ jes’ right. I got a powehful lot to do, Mistuh Stacey.”
“Well, I got to look afteh Duke, suh, an’ then theah’s all that big place to see to.”
“A couple of men working on it, aren’t there?”
“Yes, suh, but that’s jes’ it. They don’ wohk ’less’n I stan’s oveh them all the time.”
“They probably don’t work if you do. I don’t want a maid, Elijah. You can hire a woman to come in and clean for a couple of hours in the morning, but I don’t want to see her.”
“Yes, suh,” said the negro, in a tone of aggrieved resignation. But he got over it almost at once, with quick forgetfulness, and was presently babbling on as before.
When at last they approached the Carroll property Stacey looked about him more attentively, with a wistful sense of what was past, such as one might feel in reading over old letters, full of youthful affection, to some one all but forgotten now.
The house, three miles distant from the town, was low and rambling, with deep verandahs and numerous sleeping-porches. It sat on a knoll among ten acres of sloping lawn and perhaps ninety of oak and pine woods; and from its front verandah one looked away, west, for miles up a narrowing valley between tree-clad mountains. “Valley Ridge,” Stacey remembered, half humorously, half painfully, Julie had tried to call the place in her boarding-school days, and had come down one Christmas vacation with heavy blue stationery embossed in silver with that legend; at which their father had remarked that if she ever used any of that “Princess Alice abomination” he’d get some pink paper for himself, have “The Pig Sty” engraved for a heading, and write letters on it to the principal of Julie’s school.
It was odd, Stacey thought, that the recollection of this trivial incident should remain in his mind as something touching, more touching than the memory of really emotional events—his mother’s death, for instance. How things clung—the absurdest things! One could never get rid of them. They were like tattered cobwebs in corners.