CHAPTER V. The Wreck of the Blakes
When Christopher left Blake Hall, he swung vigorously in the twilight across the newly ploughed fields, until, at the end of a few minutes' walk, he reached the sunken road that branched off by the abandoned ice-pond. Here the bullfrogs were still croaking hoarsely, and far away over the gray-green rushes a dim moon was mounting the steep slope of bluish sky.
The air was fresh with the scent of the upturned earth, and the closing day refined into a tranquil beauty; but the young man, as he passed briskly, did not so much as draw a lengthened breath, and when presently the cry of a whip-poor-will floated from the old rail fence, he fell into a whistling mockery of the plaintive notes. The dogs at his heels started a rabbit once from the close cover of the underbrush, and he called them to order in a sharp, peremptory tone. Not until he reached the long, whitewashed gate opening before the frame house of the former overseers did he break the easy swing of his accustomed stride.
The house, a common country dwelling of the sort used by the poorer class of farmers, lost something of its angularity beneath the moonlight, and even the half-dried garments, spread after the day's washing on the bent old rose-bushes, shone in soft white patches amid the grass, which looked thick and fine under the heavy dew. In one corner of the yard there was a spreading peach-tree, on which the shriveled little peaches ripened out of season, and against the narrow porch sprawled a gray and crippled aspen, where a flock of turkeys had settled to roost along its twisted boughs.
In one of the lower rooms a lamp was burning, and as Christopher crunched heavily along the pebbled path, a woman with a piece of sewing in her hand came into the hall and spoke his name.
"Christopher, you are late."
Her voice was deep and musical, with a richness of volume which raised deluding hopes of an impassioned beauty in the speaker—who, as she crossed the illumined square of the window-frame, showed as a tall, thin woman of forty years, with squinting eyes, and a face whose misshapen features stood out like the hasty drawing for a grotesque. When she reached him Christopher turned from the porch, and they walked together slowly out into the moonlight, passing under the aspen where the turkeys stirred and fluttered in their sleep.
"Has her cat come home, Cynthia?" were the young man's first anxious words.
"About sunset. Uncle Boaz found her over at Aunt Daphne's, hunting mice under the joists. Mother had fretted terribly over the loss."
"Is she easier now?"
"Much more so, but she still asks for the port. We pretend that Uncle Boaz has mislaid the key of the wine-cellar. She upbraided him, and he bore it so patiently, poor old soul!"
Christopher quickly reached into the deep pocket of his overalls and drew out the scanty wages of his last three days' labour.
"Send this by somebody down to Tompkins," he said, "and get the wine he ordered. He refuses to sell on credit any longer, so I had to find the money."
She looked up, startled.
"Oh, Christopher, you have worked for Fletcher?"
Tears shone in her eyes and her mouth quivered. "Oh, Christopher!" she repeated, and the emotional quality in her voice rang strong and true. He fell back, angered, while the hand she had stretched out dropped limply to her side.
"For God's sake, don't snivel," he retorted harshly. "Send the money and give her the wine, but dole it out like a miser, for where the next will come from is more than I can tell."
"The pay for my sewing is due in three days," said Cynthia, raising her roughened hand on which the needle-scars showed even in the moonlight. "Mother has worried so to-day that I couldn't work except at odd moments, but I can easily manage to sit up to-night and get it done. She thinks I'm embroidering an ottoman, you see, and this evening she asked to feel the silks."
He uttered a savage exclamation.
"Oh, I gave her some ravellings from an old tidy," she hastened to assure him. "She played with them awhile and knew no better, as I told her the colours one by one. Afterward she planned all kinds of samplers and fire-screens that I might work. Her own knitting has wearied her of late, so we haven't been obliged to buy the yarn."
"She doesn't suspect, you think?"
Cynthia shook her head. "After fifteen years of deception there's no danger of my telling the truth to-day. I only wish I could," she added, with that patient dignity which is the outward expression of complete renouncement. When she lifted her tragic face the tears on her cheeks softened the painful hollows, as the moonbeams, playing over her gown of patched and faded silk, revived for a moment the freshness of its discoloured flowers.
"The truth would be the death of her," said the young man, in a bitter passion of anxiety. "Tell her that Fletcher owns the Hall, and that for fifteen years she has lived, blind and paralysed, in the overseer's house! Why, I'd rather stick a knife into her heart myself!"
"Her terrible pride would kill her—yes, you're right. We'll keep it up to the end at any cost."
He turned to her with a sudden terror in his face. "She isn't worse, is she?"
"Worse? Oh, no; I only meant the cost to us, the cost of never speaking the truth within the house."
"Well, I'm not afraid of lying, God knows," he answered, in the tone of one from whom a burden has been removed. "I'm only wondering how much longer I'll be able to afford the luxury."
"But we're no worse off than usual, that's one comfort. Mother is quite happy now since Beulah has been found, and the only added worry is that Aunt Dinah is laid up in her cabin and we've had to send her soup. Uncle Isam has come to see you, by the way. I believe he wants you to give him some advice about his little hut up in the woods, and to look up his birth in the servants' age-book, too. He lives five miles away, you know, and works across the river at Farrar's Mills."
"Uncle Isam!" exclaimed Christopher, wonderingly; "why, what do I know about the man? I haven't laid eyes on him for the last ten years."
"But he wants help now, so of course he's come to you, and as he's walked all the distance—equally of course—he'll stay to supper. Mother has her young chicken, and there's bacon and cornbread for the rest of us, so I hope the poor man won't go back hungry. Ever since Aunt Polly's chimney blew down she has had to fry the middling in the kitchen, and mother complains so of the smell. She can't understand why we have it three times a day, and when I told her that Uncle Tucker acquired the habit in the army, she remarked that it was very inconsiderate of him to insist upon gratifying so extraordinary a taste."
Christopher laughed shortly.
"Well, it's a muck of a world," he declared cheerfully, taking off his coarse harvest hat and running his hand through his clustering fair hair. In the mellow light the almost brutal strength of his jaw was softened, and his sunburned face paled to the beauty of some ancient ivory carving. Cynthia, gazing up at him, caught her breath with a sob.
"How big you are, and strong! How fit for any life in the world but this!"
"Don't whimper," he responded roughly, adding, after a moment, "Precious fit for anything but the stable or the tobacco field! Why, I couldn't so much as write a decently spelled letter to save my soul. A darky asked me yesterday to read a postbill for him down at the store, and I had to skip a big word in the first line."
He made his confession defiantly, with a certain boorish pride in his ignorance and his degradation.
"My dear, my dear, I wanted to teach you—I will teach you now.
We will read together."
"And let mother and Uncle Tucker plough the field, and plant the crop, and cut the wood. No, it won't answer; your learning would do me no good, and I don't want it—I told you that when you first took me from my study and put me to do all the chores upon the place."
"I take you! Oh, Christopher, what could we do? Uncle Tucker was a hopeless cripple, there wasn't a servant strong enough to spade the garden, and there were only Lila and you and I."
"And I was ten. Well, I'm not blaming you, and I've done what I was forced to—but keep your confounded books out of my sight, that's all I ask. Is that mother calling?"
Cynthia bent her ear. "I thought Lila was with her, but I'll go at once. Be sure to change your clothes, dear, before she touches you."
"Hadn't I better chop a little kindling-wood before supper?"
"No—no, not to-night. Go and dress, while I send Uncle Boaz for the wine."
She entered the house with a hurried step, and Christopher, after an instant's hesitation, passed to the back, and, taking off his clumsy boots, crept softly up the creaking staircase to his little garret room in the loft.
Ten minutes later he came down again, wearing a decent suit of country-made clothes, with the dust washed from his face, and his hair smoothly brushed across his forehead. In the front hall he took a white rosebud from a little vase of Bohemian glass and pinned it carefully in the lapel of his coat. Then, before entering, he stood for a moment silent upon the threshold of the lamplighted room.
In a massive Elizabethan chair of blackened oak a stately old lady was sitting straight and stiff, with her useless legs stretched out upon an elaborately embroidered ottoman. She wore a dress of rich black brocade, made very full in the skirt, and sleeves after an earlier fashion, and her beautiful snow-white hair was piled over a high cushion and ornamented by a cap of fine thread lace. In her face, which she turned at the first footstep with a pitiable, blind look, there were the faint traces of a proud, though almost extinguished, beauty—traces which were visible in the impetuous flash of her sightless eyes, in the noble arch of her brows, and in the transparent quality of her now yellowed skin, which still kept the look of rare porcelain held against the sunlight. On a dainty, rose-decked tray beside her chair there were the half of a broiled chicken, a thin glass of port, and a plate of buttered waffles; and near her high footstool a big yellow cat was busily lapping a saucer of new milk.
As Christopher went up to her, she stretched out her hand and touched his face with her sensitive fingers. "Oh, if I could only see you," she said, a little peevishly. "It is twenty years since I looked at you, and now you are taller than your father was, you say. I can feel that your hair is light, like his and like Lila's, too, since you are twins."
A pretty, fragile woman, who was wrapping a shawl about the old lady's feet, rose to her full height and passed behind the Elizabethan chair." Just a shade lighter than mine, mother," she responded; "the sun makes a difference, you know; he is in the sun so much without a hat." As she stood with her delicate hands clasped above the fancifully carved grotesques upon the chair-back, her beauty shone like a lamp against the smoke-stained walls.
"Ah, if you could but have seen his father when he was young, Lila," sighed her mother, falling into one of the easy reveries of old age. "I met him at a fancy ball, you know, where he went as Achilles in full Grecian dress. Oh! the sight he was, my dear, one of the few fair men among us, and taller even than old Colonel Fitzhugh, who was considered one of the finest figures of his time. That was a wild night for me, Christopher, as I've told you often before—it was love at first sight on both sides, and so marked were your father's attentions that they were the talk of the ball. Edward Morris—the greatest wit of his day, you know—remarked at supper that the weak point of Achilles was proved at last to be not his heel, but his heart."
She laughed with pleasure at the memory, and returned in a half-hearted fashion to her plate of buttered waffles. "Have you been riding again, Christopher?" she asked after a moment, as if remembering a grievance. "I haven't had so much as a word from you to-day, but when one is chained to a chair like this it is useless to ask even to be thought of amid your pleasures."
"I always think of you, mother."
"Well, I'm glad to hear it, my dear, though I'm sure I should never imagine that you do. Have you heard, by the way, that Boaz lost the key of the winecellar, and that I had to go two whole days without my port? I declare, he is getting so careless that I'm afraid we'll have to put another butler over him."
"Lawd, ole miss, you ain' gwine do dat, is you?" anxiously questioned Uncle Boaz as he filled her glass.
She lifted the wine to her lips, her stern face softening. Like many a high-spirited woman doomed to perpetual inaction, her dominion over her servants had grown to represent the larger share of life.
"Then be more careful in future, Boaz," she cautioned. "Tell me, Lila, what has become of Nathan, the son of Phyllis? He used to be a very bright little darkey twenty years ago, and I always intended putting him in the dining-room, but things escape me so. His mother, Phyllis, I remember, got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them."
Lila's face flushed, for since the war Nathan had grown into one of the most respectable of freedmen, but Uncle Boaz, with a glib tongue, started valiantly to her support.
"Go 'way, ole miss; dat ar Natan is de mos' ornery un er de hull bunch," he declared. "Wen he comes inter my dinin'-'oom, out I'se gwine, an' days sho."
The old lady passed a hand slowly across her brow. "I can't remember—I can't remember," she murmured; "but I dare say you're right, Boaz—and that reminds me that this bottle of port is not so good as the last. Have you tried it, Christopher?"
"Not yet, mother. Where did you find it, Uncle Boaz?"
"Hit's des de same, suh," protested Uncle Boaz. "Dey wuz bofe un um layin' right side by side, des like dey 'uz bo'n blood kin, en I done dus' de cobwebs off'n um wid de same duster, dat I is."
"Well, well, that will do. Now go in to supper, children, and send Docia to take my tray. Dear me, I do wish that Tucker could be persuaded to give up that vulgar bacon. I'm not so unreasonable, I hope, as to expect a man to make any sacrifices in this world—that's the woman's part, and I've tried to take my share of it—but to conceive of a passion for a thing like bacon—I declare is quite beyond me."
"Come, now, Lucy, don't begin to meddle with my whims," protested the cheerful tones of Tucker, as he entered on his crutches, one of which was strapped to the stump of his right arm. "Allow me my dissipations, my dear, and I'll not interfere with yours."
"Dissipations!" promptly took up the old lady, from the hearth. "Why, if it were such a gentlemanly thing as a dissipation, Tucker, I shouldn't say a word—not a single word. A taste for wine is entirely proper, I'm sure, and even a little intoxication is permissible on occasions—such as christenings, weddings, and Christmas Eve gatherings. Your father used to say, Christopher, that the proof of a gentleman was in the way he held his wine. But to fall a deliberate victim to so low-born a vice as a love of bacon is something that no member of our family has ever done before."
"That's true, Lucy," pleasantly assented Tucker; "but then, you see, no member of our family had ever fought three years for his State—to say nothing of losing a leg and an arm in her service."
His fine face was ploughed with the marks of suffering, but the heartiness had not left his voice, and his smile still shone bright and strong. From a proud position as the straightest shot and the gayest liver of his day, he had been reduced at a single blow to the couch of a hopeless cripple. Poverty had come a little later, but the second shock had only served to steady his nerves from the vibration of the first, and the courage which had drooped within him for a time was revived in the form of a rare and gentle humour. Nothing was so terrible but Tucker could get a laugh out of it, people said—not knowing that since he had learned to smile at his own ghastly failure it was an easy matter to turn the jest on universal joy or woe.
The old lady's humour melted at his words, and she hastened to offer proof of her contrition. "You're perfectly right, brother," she said; "and I know I'm an ungrateful creature, so you needn't take the trouble to tell me. As long as you do me the honour to live beneath my roof, you shall eat the whole hog or none to your heart's content."
Then, as Docia, a large black woman, with brass hoops in her ears, appeared to bear away the supper tray, Mrs. Blake folded her hands and settled herself for a nap upon her cushions, while the yellow cat purred blissfully on her knees.
Beyond the adjoining bedroom, through which Christopher passed, a rude plank platform led to a long, unceiled room which served as kitchen and dining-room in one. Here a cheerful blaze made merry about an ancient crane, on which a coffeeboiler swung slowly back and forth with a bubbling noise. In the red firelight a plain pine table was spread with a scant supper of cornbread and bacon and a cracked Wedgewood pitcher filled with buttermilk. There was no silver; the china consisted of some odd, broken pieces of old willow-ware; and beyond a bunch of damask roses stuck in a quaint glass vase, there was no visible attempt to lighten the effect of extreme poverty. An aged Negress, in a dress of linsey-woolsey which resembled a patchwork quilt, was pouring hot, thin coffee into a row of cups with chipped or missing saucers.
Cynthia was already at the table, and when Christopher came in she served him with an anxious haste like that of a stricken mother. To Tucker and herself the coarse fare was unbearable even after the custom of fifteen years, and time had not lessened the surprise with which they watched the young man's healthful enjoyment of his food. Even Lila, whose glowing face in its nimbus of curls lent an almost festive air to her end of the white pine board, ate with a heartiness which Cynthia, with her outgrown standard for her sex, could not but find a trifle vulgar. The elder sister had been born to a different heritage —to one of restricted views and mincing manners for a woman—and, despite herself, she could but drift aimlessly on the widening current of the times.
"Christopher, will you have some coffee—it is stronger now?" she asked presently, reaching for his emptied cup.
"Dis yer stuff ain' no cawfy," grumbled Aunt Pony, taking the boiler from the crane; "hit ain' nuttin' but dishwater, I don' cyar who done made hit." Then, as the door opened to admit Uncle Isam with a bucket from the spring, she divided her scorn equally between him and the coffee-pot.
"You needn't be a-castin' er you nets into dese yer pains," she observed cynically.
Uncle Isam, a dried old Negro of seventy years, shambled in patiently and placed the bucket carefully upon the stones, to be shrilly scolded by Aunt Polly for spilling a few drops on the floor. "I reckon you is steddyin' ter outdo Marse Noah," she remarked with scorn.
"Howdy, Marse Christopher? Howdy, Marse Tuck?" Uncle Isam inquired politely, as he seated himself in a low chair on the hearth and dropped his clasped hands between his open knees.
Christopher nodded carelessly. "Glad to see you, Isam," Tucker cordially responded. "Times have changed since you used to live over here."
"Days so, suh, dot's so. Times dey's done change, but I ain't—I'se des de same. Dat's de tribble wid dis yer worl'; w'en hit change yo' fortune hit don' look ter changin' yo' skin es well."
"That's true; but you're doing all right, I hope?"
"I dunno, Marse Tuck," replied Uncle Isam, coughing as a sudden spurt of smoke issued from the old stone chimney. "I dunno 'bout dat. Times dey's right peart, but I ain't. De vittles dey's ready ter do dar tu'n, but de belly, hit ain't."
"What—are you sick?" asked Cynthia, with interest, rising from the table.
Uncle Isam sighed. "I'se got a tur'able peskey feelin', Miss Cynthy, days de gospel trufe," he returned. "I dunno whur hit's de lungs er de liver, but one un um done got moughty sassy ter de yuther 'en he done flung de reins right loose. Hit looks pow'ful like dey wuz gwine ter run twel dey bofe drap down daid, so I done come all dis way atter a dose er dem bitters ole miss use ter gin us befo' de wah."
"Well, I never!" said Cynthia, laughing. "I believe he means the brown bitters mother used to make for chills and fever. I'm very sorry, Uncle Isam, but we haven't any. We don't keep it any longer."
Leaning over his gnarled palms, the old man shook his head in sober reverie.
"Dar ain' nuttin' like dem bitters in dese yer days," he reflected sadly, "'caze de smell er dem use ter mos' knock you flat 'fo' you done taste 'em, en all de way ter de belly dey use ter keep a-wukin' fur dey livin'. Lawd! Lawd! I'se done bought de biggest bottle er sto' stuff in de sto', en hit slid right spang down 'fo' I got a grip er de taste er hit."
"I'll tell you how to mix it, " said Cynthia sympathetically.
"It's very easy; I know Aunt Eve can brew it."
"Go 'way, Miss Cynthy; huccome you don' know better'n dat? Dar ain' no Eve. She's done gone."
"Gone! Is she dead?"
"Naw'm, she aint daid dat I knows—she's des gone.
Hit all come along er dem highfalutin' notions days struttin' roun' dese days 'bout prancin' up de chu'ch aisle en bein' mah'ed by de preacher, stedder des totin' all yo' belongin's f'om one cabin ter anurr, en roas'in' yo' ash-cake in de same pile er ashes. You see, me en Eve we hed done 'sperunce mah'age gwine n fifty years, but we ain' nuver 'sperunce de ceremony twel las' watermillion time."
"Why, Uncle Isam, did she leave you because of that? Here, draw up to the table and eat your supper, while I get down the age-book and find your birth."
She reached for a dusty account book on one of the kitchen shelves, and, bringing it to the table, began slowly turning the yellowed leaves. For more than two hundred years the births of all the Blake slaves had been entered in the big volume.
"You des wait, Miss Cynthy, you des wait twel I git dar," remonstrated Uncle Isam, as he stirred his coffee. "I ain' got no use fur dese yer newfangle fashions, dot's wat I tell de chillun w'en dey begin a-pesterin' me ter mah'y Eve—I ain' got no use fur dem no way hit's put—I ain' got no use fur dis yer struttin' up de aisle bus'ness, ner fur dis yer w'arin' er sto'-made shoes, ner fur dis yer leavin' er de hyar unwropped, needer. Hit looks pisonous tickly ter me, days wat I sez, but w'en dey keep up dey naggin' day in en day out, en I carn' git shunt er um, I hop right up en put on my Sunday bes' en go 'long wid 'em ter de chu'ch—me en Eve bofe a-mincin' des like peacocks. 'You des pay de preacher,' days wat I tell 'em, 'en I'se gwine do all de mah'yin' days ter be done'; en w'en de preacher done got thoo wid me en Eve, I stood right up in de chu'ch an axed ef dey wus any udder nigger 'ooman es 'ud like ter do a little mah'yin'? 'Hit's es easy ter mah'y a dozen es ter mah'y one,' I holler out."
"Oh, Uncle Isam! No wonder Aunt Eve was angry. Here we are—'Isam, son of Docia, born August 12, 18—."
"Lawd, Miss Cynthy, 'twan' me dat mek Eve mad—twuz de preacher, 'caze atter we got back ter de cabin en eat de watermillion ter de rin', she up en tied her bonnet on tight es a chestnut burr en made right fur de do'. De preacher done tote 'er, she sez, dat Eve 'uz in subjection ter her husban', en she'd let 'im see she warn' gwine be subjected unner no man, she warn't. 'Fo' de Lawd, Miss Cynthy, dat ar Eve sutney wuz a high-sperited 'ooman!"
"But, Uncle Isam, it was so silly. Why, she'd been married to you already for a lifetime."
"Dat's so, Miss Cynthy, dat's so, 'caze 'twuz dem ar wuds dat rile 'er mos'. She 'low she done been in subjection fur gwine on fifty years widout knowin' hit."
He finished his coffee at a gulp and leaned back in his chair.
"En now des fem me hyear how ole I is," he wound up sorrowfully.
"The twelfth of August, 18— (that's the date of your birth), makes you—let me see—you'll be seventy years old next summer. There, now, since you've found out what you wanted, you'd better spend the night with Uncle Boaz."
"Thanky, ma'am, but I mus' be gwine back agin," responded Uncle
Isam, shuffling to his feet, "en ef you don' min', Marse
Christopher, I'd like a wud wid you outside de do'."
Laughing, Christopher rose from his chair and, with a patriarchal dignity of manner, followed the old man into the moonlight.
CHAPTER VI. Carraway Plays Courtier
At twelve o'clock the next day, Carraway, walking in the June brightness along the road to the Blake cottage, came suddenly, at the bend of the old icepond, upon Maria Fletcher returning from a morning ride. The glow of summer was in her eyes, and though her face was still pale, she seemed to him a different creature from the grave, repressed girl of the night before. He noticed at once that she sat her horse superbly, and in her long black habit all the sinuous lines of her figure moved in rhythm with the rapid pace.
As she neared him, and apparently before she had noticed his approach, he saw her draw rein quickly, and, screened by the overhanging boughs of a blossoming chestnut, send her glance like a hooded falcon across the neighbouring field. Following the aim of her look, he saw Christopher Blake walking idly among the heavy furrows, watching, with the interest of a born agriculturist, the busy transplanting of Fletcher's crop. He still wore his jean clothes, which, hanging loosely upon his impressive figure, blended harmoniously with the dull-purple tones of the upturned soil. Beyond him there was a background of distant wood, still young in leaf, and his bared head, with the strong, sunburned line of his profile, stood out as distinctly as a portrait done in early Roman gold.
That Maria had seen in him some higher possibility than that of a field labourer was soon evident to Carraway, for her horse was still standing on the slight incline, and as he reached her side she turned with a frank question on her lips.
"Is that one of the labourers—the young giant by the fence?"
"Well, I dare say he labours, if that's what you mean. He's young
Blake, you know."
"Young Blake?" She bent her brows, and it was clear that the name suggested only a trivial recollection to her mind. "There used to be some Blake children in the old overseer's house—is this one of them."
"Possibly; they live in the overseer's house."
She leaned over, fastening her heavy gauntlet. "They wouldn't play with me, I remember; I couldn't understand why. Once I carried my dolls over to their yard, and the boy set a pack of hounds on me. I screamed so that an old Negro ran out and drove them off, and all the time the boy stood by, laughing and calling me names. Is that he, do you think?"
"I dare say. It sounds like him."
"Is he so cruel?" she asked a little wistfully.
"I don't know about that—but he doesn't like your people. Your grandfather had some trouble with him a long time ago."
"And he wanted to punish me?—how cowardly."
"It does sound rather savage, but it isn't an ordinary case, you know. He's the kind of person to curse 'root and branch,' from all I hear, in the good old Biblical fashion."
"Oh, well, he's certainly very large, isn't he?"
"He's superb," said Carraway, with conviction.
"At a distance—so is that great pine over there," she lifted her whip and pointed across the field; then as Carraway made no answer, she smiled slightly and rode rapidly toward the Hall.
For a few minutes the lawyer stood where she had left him, watching in puzzled thought her swaying figure on the handsome horse. The girl fretted him, and yet he felt that he liked her almost in spite of himself—liked something fine and fearless he found in her dark eyes; liked, too, even while he sneered, her peculiar grace of manner. There was the making of a woman in her after all, he told himself, as he turned into the sunken road, where he saw Christopher already moving homeward. He had meant to catch up with him and join company on the way, but the young man covered ground so quickly with his great strides that at last Carraway, losing sight of him entirely, resigned himself to going leisurely about his errand.
When, a little later, he opened the unhinged whitewashed gate before the cottage, the place, as he found it, seemed to be tenanted solely by a family of young turkeys scratching beneath the damask rose-bushes in the yard. From a rear chimney a dark streak of smoke was rising, but the front of the house gave no outward sign of life, and as there came no answer to his insistent knocks he at last ventured to open the door and pass into the narrow hall. From the first room on the right a voice spoke at his entrance, and following the sound he found himself face to face with Mrs. Blake in her massive Elizabethan chair.
"There is a stranger in the room," she said rigidly, turning her sightless eyes; "speak at once."
"I beg pardon most humbly for my intrusion," replied Carraway, conscious of stammering like an offending schoolboy, "but as no one answered my knock, I committed the indiscretion of opening a closed door."
Awed as much by the stricken pallor of her appearance as by the inappropriate grandeur of her black brocade and her thread lace cap, he advanced slowly and stood awaiting his dismissal.
"What door?" she demanded sharply, much to his surprise.
"Yours, madam."
"Not answer your knock?" she pursued, with indignation. "So that was the noise I heard, and no wonder that you entered. Why, what is the matter with the place? Where are the servants?"
He humbly replied that he had seen none, to be taken up with her accustomed quickness of touch.
"Seen none! Why, there are three hundred of them, sir. Well, well, this is really too much. I shall put a butler over Boaz this very day."
For an instant Carraway felt strangely tempted to turn and run as fast as he could along the sunken road—remembering, as he struggled with the impulse, that he had once been caught at the age of ten and whipped for stealing apples. Recovering with an effort his sense of dignity, he offered the suggestion that Boaz, instead of being seriously in fault, might merely have been engaged in useful occupations "somewhere at the back."
"What on earth can he have to do at the back, sir?" inquired the irrepressible old lady; "but since you were so kind as to overlook our inhospitable reception, will you not be equally good and tell me your name?"
"I fear it won't enlighten you much," replied the lawyer modestly, "but my name happens to be Guy Carraway."
"Guy—Guy Carraway," repeated Mrs. Blake, as if weighing each separate letter in some remote social scales. " I've known many a Guy in my day—and that part, at least, of your name is quite familiar. There was Guy Nelson, and Guy Blair, and Guy Marshall, the greatest beau of his time—but I don't think I ever had the pleasure of meeting a Carraway before."
"That is more than probable, ma'am, but I have the advantage of you, since, as a child, I was once taken out upon the street corner merely to see you go by on your way to a fancy ball, where you appeared as Diana."
Mrs. Blake yielded gracefully to the skilful thrust.
"Ah, I was Lucy Corbin then," she sighed. "You find few traces of her in me now, sir."
"Unfortunately, your mirror cannot speak for me."
She shook her head.
"You're a flatterer—a sad flatterer, I see," she returned, a little wistfully; "but it does no harm, as I tell my son, to flatter the old. It is well to strew the passage to the grave with flowers."
"How well I remember that day, " said Carraway, speaking softly. "There was a crowd about the door, waiting to see you come out, and a carpenter lifted me upon his shoulder. Your hair was as black as night, and there was a circle round your head."
"A silver fillet," she corrected, with a smile in which there was a gentle archness.
"A fillet, yes; and you carried a bow and a quiver full of arrows. I declare, it seems but yesterday."
"It was more than fifty years ago," murmured the old lady. Well, well, I've had my day, sir, and it was a merry one. I am almost seventy years old, I'm half dead, and stone blind into the bargain, but I can say to you that this is a cheerful world in spite of the darkness in which I linger on. I'd take it over again and gladly any day—the pleasure and the pain, the light and the darkness. Why, I sometimes think that my present blindness was given me in order that I might view the past more clearly. There's not a ball of my youth, nor a face I knew, nor even a dress I wore, that I don't see more distinctly every day. The present is a very little part of life, sir; it's the past in which we store our treasures."
"You're right, you're right," replied Carraway, drawing his chair nearer the embroidered ottoman and leaning over to stroke the yellow cat; "and I'm glad to hear so cheerful a philosophy from your lips."
"It is based on a cheerful experience—I've been as you see me now only twenty years."
Only twenty years! He looked mutely round the soiled whitewashed walls, where hung a noble gathering of Blake portraits in massive old gilt frames. Among them he saw the remembered face of Lucy Corbin herself, painted under a rose-garland held by smiling Loves.
"Life has its trials, of course, " pursued Mrs. Blake, as if speaking to herself. "I can't look out upon the June flowers, you know, and though the pink crape-myrtle at my window is in full bloom I cannot see it."
Following her gesture, Carraway glanced out into the little yard; no myrtle was there, but he remembered vaguely that he had seen one in blossom at the Hall.
"You keep flowers about you, though," he said, alluding to the scattered vases of June roses.
"Not my crape-myrtle. I planted it myself when I first came home with Mr. Blake, and I have never allowed so much as a spray of it to be plucked."
Forgetting his presence, she lapsed for a time into one of the pathetic day-dreams of old age. Then recalling herself suddenly, her tone took on a sprightliness like that of youth.
"It's not often that we have the pleasure of entertaining a stranger in our out-of-the-way house, sir so may I ask where you are staying—or perhaps you will do us the honour to sleep beneath our roof. It has had the privilege of sheltering General Washington."
"You are very kind," replied Carraway, with a gratitude that was from his heart, "but to tell the truth, I feel that I am sailing under false colours. The real object of my visit is to ask a business interview with your son. I bring what seems to me a very fair offer for the place."
Grasping the carved arms of her chair, Mrs. Blake turned the wonder in her blind eyes upon him.
"An offer for the place! Why, you must be dreaming, sir! A Blake owned it more than a hundred years before the Revolution."
At the instant, understanding broke upon Carraway like a thundercloud, and as he rose from his seat it seemed to him that he had missed by a single step the yawning gulf before him. Blind terror gripped him for the moment, and when his brain steadied he looked up to meet, from the threshold of the adjoining room, the enraged flash of Christopher's eyes. So tempestuous was the glance that Carraway, impulsively falling back, squared himself to receive a physical blow; but the young man, without so much as the expected oath, came in quietly and took his stand behind the Elizabethan chair.
"Why, what a joke, mother," he said, laughing; "he means the old Weatherby farm, of course. The one I wanted to sell last year, you know."
"I thought you'd sold it to the Weatherbys, Christopher."
"Not a bit of it—they backed out at the last; but don't begin to bother your head about such things; they aren't worth it. And now, sir," he turned upon Carraway, "since your business is with me, perhaps you will have the goodness to step outside."
With the feeling that he was asked out for a beating, Carraway turned for a farewell with Mrs. Blake, but the imperious old lady was not to be so lightly defrauded of a listener.
"Business may come later, my son," she said, detaining them by a gesture of her heavily ringed hand. "After dinner you may take Mr. Carraway with you into the library and discuss your affairs over a bottle of burgundy, as was your grandfather's custom before you; meanwhile, he and I will resume our very pleasant talk which you interrupted. He remembers seeing me in the old days when we were all in the United States, my dear."
Christopher's brow grew black, and he threw a sharp and malignant glance of sullen suspicion at Carraway, who summoned to meet it his most frank and open look.
"I saw your mother in the height of her fame," he said, smiling, "so I may count myself one of her oldest admirers, I believe. You may assure yourself," he added softly, "that I have her welfare very decidedly at heart."
At this Christopher smiled back at him, and there was something of the June brightness in his look.
"Well, take care, sir," he answered, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him, while Carraway applied himself to a determined entertaining of Mrs. Blake.
To accomplish this he found that he had only to leave her free, guiding her thoughts with his lightest touch into newer channels. The talk had grown merrier now, and he soon discovered that she possessed a sharpened wit as well as a ready tongue. From subject to subject she passed with amazing swiftness, bearing down upon her favourite themes with the delightful audacity of the talker who is born, not made. She spoke of her own youth, of historic flirtations in the early twenties, of great beaux she had known, and of famous recipes that had been handed down for generations. Everywhere he felt her wonderful keenness of perception, that intuitive understanding of men and manners which had kept her for so long the reigning belle among her younger rivals.
As she went on he found that her world was as different from his own as if she dwelt upon some undiscovered planet—a world peopled with shades and governed by an ideal group of abstract laws. She lived upon lies, he saw, and thrived upon the sweetness she extracted from them. For her the Confederacy had never fallen, the quiet of her dreamland had been disturbed by no invading army, and the three hundred slaves, who had in reality scattered like chaff before the wind, she still saw in her cheerful visions tilling her familiar fields. It was as if she had fallen asleep with the great blow that bad wrecked her body, and had dreamed on steadily throughout the years. Of real changes she was as ignorant as a new-born child. Events had shaken the world to its centre, and she, by her obscure hearth, had not felt so much as a sympathetic tremor. In her memory there was no Appomattox, news of the death of Lincoln had never reached her ears, and president had peacefully succeeded president in the secure Confederacy in which she lived. Wonderful as it all was, to Carraway the most wonderful thing was the intricate tissue of lies woven around her chair. Lies—lies—there had been nothing but lies spoken within her hearing for twenty years.
CHAPTER VII. In Which a Stand is Made
Dim wonder was still upon him when Docia appeared bearing her mistress's dinner-tray, and a moment later Cynthia came in and paused uncertainly near the threshold.
"Do you wish anything, mother?"
"Only to present Mr. Carraway, my child. He will be with us at dinner."
Cynthia came forward smiling and held out her hand with the cordial hospitality which she had inherited with the family portraits and the good old name. She wore this morning a dress of cheap black calico, shrunken from many washings, and beneath the scant sleeves Carraway saw her thin red wrists, which looked as if they had been soaking in harsh soapsuds. Except for a certain ease of manner which she had not lost in the drudgery of her life, she might have been sister to the toilworn slattern he had noticed in one of the hovels across the country.
"We shall be very glad to have you," she said, with quiet dignity.
"It is ready now, I think."
"Be sure to make him try the port, Cynthia," called Mrs. Blake, as Carraway followed the daughter across the threshold.
In the kitchen they found Tucker and Lila and a strange young man in overalls, who was introduced as "one of the Weatherbys who live just up the road." He was evidently one of their plainer neighbours for Carraway detected a constraint in Cynthia's manner which Lila did not appear to share. The girl, dressed daintily in a faded muslin, with an organdy kerchief crossed over her swelling bosom, flashed upon Carraway's delighted vision like one of the maidens hanging, gilt-framed, in the old lady's parlour. That she was the particular pride of the family—the one luxury they allowed themselves besides their costly mother—the lawyer realised upon the instant. Her small white hands were unsoiled by any work, and her beautiful, kindly face had none of the nervous dread which seemed always lying behind Cynthia's tired eyes. With the high devotion of a martyr, the elder sister must have offered herself a willing sacrifice, winning for the younger an existence which, despite its gray monotony, showed fairly rose-coloured in comparison with her own. She herself had sunk to the level of a servant, but through it all Lila had remained "the lady," preserving an equable loveliness to which Jim Weatherby hardly dared lift his wistful gaze.
As for the young man himself, he had a blithe, open look which Carraway found singularly attractive, the kind of look it warms one's heart to meet in the long road on a winter's day. Leaning idly against the lintel of the door, and fingering a bright axe which he was apparently anxious that they should retain, he presented a pleasant enough picture to the attentive eyes within the kitchen.
"You'd as well keep this axe as long as you want it," he protested earnestly. " It's an old one, anyway, that I sharpened when you asked for it, and we've another at home; that's all we need."
"It's very kind of you, Jim, but ours is mended now," replied
Cynthia, a trifle stiffly.
"If we need one again, we'll certainly borrow yours, "added Lila, smiling as she looked up from the glasses she was filling with fresh buttermilk.
"Sit down, Jim, and have dinner with us; there's no hurry," urged Tucker hospitably, with a genial wave toward the meagerly spread table. "Jim's a great fellow, Mr. Carraway; you ought to know him. He can manage anything from a Sunday-school to the digging of a well. I've always said that if he'd had charge of the children of Israel's journey to the promised land he'd have had them there, flesh-pots and all, before the week was up."
"I can see he is a useful neighbour," observed Carraway, glancing at the axe.
"Well, I'm glad I come handy, " replied Jim in his hearty way; "and are you sure you don't want me to split up that big oak log at the woodpile? I can do it in a twinkling."
Cynthia declined his knightly offer, to be overruled again by
Lila's smiling lips.
"Christopher will have to do it when he comes in, " she said; "poor Christopher, he never has a single moment of his own."
Jim Weatherby looked at her eagerly, his blue eyes full of sparkle. "Why, I can do it in no time," he declared, shouldering his axe, and a moment afterward they heard his merry strokes from the woodpile.
"Are you interested in tobacco, Mr. Carraway?" inquired Tucker, as they seated themselves at the pine table without so much as an apology for the coarseness of the fare or an allusion to their fallen fortunes. "If so, you've struck us at the time when every man about here is setting out his next winter's chew. Sol Peterkin, by the way, has planted every square inch of his land in tobacco, and when I asked him what market he expected to send it to he answered that he only raised a little for his own use."
"Is that the Peterkin who has the pretty daughter?" asked Cynthia, slicing a piece of bacon. "May I help you to turnip salad, Mr. Carraway?" Uncle Boaz, hobbling with rheumatism, held out a quaint old tray of inlaid woods; and the lawyer, as he placed his plate upon it, heaved a sigh of gratitude for the utter absence of vulgarity. He could fancy dear old Miss Saidie puffing apologies over the fat bacon, and Fletcher profanely deploring the sloppy coffee.
"The half-grown girl with the bunch of flaxen curls tied with a blue ribbon?" returned Tucker, while Lila cut up his food as if he were a child. "Yes, that's Molly Peterkin, though it's hard to believe she's any kin to Sol. I shouldn't wonder if she turned into a bouncing beauty a few years further on."
"It was her father, then, that I walked over with from the cross-roads," said Carraway. "He struck me as a shrewd man of his sort."
"Oh, he's shrewd enough," rejoined Tucker, "and the proof of it is that he's outlived three wives and is likely to outlive a fourth. I met him in the road yesterday, and he told me that he had just been off again to get married. 'Good luck to you this time, Sol', said I. 'Wal, it ought to be, sir,' said he, 'seeing as marrying has got to be so costly in these days. Why, my first wife didn't come to more than ten dollars, counting the stovepipe hat and all, and this last one's mounted up to 'most a hundred.' 'Try and take good care of her, then,' I cautioned; "they come too high to throw away." "That's true, sir," he answered, with a sorrowful shake of his head. "But the trouble is that as the price goes up the quality gets poorer. My first one lasted near on to thirty years, and did all the chores about the house, to say nothing of the hog-pen; and if you'll believe me, sir, the one before this stuck at the hog-feeding on her wedding day, and then wore out before twelve months were up.'"
He finished with his humorous chuckle and lifted his fork skilfully in his left hand.
"I dare say he overvalues himself as a husband," remarked Carraway, joining in the laugh, "but he has at least the merit of being loyal to your family."
"Well, I believe he has; but then, he doesn't like new folks or new things, I reckon. There's a saying that his hatred of changes keeps him from ever changing his clothes."
Christopher came in at the moment, and with a slight bow to
Carraway, slipped into his place.
"What's Jim Weatherby chopping up that log for?" he asked, glancing in the direction of the ringing strokes.
Cynthia looked at him almost grimly, and there was a contraction of the muscles about her determined mouth.
"Ask Lila," she responded quietly. As Christopher's questioning gaze turned to her, Lila flushed rose-pink and played nervously with the breadcrumbs on the table.
"He said he had nothing else to do," she answered, with an effort, "and he knew you were so busy—that was all."
"Well, he's a first rate fellow," commented Christopher, as he reached for the pitcher of buttermilk, "but I don't see what makes him so anxious to do my work."
"Oh, that's Jim's way, you know," put in Tucker with his offhand kindliness. "He's the sort of old maid who would undertake to straighten the wilderness if he could get the job. Why, I actually found him once chopping off dead boughs in the woods, and when I laughed he excused himself by saying that he couldn't bear to see trees look so scraggy."
As he talked, his pleasant pale blue eyes twinkled with humour, and his full double chin shook over his shirt of common calico. He had grown very large from his long inaction, and it was with a perceptible effort that he moved himself upon his slender crutches. Yet despite his maimed and suffering body he was dressed with a scrupulous neatness which was almost like an air of elegance. As he chatted on easily, Carraway forgot, in listening to him, the harrowing details in the midst of which he sat—forgot the overheated, smoky kitchen, the common pine table with its broken china, and the sullen young savage whom he faced.
For Christopher was eating his dinner hurriedly, staring at his plate in a moodiness which he did not take the trouble to conceal. With all the youthful beauty of his face, there was a boorishness in his ill-humour which in a less commanding figure would have been repellent—an evident pride in the sincerity of the scowl upon his brow. When his meal was over he rose with a muttered excuse and went out into the yard, where a few minutes afterward Carraway was bold enough to follow him.
The afternoon was golden with sunshine, and every green leaf on the trees seemed to stand out clearly against the bright blue sky. In the rear of the house there was a lack of the careful cleanliness he had noticed at the front, and rotting chips from the woodpile strewed the short grass before the door, where a clump of riotous ailanthus shoots was waging a desperate battle for existence. Beside the sunken wooden step a bare brown patch showed where the daily splashes of hot soapsuds had stripped the ground of even the modest covering that it wore. Within a stone's throw of the threshold the half of a broken wheelbarrow, white with mould, was fast crumbling into earth, and a little farther off stood a disorderly group of chicken coops before which lay a couple of dead nestlings. On the soaking plank ledge around the well-brink, where fresh water was slopping from the overturned bucket, several bedraggled ducks were paddling with evident enjoyment. The one pleasant sight about the place was the sturdy figure of Jim Weatherby, still at work upon the giant body of a dead oak tree.
When Carraway came out, Christopher was feeding a pack of hounds from a tin pan of coarse corn bread, and to the lawyer's surprise he was speaking to them in a tone that sounded almost jocular. Though born of a cringing breed, the dogs looked contented and well fed, and among them Carraway recognised his friend Spy, who had followed at the heels of Uncle Boaz.
"Here, Miser, this is yours," the young man was saying. "There, you needn't turn up your nose; it's as big as Blister's. Down, Spy, I tell you; you've had twice your share; you think because you're the best looking you're to be the best fed, too."
As Carraway left the steps the dogs made an angry rush at him, to be promptly checked by Christopher.
"Back, you fools; back, I say. You'd better be careful how you walk about here, sir," he added; "they'd bite as soon as not—all of them except Spy.
"Good fellow, Spy," returned Carraway, a little nervously, and the hound came fawning to his feet. "I assure you I have no intention of treading upon their preserves," he hastened to explain; "but I should like a word with you, and this seems to be the only opportunity I'll have, as I return to town to-morrow."
Christopher threw the remaining pieces of corn bread into the wriggling pack, set the pan in the doorway, and wiped his hands carelessly upon his overalls.
"Well, I don't see what you've got to say to me," he replied, walking rapidly in the direction of the well, where he waited for the other to join him.
"It's about the place, of course," returned the lawyer, with an attempt to shatter the awkward rustic reserve. "I understand that it has passed into your possession."
The young man nodded, and, drawing out his clasp-knife, fell to whittling a splinter which he had broken from the well-brink.
"In that case," pursued Carraway, feeling as if he were dashing his head against a wall, "I shall address myself to you in the briefest terms. The place, I suppose, as it stands, is not worth much to-day. Even good land is cheap, and this is poor."
Again Christopher nodded, intent upon his whittling. "I reckon it wouldn't bring more than nine hundred," he responded coolly.
"Then my position is easy, for I am sure you will consider favourably the chance to sell at treble its actual value. I am authorised to offer you three thousand dollars for the farm."
For a moment Christopher stared at him in silence, then, "What in the devil do you want with it?" he demanded.
"I am not acting for myself in the matter," returned the lawyer, after a short hesitation. "The offer is made through me by another. That it is to your advantage to accept it is my honest conviction."
Christopher tossed the bit of wood at a bedraggled drake that waddled off, quacking angrily.
"Then it's Fletcher behind you," he said in the same cool tones.
"It seems to me that is neither here nor there. Naturally Mr. Fletcher is very anxious to secure the land. As it stands, it is a serious inconvenience to him, of course."
Laughing, Christopher snapped the blade of his knife.
"Well, you may tell him from me," he retorted, "that just as long as it is 'a serious inconvenience to him' it shall stand as it is. Why, man, if Fletcher wanted that broken wheelbarrow enough to offer me three thousand dollars for it, I wouldn't let him have it. The only thing I'd leave him free to take, if I could help it, is the straight road to damnation!"
His voice, for all the laughter, sounded brutal, and Carraway, gazing at him in wonder, saw his face grow suddenly lustful like that of an evil deity. The beauty was still there, blackened and distorted, a beauty that he felt to be more sinister than ugliness. The lawyer was in the presence of a great naked passion, and involuntarily he lowered his eyes.
"I don't think he understands your attitude," he said quietly; "it seems to him—and to me also, I honestly affirm—that you would reap an advantage as decided as his own."
"Nothing is to my advantage, I tell you, that isn't harm to him.
He knows it if he isn't as big a fool as he is a rascal."
"Then I may presume that you are entirely convinced in your own mind that you have a just cause for the stand you take?"
"Cause!" the word rapped out like an oath. "He stole my home, I tell you; he stole every inch of land I owned, and every penny. Where did he get the money to buy the place—he a slave-overseer? Where did he get it, I ask, unless he had been stealing for twenty years?"
"It looks ugly, I confess," admitted Carraway; "but were there no books—no accounts kept?"
"Oh, he settled that, of course. When my father died, and we asked for the books, where were they?
Burned, he said—burned in the old office that the Yankees fired.
He's a scoundrel, I tell you, sir, and I know him to the core.
He's a rotten scoundrel!"
Carraway caught his breath quickly and drew back as if he had touched unwittingly a throbbing canker. To his oversensitive nature these primal emotions had a crudeness that was vulgar in its unrestraint. He beheld it all—the old wrong and the new hatred—in a horrid glare of light, a disgraceful blaze of trumpets. Here there was no cultured evasion of the conspicuous vice—none of the refinements even of the Christian ethics—it was all raw and palpitating humanity.
"Then my mission is quite useless," he confessed. "I can only add that I am sorrier than I can say sorry for the whole thing, too. If my services could be of any use to you I should not hesitate to offer them, but so far as I see there is absolutely nothing to be done. An old crime, as you know, very often conforms to an appearance of virtue."
He held out his hand, Christopher shook it, and then the lawyer went back into the house to bid good-by to Mrs. Blake. When he came out a few moments later, and passed through the whitewashed gate into the sunken road, he saw that Christopher was still standing where he had left him, the golden afternoon around him, and the bedraggled ducks paddling at his feet.
VIII. Treats of a Passion that is Not Love
Over a distant meadow fluted the silver whistle of a partridge, and Christopher, lifting his head, noted involuntarily the direction of the sound. A covey was hatching down by the meadow brook, he knew—for not a summer mating nor a hidden nest had escaped his eyes—and he wondered vaguely if the young birds were roaming into Fletcher's wheatfield. Then, with a single vigorous movement as if he were settling his thoughts upon him, he crossed the yard, leaped the fence by the barnyard, and started briskly along the edge of a little cattle pasture, where a strange bull bellowed in the shadow of a walnut-tree. At the bottom of the pasture a crumbling rail fence divided his land from Fletcher's, and as he looked over the festoons of poisonous ivy he saw Fletcher himself overseeing the last planting of his tobacco. For a time Christopher watched them as through a mist—watched the white and the black labourers, the brown furrows in which the small holes were bored, the wilted plants thrown carelessly in place and planted with two quick pressures of a bare, earth-begrimed foot. He smelled the keen odours released by the sunshine from the broken soil; he saw the standing beads of sweat on the faces of the planters—Negroes with swollen lips and pleasant eyes like those of kindly animals—and he heard the coarse, hectoring voice of Fletcher, who stood midway of the naked ground. To regard the man as a mere usurper of his land had been an article in the religious creed the child had learned, and as he watched him now, bearded, noisy, assured of his possessions, the sight lashed him like the strokes of a whip on bleeding flesh. In the twenty-five years of his life he had grown fairly gluttonous of hate—had tended it with a passion that was like that of love. Now he felt that he had never really had enough of it—had never feasted on the fruit of it till he was satisfied—had never known the delight of wallowing in it until to-day. Deep-rooted like an instinct as the feeling was, he knew now that there had been hours when, for very weakness of his nature, he had almost forgotten that he meant to pay back Fletcher in the end, when it seemed, after all, easier merely to endure and forget and have it done. Still keeping upon his own land, he turned presently and followed a little brook that crossed a meadow where mixed wild flowers were strewn loosely in the grass. The bull still bellowed in the shadow of the walnut-tree, and he found himself listening with pure delight to the savage cries. Reaching at last a point where the brook turned westward at the foot of a low green hill, he threw himself over the dividing rail fence, and came, at the end of a minute's hurried walk, to the old Blake graveyard, midway of one of Fletcher's fallow fields. The gate was bricked up, after the superstitious custom of many country burial places, but he climbed the old moss-grown wall, where poisonous ivy grew rank and venomous, and landing deep in the periwinkle that carpeted the ground, made his way rapidly to the flat oblong slab beneath which his father lay. The marble was discoloured by long rains and stained with bruised periwinkle, and the shallow lettering was hidden under a fall of dried needles from a little stunted fir-tree; but, leaning over, he carefully swept the dust away and loosened the imprisoned name which seemed to hover like a spiritual presence upon the air.
"HERE LIES ALL THAT IS MORTAL OF CHRISTOPHER BLAKE, WHO DIED IN THE HOPE OF A JOYFUL RESURRECTION, APRIL 12, 1786, AGED 70 YEARS. INTO THY HANDS, O LORD, I COMMIT MY SPIRIT."
Around him there were other graves—graves of all dead Blakes for two hundred years, and the flat tombstones were crowded so thickly together that it seemed as if the dead must lie beneath them row on row. It was all in deep shadow, fallen slabs, rank periwinkle, dust and mould—no cheerful sunshine had ever penetrated through the spreading cedars overhead. Life was here, but it was the shy life of wild creatures, approaching man only when he had returned to earth. A mocking-bird purled a love note in the twilight of a great black cedar, a lizard glided like a gray shadow along one of the overturned slabs, and at his entrance a rabbit had started from the ivy on his father's grave. To climb the overgrown wall and lie upon the periwinkle was like entering, for a time, the world of shades—a world far removed from the sunny meadow and the low green hill.
With his head pillowed upon his father's grave, Christopher stretched himself at full length on the ground and stared straight upward at the darkbrowed cedars. It was such an hour as he allowed himself at long intervals when his inheritance was heavy upon him and his disordered mind needed to retreat into a city of refuge. As a child he had often come to this same spot to dream hopefully of the future, unboylike dreams in which the spirit of revenge wore the face of happiness. Then, with the inconsequence of childhood, he had pictured Fletcher gasping beneath his feet—trampled out like a worm, when he was big enough to take his vengeance and come again into his own. Mere physical strength seemed to him at that age the sole thing needed—he wanted then only the brawny arm and the heart bound by triple brass.
Now, as he stretched out his square, sunburned hand, with its misshapen nails, he laughed aloud at the absurdity of those blunted hopes. To-day he stood six feet three inches from the ground, with muscles hard as steel and a chest that rang sound as a bell, yet how much nearer his purpose had he been as a little child! He remembered the day that he had hidden in the bushes with his squirrel gun and waited with fluttering breath for the sound of Fletcher's footsteps along the road. On that day it had seemed to him that the hand of the Lord was in his own Godlike vengeance nerving his little wrist. He had meant to shoot—for that he had saved every stray penny from his sales of hogs and cider, of watermelons and chinkapins; for that he had bought the gun and rammed the powder home. Even when the thud of footsteps beat down the sunny road strewn with brown honeyshucks, he had felt neither fear nor hesitation as he crouched amid the underbrush. Rather there was a rare exhilaration, warm blood in his brain and a sharp taste in his mouth like that of unripe fruit—as if he had gorged himself upon the fallen honeyshucks. It was the happiest moment of his life, he knew, the one moment when he seemed to measure himself inch by inch with fate; and like all such supreme instants, it fell suddenly flat among the passing hours. For even as the gun was lifted, at the very second that Fletcher's heavy body swung into view, he heard a crackling in the dead bushes at his back, and Uncle Boaz struck up his arm with a palsied hand.
"Gawd alive, honey, you don' wanter be tucken out an' hunged?" the old man cried in terror.
The boy rose in a passion and flung his useless gun aside. "Oh, you've spoiled it! you've spoiled it!" he sobbed, and shed bitter tears upon the ground.
To this hour, lying on his father's grave, he knew that he regretted that wasted powder—that will to slay which had blazed up and died down so soon. Strangely enough, it soothed him now to remember how near to murder he had been, and as he drank the summer air in deep drafts he felt the old desire rekindle from its embers. While he lived it was still possible—the one chance that awaits the ready hand, the final answer of a sympathetic heaven that deals out justice. His god was a pagan god, terrible rather than tender, and there had always been within him the old pagan scorn of everlasting mercy. There were moods even when he felt the kinship with his savage forefathers working in his blood, and at such times he liked to fit heroic tortures to heroic crimes to imagine the lighted stake and his enemy amid the flames. Over him as he lay at full length the ancient cedars, touched here and there with a younger green, reared a dusky tent that screened him alike from the hot sunshine and the bright June sky. Somewhere in the deepest shadow the mocking-bird purled over its single note, and across the lettering on the marble slab beside him a small brown lizard was gliding back and forth. The clean, fresh smell of the cedars filled his nostrils like a balm.
For a moment the physical pleasure in his surroundings possessed his thoughts; then gradually, in a state between waking and sleeping, the curious boughs above took fantastic shapes and were interwoven before his eyes with his earlier memories. There was a great tester bed, with carved posts and curtains of silvery damask, that he had slept in as a child, and it was here that he had once had a terrible dream—a dream which he had remembered to this day because it was so like a story of Aunt Delisha's, in which the devil comes with a red-hot scuttle to carry off a little boy. On that night he had been the little boy, and he had seen the scuttle with its leaping flames so plainly that in his terror he had struggled up and screamed aloud. A moment later he had awakened fully, to find a lighted candle in his face and his father in a flowered dressing-gown sitting beside the bed and looking at him with his sad, bloodshot eyes. "Is the devil gone, father, and did you drive him away?" he asked; and then the tall, white-haired old man, whose mind was fast decaying, did a strange and a pitiable thing, for he fell upon his knees beside the bed and cried out upon Christopher for forgiveness for the selfishness of his long life. "You came too late, my son," he said; "you came twenty years too late. I had given you up long ago and grown hopeless. You came like Isaac to Abraham, but too late—too late!" The boy sat up in bed, huddling in the bedclothes, for the night was chilly. He grew suddenly afraid of his father, the big, beautiful old man in the flowered dressing-gown, and he wished that his mother would come in and take him away. "But I came twins with Lila, father," he replied, trying to speak bravely. "With Lila! Oh, my poor children! my poor children!" cried the old man, and, taking up his candle, tottered to the door. Then Christopher stopped his ears in the pillows, for he heard him moaning to himself as he went back along the hall. He felt all at once terribly frightened, and at last, slipping down the tall bed-steps, he stole on his bare feet to Cynthia's door and crept in beside her. After this, dim years went by when he did not see his father, and the great closed rooms on the north side of the house were as silent as if a corpse lay there awaiting burial. His beautiful, stately mother, who, in spite of her gray hair, had always seemed but little older than himself, vanished as mysteriously from his sight—on a thrilling morning when there were many waving red flags and much hurried marching by of gray-clad troops. Young as he was, he was already beginning to play his boy's share in a war which was then fighting slowly to a finish; and in the wild flutter of events he forgot, for a time, to do more than tip softly when he crossed the hall. She was ill, they told him—too ill to care even about the battles that were fought across the river. The sound of the big guns sent no delicious shivers through her limbs, and there was only Lila to come with him when he laid his ear to the ground and thrilled with the strong shock which seemed to run around the earth. When at last her door was opened again and he went timidly in, holding hands with Lila, he found his mother sitting stiffly erect among her cushions as she would sit for the remainder of her days, blind and half dead, in her Elizabethan chair. His beautiful, proud mother, with the smiling Loves painted above her head!
For an instant he shut his eyes beneath the cedars, seeing her on that morning as a man sees in his dreams the face of his first love. Then another day dawned slowly to his consciousness—a day which stood out clear-cut as a cameo from all the others of his life. For weeks Cynthia's eyes had been red and swollen, and he commented querulously upon them, for they made her homelier than usual. When he had finished, she looked at him a moment without replying, then, putting her arm about him, she drew him out upon the lawn and told him why she wept. It was a mellow autumn day, and they passed over gold and russet leaves strewn deep along the path. A light wind was blowing in the tree-tops, and the leaves were still falling, falling, falling! He saw Cynthia's haggard face in a flame of glowing colours. Through the drumming in his ears, which seemed to come from the clear sky, he heard the ceaseless rustle beneath his feet; and to this day he could not walk along a leaf-strewn road in autumn without seeing again the blur of red-and-gold and the gray misery in Cynthia's face.