If you are coming into our
family, you ought to know it beforehand. There is a shadow over
our house. It grows deeper every year and we do not know what it
means. That is, my mother and I do not know. It is some secret in
Rowan's life. He has never offered to tell us, and of course we
have never asked him, and in fact mother and I have never even
spoken to each other on the subject."
It was the first time she had even seen sadness in his eyes; and
she impulsively clasped his hand. He returned the pressure and
then their palms separated. No franker sign of their love had ever
passed between them.
He went on very gravely: "Rowan was the most open nature I ever saw
when he was a boy. I remember this now. I did not think of it
then. I believe he was the happiest. You know we are all
pantheists of some kind nowadays. I could never see much
difference between a living thing that stands rooted in the earth
like a tree and a living thing whose destiny it is to move the foot
perpetually over the earth, as man. The union is as close in one
case as in the other. Do you remember the blind man of the New
Testament who saw men as trees walking? Rowan seemed to me, as I
recall him now, to have risen out of the earth through my father
and mother--a growth of wild nature, with the seasons in his face,
with the blood of the planet rising into his veins as intimately as
it pours into a spring oak or into an autumn grape-vine. I often
heard Professor Hardage call him the earth-born.
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