He had stayed just three weeks. He had spent them chiefly defeating Maw’s plans to keep him. Wanderlust kept him longer the next time. That was eight years ago. Since then he had been back home three times. Never so poor and shabby as at first—indeed, Nat’s wanderings had prospered more or less—but still remote, somewhat mysterious, touched by new habits of life, new ways of speech.
The countryside, remembering the manner of his first return, shook its head darkly. A tramp—a burglar, even. God knew what! When, on his third visit home, he brought an air of extreme opulence, plenty of money, and a sartorial perfection undreamed of locally, the heads wagged even harder. A gambler probably; a ne’er-do-well certainly; and one to break his mother’s heart in the end.
But none of this was true, as Luke knew. It was just that Nat hated farming; that he liked to rove and take a floater’s fortune. He had a taste for the mechanical and followed incomprehensible quests. San Francisco had known him; the big races at Cincinnati; the hangars at Mineola. He was restless—Nat; but he was respectable. No one could look into his merry blue eyes and not know it. If his labors were uncertain and sporadic, and his address that of a nomad, it all sufficed, at least for himself.
If at times Luke felt a stirring doubt that Nat was not acquitting himself of his family duty, he quenched it fiercely. Nat was different. He was born free; you could tell it in his talk, in his way of thinking. He was like an eagle and hated to be bound by earthly ties. He cared for them all in his own way. Times when he was back he helped Maw all he could. If he brought money he gave of it freely; if he had none, just the look of his eye or the ready jest on his lip helped.
Upstairs in a drawer of the old pine bureau lay some of Nat’s discarded clothing—incredible garments to Luke. The lame boy, going to them sometimes, fingered them, pondering, reconstructing for himself the fabric of Nat’s adventures, his life. The ice-cream pants of a by-gone day; the pointed, shriveled yellow Oxfords! the silk-front shirt; the odd cuff link or stud—they were like a genie-in-a-bottle, these poor clothes! You rubbed them and a whole Arabian Night’s dream unfurled from them.