Out of those grave mental workers had come Dent--her student. She
loved to believe that in the making of him her own blood asserted
itself by drawing him away from the tyrannical interpretation of
God to the neutral investigation of the earth, from black theology
to sunlit science--so leaving him at work and at peace, the
ancestral antagonisms becoming neutralized by being blended.
But Rowan! while he was yet a little fellow, and she and her young
husband would sit watching him at play, characteristics revealed
themselves which led her to shake her head rebukingly and say: "He
gets these traits from you." At other times contradictory
characteristics appeared and the father, looking silently at her,
would in effect inquire: "Whence does he derive these?" On both
accounts she began to look with apprehension toward this son's
maturing years. And always, as the years passed, evidence was
forced more plainly upon her that in him the two natures he
inherited were antagonistic still; each alternately uppermost; both
in unceasing warfare; thus endowing him with a double nature which
might in time lead him to a double life. So that even then she had
begun to take upon herself the burden of dreading lest she should
not only be the mother of his life, but the mother of his
tragedies. She went over this again and again: "Am I to be the
mother of his tragedies?"
As she sat this young summer morning after he had left her so
strangely, all at once the world became autumn to her remembrance.
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