This evening the road through the wood did not frighten him, though the sun was down. He thought neither of the ghosts that Uncle Dan'l had seen, nor of the bug-a-boos that had chased Viney's husband home. He was too old for these things now. He had grown taller and stronger in a day. When he reached the pasture gate opposite the house he opened it and went in to look for the sheep.
The west was fast losing colour, like a bright-hued fabric that has been drenched in water, and a thick, blue mist, shot with fireflies, shrouded the wide common. A fresh, sharp odour rose from the dew-steeped earth, giving place, as he gained upon the flock, to the smell of moist wool. As he brushed the heavy, purple tubes of Jamestown weeds long-legged insects flew out and struck against his arm before they fell in a drunken stupor to the grass below.
The boy made his way cautiously, his figure becoming blurred as the mist wrapped him like a blanket. The darkness was gathering rapidly. From the far-off horizon clouds of lavender were melting, and the pines had gone gray.
Presently a white patch glimmered in the midst of the pasture, and he began to call softly:
"Coo-sheep! Coo-sheep!"
A tremulous bleat answered, but as he neared the flock it scattered swiftly, the errant leaders darting shyly behind the looming outlines of sassafras bushes. Again he called, and again the plaintive cry responded, growing fainter as several fleeter ewes sped past him to the beech trees beside the little stream.
The space before the boy was suddenly spangled with fireflies, and the mist grew denser.
He broke off a branch of sassafras and started at a brisk run, rounding by some dozen yards the startled ewes. The scattered white blotches closed together as he ran towards them, and fled, bleating, to the flock where it clustered at the pasture gate.
In a moment he had driven them across the road and behind the bars of the cow-pen.
When he entered the house a little later he found that the family had had supper, a single plate remaining for himself. His stepmother, looking jaded and nervous, was putting salted herring to soak in an earthenware bowl, while she scolded Sairy Jane, who was patching Jubal's apron.
"It's goin' on ten years sence I've stopped to draw breath," said Marthy Burr, "an' I'm clean wore out. 'Tain't no better than a dog's life, nohow—a woman an' a dog air about the only creeturs as would put up with it, an' they're the biggest pair of fools the Lord ever made. Here I've been standin' at the tub from sunrise to sunset, with my jaw a'most splittin' from my face, an' thar's yo' pa a-settin' at his pipe as unconsarned as if I wa'nt his lawful wife—the more's the pity! It's the lawful wives as have the work to do, an' the lawfuller the wives the lawfuller the work. If this here government ain't got nothin' better to do than to drive poor women till they drop I reckon we'd as well stop payin' taxes to keep it goin'."
Nicholas wiped his heated brow on his shirt-*sleeve and hung his hat on the back of a bottomless chair. Jubal, who was rolling on the floor, gave a gurgle and made a grab at it, to be soundly boxed by his mother as she reseated him at Sairy Jane's feet. His gurgle wavered dolorously and rose into a howl.
"Have you been to supper, ma?" asked Nicholas cheerfully.
"Lord, Nick, it's a long ways past supper-time," answered Sairy Jane, relieved by the interruption. "The things air all washed up, ain't they, pa?"
Amos Burr scowled heavily upon the boy's head, his phlegmatic nature goaded into resentment by his wife's ill-temper and the lamentations of Jubal.
"I don't reckon you expect supper to keep waitin' till breakfast," he said. "You've given your ma trouble enough 'thout makin' her do an extra washin' up on your o'count. You've gone clean crazy sence you've been loafin' round with them Battles. I don't see as you air much o'count, nohow."
Nicholas raised his eyes to his father's face and looked at him fixedly. For a moment he did not speak, and then he said slowly:
"I'm as good as a hand to you."
He was thinking doggedly that he had never hated any one so much as he hated his own father, and that he liked the sensation. He wished he could do him some real harm—hit him hard enough to hurt or make the peanuts rot in the ground. He should like also to choke Jubal, who never left off yelling.
Amos Burr spat a mouthful of tobacco juice through the open window, flinching before the boy's steady glance. He was a mild-natured man at best, whose chief sin was his softness. It would not have entered his slow-witted head to protest against the accusations of his wife. When they stung him into revolt he revolted in the opposite direction.
But his failures were faults in his son's eyes. To the desperate determination of the boy, weakness became as contemptible as crime. What was a man worth who worked from morning until night and yet achieved nothing? Of what account was the farmer whom the crows outwitted and the weather made a mockery? Did not the very crops cry out as they rotted that his father was a fool, and the unploughed land proclaim him a coward? Had he ever dared a venture in his life or risked a season? And yet what had ever returned at his bidding or brought forth at his planting?
"You've been mighty little use of late," repeated Amos Burr stubbornly when his wife placed the earthenware bowl on the shelf and came to the table—her arm outstretched.
"Now, you jes' take yourself right off, Amos Burr," she said. "If you can't behave decently to my dead sister's child you shan't hang round them as was her own flesh and blood kin. Sairy Jane, you bring that plate of hot corn pones from the stove. Here, Nick, set right down an' eat your supper! There's some canned cherries if you want 'em."
Nicholas sat down, but the cornbread stuck in his throat and the coffee was without aroma. He looked at the figured oilcloth on the table and thought of the shining glass and silver at Juliet Burwell's. The flavour of the cake she had given him seemed to intensify his distaste for the food before him. He felt that he cared for nobody—that he wanted nothing. He looked at his stepmother and thought that she was dried and brown like a hickory nut; he looked at Sairy Jane and wondered why she didn't have any eyelashes, and he looked at Jubal and saw that he was all gums.
When he went up to his little attic room after supper he sat on his shucks pallet in the darkness and thought of all the evil that he should like to do. He should like to pull Sairy Jane's plait and to slap Jubal. He should even like to tell Juliet Burwell that he didn't want to keep a clean heart, and to call God names. No, he would not become a minister and preach the Gospel. He would be a thief instead and break into hen-houses and steal chickens. If his father planted watermelons he would steal them from the vines as soon as they were ripe. Perhaps Eugenia would help him. At any rate he would go halves with her if she would be his partner in wickedness. He had just as soon go to hell, after all—if it were not for Thomas Jefferson.
He leaned his head on his hands and looked through the narrow window to where the peanut fields lay in blackness. From the stable came the faint neigh of the old mare, and he remembered suddenly that he had forgotten to put straw in her stall and to loosen her halter that she might lie down. He rose and stole softly downstairs and out of the house.
One evening in late autumn Nicholas went into Delphy's cabin after supper and found Eugenia seated upon the hearth, facing Uncle Ish and Aunt Verbeny. Between them Delphy's son-in-law, Moses, was helping Bernard mend a broken hare trap, while Delphy, herself, was crooning a lullaby to one of her grandchildren as she carded the wool which she had taken from a quilt of faded patchwork. On the stones of the great fireplace the red flames from lightwood splits leaped over a smouldering hickory log, filling the cabin with the penetrating odour of burning, resinous pine. From the wall above the hearth a dozen roasting apples were suspended by hemp strings, and as the heat penetrated the russet coats the apples circled against the yawning chimney like small globes revolving about a sun.
Eugenia was sitting silently in a low, split-bottomed chair, her hands folded in her lap and her animated eyes on the dark faces across from her, over whose wrinkled surfaces the dancing firelight chased in ruddy lights and shadows.
Uncle Ish had stretched his feet out upon the stones, and the mud adhering to his rough, homemade boots was fast drying before the blaze and settling in coarse gray dust upon the hearth. His gnarled old palms lay upward on his knees, and his grizzled head was bowed upon his chest. At intervals he muttered softly to himself, but his words were inaudible—suggested by some far-off and disconnected vision. Aunt Verbeny was nodding in her chair, arousing herself from time to time to give a sharp glance into the face of Uncle Ish.
"Huccome dey let you out ter-night, honey?" asked Delphy suddenly, turning her eyes upon Eugenia as she drew a fresh handful of wool from between the covers of the quilt.
"I ran away," replied the child gravely. "I saw Bernard with his hare trap, and Bernard shan't do nothin' that I can't do."
"Yes, I shall," rejoined Bernard without looking up from his trap. "You can't wear breeches."
"I like to know why I can't," demanded Eugenia. "I put on a pair of your old ones and they fit me just as well as they do you—only Aunt Chris made me get out of them."
"Sakes er live!" exclaimed Aunt Verbeny, awaking from her doze.
Uncle Ish stared dreamily into the flames. "Ole Miss wuz in her grave, she wuz," he muttered, while Delphy looked at him and shook her head mysteriously.
Then, as Nicholas entered, they made a place for him upon the hearthstones, treating him with the forbearing tolerance with which the well-born negro regards the low-born white man.
"Pa wants you all to help him in peanut-picking to-morrow," said Nicholas, addressing the group indiscriminately. "He's late at it this year, but he's been laid up with rheumatism."
"Dar ain' nuttin' ez goes on two foot er fo' ez won' len' er han' at a pickin'," remarked Uncle Ish as the boy sat down. "Dar ain' nuttin' in de shape, er man er crow ez won't he'p demse'ves w'en dey's lyin' roun' loose, nuther."
"Dar's gwine ter be er killin' fros' fo' mawnin'," said Moses, his teeth chattering from the draught let in by the opening door. "Hit kilt all Miss Chris' hop vines las' year, en it'll kill all ez ain't under kiver ter-night. Hit seems ter sort er lay holt er yo' chist en clean grip hit."
"You ain' never had no chist, nohow," remarked Delphy disdainfully. "Hit don't take mo'n er spit er fros' ter freeze thoo you. You de coldest innered somebody I ever lay eyes on. Dar mought ez well be er fence rail er roun' on er winter night fer all de wa'mth ez is in yo' bones."
"Dat's so," admitted Moses shamefacedly. "Dat's so. Dese yer nights, when de fire is all gone, is moughty near ter freezin' me out er house en home. I ain' never seed ne'r quilt ez wuz made fur er hull fambly yit. Wid me ter pull en Betsey ter pull en de chillun ter pull, whar de quilt?"
"Dar ain' no blankets dese days," said Uncle Ish sadly. "Dey ain' got mo'n er seasonin' er wool in dese yer sto' stuff. Dey wa'nt dat ar way in ole times, sis Verbeny. Bless yo' soul, sis Verbeny, dey wan't dat ar way."
"Ole Miss she use ter have eve'y stitch er her wool carded fo' her own eyes," said Aunt Verbeny. "What wa'nt good enough fer her wuz good enough fer de res', en we got hit. Ef'n de briars wouldn't come out'n it soon ez she laid her han' on 'em, Ole Miss she turnt up her nose en thowed de wool on ter de niggers' pile. Hit had ter be pisonous white en sof fo' hit 'ud tech Ole Missusses skin. Noner yo' nappy stuff done come near her."
Uncle Ish chuckled and hung his head on his breast.
"Doze wuz times!" he cried, "doze wuz times, en dese ain't times!"
Then he looked at Nicholas, who was watching the apples spinning in the heat.
"De po' white trash ain' set foot inside my do'," he added, "en de leetle gals ain' flirt roun' twell dar wa'nt no qualifyin' der legs f'om der arms."
"I don't care!" said Eugenia, looking defiantly at Uncle Ish.
"Lor', chile, don't teck on dat way," remonstrated Aunt Verbeny. "You ain't had no raisin' noways, en dar ain' been nobody ter brung you up 'cep'n yo' pa. Hit's de foolishness uv Miss Chris ez has overturnt de hull place."
"She's a-settin' moughty prim now," continued Uncle Ish, his eyes on the little girl. "She des' es prim es ef she wuz chiny en glass, but I'se had my eye on 'er afo' dis. I'se done tote 'er in dese arms when she wa'nt knee high ter Marse Tom's ole mule Jenny, en she ain't cut nairy er caper dat I ain't 'sperienced hit."
"I don't care," retorted Eugenia.
"Ain't I done see her plump right out whar sis Delphy wuz a-wallopin' her Jeetle nigger Jake, en holler out dat Jake ain' done lay ban's on her pa's watermillion—'case she done steal 'em herse'f?"
"I don't care!" repeated Eugenia with tearful defiance.
"An' she ain' no mo' steal dat ar watermillion den I is," finished Uncle Ish triumphantly.
"It was just a lie," said Bernard. "Eugie, you know where liars go."
"Des' ez straight ter de bad place ez dey kin walk," added Aunt Verbeny severely. "Des' ez straight ez de Lord kin sen' 'em dar."
"It was a good lie," declared Nicholas, in manful defence of the weak. "I don't believe she's goin' to be damned for a good lie and a little one, too."
"Well, dar's lies en dar's lies," put in Delphy consolingly, "an' I 'low dat dar's mo' in de manner uv lyin' den in de lie. Some lies is er long ways sweeter ter de tas' den Gospel trufe. Abraham, he lied, en it ain't discountenance him wid de Lord. Marse Tom, he lied when he wuz young, en it spar'd 'im er whoppin'. Hit's er plum fool ez won't spar' dere own hinder parts on er 'count uv er few words."
"George Washington didn't," said Bernard.
"I wish he had," added Eugenia. "Aunt Chris made me read about him and his old cherry tree when I told her the red rooster was setting, because I didn't want her to kill him."
"Ma asked me once if I had been fishin' when she told me to clean out the spring," said Nicholas thoughtfully, "an' I said yes."
"What did she say?" asked Bernard.
"Nothin'. She whacked me on the head."
Just then Betsey came in with her baby in her arms, and Moses shuffled aside to give place to her, cowed by an admonishing glance from his mother-in-law.
"Bless de Lord!" exclaimed Uncle Ish, lifting his withered, old hands. "Ef dar ain' anur er Betsey's babies! How many is de, Mose?"
Moses scratched his head and shrank into the corner.
"I ain' done straighten 'em out yit, Unk Ish," he returned slowly. "'Pears like soon es I done add 'em all up anur done come, an' I has ter kac'late f'om de bottom agin. I ain' got no head fer figgers, nohow. Betsey, she lays dat dar's ten uv 'em, but ter save my soul I can't mek out mo'n eight."
"Dar's nearer er dozen," rejoined Betsey with offended pride, "dar's nearer er dozen 'cordin' ter de way I count."
"Dar now!" cried Aunt Verbeny. "I ain' never trus' no nigger's cac'lations yit, en I ain' gwine ter now. When I wants countin', I want white folks' countin'."
"Dey tell me," said Delphy, glancing sternly at the head on Betsey's knee, "dat de quality don' set demse'ves up on er pa'sel er chillun no mo'. De time done gone by. My Mahaly, she went up ter some outlandish place wid er wild Injun name, like Philadelphy, en she sez de smaller de fambly de mo' stuck up is de heads er it. She sez ef Ole Miss had gone up dar a-puttin' on airs 'case er her fifteen chillun, she wouldn't never have helt up 'er head no mo'. Mahaly, she ain' mah'ed no man, she ain't. She sez en ole maid in Philadelphy des' looks right spang over all de heads, she's so sot up."
"'Tain' so yer," said Aunt Verbeny feelingly. "'Tain' so yer. Hit seems like de 'oman nairy a man is laid claim ter ain' wuth claimin'. Ain' dat so, bro' Ish?"
But Uncle Ish only grunted in retort, his head nodding drowsily. The tremulous tracery the wood-fire cast upon his face gave it an expression of dumb intensity which adumbrated all the pathos and the patience of his race.
"Mahaly wuz er likely gal," went on Aunt Verbeny, "an' when she las' come home, she wuz a-warin' spike-heeled shoes en er veil uv skeeter nettin'. 'Tain' so long sence Rhody's Viney went to Philadelphy, too, but she ain' had no luck sence she wuz born er twin. Hit went clean agin 'er."
"Lord a-mercy, Aunt Verbeny, she ain't a-comin' back dis way?" asked Betsey, probing the apples with a small pine stick and giving the softest to Eugenia.
Aunt Verbeny shook her head.
"She ain' never had no luck on er 'count er bein' er twin," she said. "When she sot herse'f on a-gwine up ter de Yankees, Marse Tom, he tuck er goose quill en wrote out 'er principles [recommendations] des' es plain es writin' kin be writ—which ain't plain enough fer my eyes—en he gun' 'em ter Viney wid his own han's. Viney tuck 'n put 'em safe 'way down in de bottom uv 'er trunk en went 'long ter de Yankees. But she ain' been dar mo'n er week when one night she went a-traipsin' out on de street en lef er principles behint 'er, en, bless yo' life, oner dem ar Yankees breck right in en stole 'em smack 'way f'om 'er. Yo' trunk is a moughty risky place ter kyar yo' principles, but Viney, she wuz dat sot up."
A nod of assent passed round the group. The children ate their apples silently, and Moses got up to put fresh wood on the fire. As the green log fell among the smouldering chips vivid tongues of flame shot up the smoked old mortar of the chimney, and the remaining apples burst their brown peels and sent out little rivulets of juice. The crackling of the fresh bark made a cheerful accompaniment to the chirping of a cricket hidden somewhere in the hearthstones.
"Dar now, bro' Ish!" exclaimed Aunt Verbeny, watching Eugenia as she sat in the dull red glare. "Ef dat chile ain't de patt'en er young Miss Meeley, I'se clean cracked in my head, I is. I 'members Miss Meeley des' ez well ez 'twuz yestiddy de day Marse Tom brung her home en de niggers stood a-bowin' en axin' howdy at de gate. She wuz all black en white en cold lookin' twell she smiled, en den it wuz des' like er lightwood blaze in 'er eyes."
Uncle Ish nodded dreamily.
"I use ter ride erlong wid Marse Tom ter co'te 'er," he said, "en de gent'men wuz a-troopin' ter see her in vayous attitudes. Dey buzzed roun' 'er de same ez bees, but she ain' had no eyes fer none 'cep'n Marse Tom."
At that instant the door opened, and Rindy rushed in, breathlesly pursuing Eugenia.
"Miss Chris is pow'ful riled," she announced, "an' Marse Tom is a-stampin' roun' same ez er bull. I reckon you'se gwine ter ketch it when dey once gits dere han's on you." Then, as her eye fell on Nicholas, she assumed an indignant air. "Dis ain't de place fer po' folks," she added.
Eugenia rose and put a roasted apple in her pocket.
"I ain't goin' to catch anything that Bernard doesn't catch," she said. "When he goes I'm goin' too."
And she went out, followed by Rindy and the boys.
The first breath of the chill atmosphere brought a glow to Nicholas's cheek, and he started at a brisk run across the fields. He had gone but a few yards when he was checked by Eugenia's voice.
"Nick!" she called.
Her small, dark shadow was falling on the ground beside him, and by the light of the pale moon he could see the fog of her breath.
As he went towards her she held out her hand.
"Here's an apple I saved for you," she panted. "And—and I don't mind about your being poor white trash!"
He took the apple, but before the reply left his lips she had darted from him and was speeding homeward across the glimmering whiteness of the frost.
Mrs. Jane Dudley Webb was a lady who supported an impossible present upon an important past. She had once been heard to remark that if she had not something to look back upon she could not live: and, as her retrospective view was racial rather than individual, the consolation attained might be considered disproportionate to the needs of the case. The lines of her present had fallen in a white frame house in the main street of Kingsborough; those of her past began with the first Dudley who swung a lance in Merry England, to end with irascible old William of the name, who slept in the family graveyard upon James River.
Mrs. Webb herself was straight and elegant, and inclined to the ironical, when, as Jane Dudley, the belle of the country-side, she fired the fancy of young Julius Webb, an officer in the cavalry of the United States. He danced a minuet with her at a ball in Washington, was heard to swear an oath by her eyes at punch before the supper was over; and proceeded the following week to spur his courtship upon old William as daringly as he had ever spurred his horse upon an Indian wigwam.
The last Dudley of the Virginian line withstood, through several stormy years, the united appeals of his daughter and her lover. In the end he yielded, subdued by opposition and gout, retaining the strength to insert but a single stipulation in the marriage contract, to the effect that his daughter should drop the name of Jane and be known as Dudley in her husband's household. To this the dashing bridegroom acquiesced with readiness, and when, within a year of the wedding, his wife presented him with a son, he called the boy, as he called the mother, by her maiden name.
He was a jovial young buck, who lived in his cards and his cups and loathed a quarrel as he loved a fight.
When the war between the States arose he went with Virginia, caring little for either cause, but conscious that his heart was where his home was. So he kissed the young mother and the boy at her side and rode lightly away with a laugh upon his lips, to fall as lightly in the mad charge of cavalry at Brandy Station.
When the news came Jane Dudley listened to it in silence, her hands clasping the worsteds she was winding. After the words were spoken she laid the worsteds carefully aside, stooping to pick up a fallen ball. Then she crossed the room and went upstairs.
She said little, refusing herself alike to consolation and to acquaintances, spending her days in the shuttered house with her boy beside her. When he fretted at the restraint she tied a band of crêpe on his little jacket and sent him to play on the green, while she took up her worsteds again and finished the muffler she had been crocheting. If she wept it was in secret, when the lights were out.
Some years later the house was sold over her head, but when she stood, penniless, upon the threshold it was to cross it as haughtily as she had done as a bride. The stiff folds of her black silk showed no wavering ripple, the repose of her lips betrayed no tremor. The smooth, high pompadour of her black hair passed as proudly beneath the arched doorway as it had done in the days of her wifehood and Julius Webb.
Her neighbours opened their wasted stores to her need, and out of their poverty offered her abundance, but she put aside their proffered assistance and undertook, unaided, the support and education of her child, maintaining throughout the struggle her air of unflinching irony. She moved into a small white frame house opposite the church, and let out her spare rooms to student boarders. Her pride was never lowered and her crêpe was never laid aside. She sat up far into the night to darn the sleeves of her black silk gown, but the stitches were of such exquisite fineness that in the dim light of her drawing-room they seemed but an added gloss.
From behind the massive coffee urn at the head of her table she regarded her boarders as so many beneficiaries upon her bounty. When she passed a cup of coffee she seemed to confer an honour; when she returned a receipted bill it was as if she repulsed an insult. People said that she had been born to greatness and that she had never adapted herself to the obscurity that had been thrust upon her—but they said it when her back was turned. To her face the subject was never broached, and her former prosperity was ignored along with her present poverty. Of her own sorrows she, herself, made no mention. When she spoke from the depths of her bitterness of the war and the ruin it had left, her resentment was general rather than personal. Above the mantel in her room hung the sword of Julius Webb, sheathed under the tattered colours of the Confederate States. At her throat she wore a button that had been cut from a gray coat, and, once, after the close of the war, she had pointed to it before a Federal officer, and had said: "Sir, the women of the South have never surrendered!" The officer had looked at the face above the button as he answered: "Madam, had the women of the South fought its battles, surrender would have been for the men of the North." But Jane Webb had smiled bitterly in silence. To her the Federal officer was but an individual member of a national army of invasion, and the rights of the victors, the wrongs of Virginia.
Her neighbours regarded her with almost passionate pride—rebuking their more generous natures by the sight of her unbowed beauty and her solitary revolt. When young Dudley grew old enough to attend school the general and the judge called together upon his mother and offered, with hesitancy, to undertake his education.
"He is only a year or two older than my Tom," began the judge, tripping in his usually steady speech. "I assure you it will give me pleasure to have the boys thrown together."
Mrs. Webb bowed in unaffirmative fashion.
"On my life, ma'am, I can't forget that Julius Webb fell at Brandy Station," put in the general hotly. "Your husband died for Virginia, and your boy shall not want while I have a penny in my pocket. I'll send him to college with Bernard, and feel it to be a privilege!"
Mrs. Webb bowed again.
"A great privilege, ma'am," protested the general, uneasily.
Mrs. Webb smiled.
"The greatest privilege of my life, ma'am!" cried the general, his face flushing and his eyes growing round with agitation.
In the end they gained their point, and Mrs. Webb consented, but with a reluctance of reserve which caused the general to choke with embarrassment and the judge to become speechless from perplexity. When they rose to leave both thanked her with effusion and both bowed themselves out as gratefully as if it were a royal drawing-room and they had received the honours of knighthood.
"She is a remarkable woman!" exclaimed the general, wiping his eyes on his white silk handkerchief as they descended the steps. "A most unusual woman! Why, I feel positively unworthy to sit in her presence. Her manner brings all my past indiscretions to mind. It is an honour to have such a character in the community, sir!"
The judge acquiesced silently.
The interview had tried his Epicurean fortitude, and he was wondering if it would be necessary to repeat the call before Christmas.
"If Julius Webb had lived she would have made a man of him," continued the general enthusiastically, the purple flush slowly fading from his flabby face. "A creature who could live with that woman and not be made a man of wouldn't be human; he'd be a hound. There is dignity in every inch of her, sir. I will allow no man to question my respect for our immortal Lee—but if Jane Webb had been the commander of our armies, we should be standing now upon Confederate soil—"
"Or upon the ashes of it," suggested the judge, adding apologetically, "she is indeed a woman in a thousand."
He held it to be a lack of courtesy to dissent from praise of any woman whose chastity was beyond impeachment, as he held it to be an absence of propriety to unite in admiration of one who was wanting in the supremest of the feminine virtues. His code was an obvious one, and he had never seen cause to depart from it.
"I hope the boy will be worthy of her," he said. "It is a good name that he bears."
The general took off his straw hat and mopped his brow.
"Worthy of her!" he exclaimed. "He's got to be worthy of her, sir. If he takes any notion in his head not to be, I'll thrash him within an inch of his life. Let him try it, the young scamp!"
The judge laughed easily, having regained his self-possession. "Well, well, there's no telling," he said; "but he's as bright as a steel trap. I wish Tom had half his sense." Then he turned past the church on his way home, and the general, declining an invitation to dinner, went on to the post-office, where he awaited his carriage.
From this time Dudley Webb attended classes at the judge's house and became the popular tyrant of his little schoolroom. He was a dark, high-bred looking boy, with a rich voice and a nature that was generous in small things and selfish in large ones. There was a convincing air of good-fellowship about him, which won the honest heart of slow-witted Tom Bassett, and a half-veiled regard for his own youthful pleasures, which aroused the wrath of Eugenia.
"I can't abide him," she had once declared passionately to Sally Burwell. "Somehow, he always gets the best of everything."
When, after the first few years, Nicholas Burr entered the schoolroom and took his place upon one of the short green benches, Mrs. Webb called upon the judge in person and demanded an explanation.
"My boy has been carefully brought up," she said; "he is a gentleman, and he will not submit to association with his inferiors. His grandfather would not have done so before him."
The judge quailed, but it was an uncompromising quailing—a surrender of the flesh, not the spirit.
"My dear lady," he began in his softest voice, "your son is a fine, spirited fellow, but he is a boy, and he doesn't care a—a—pardon me, madam—a continental whether anybody else is his inferior or not. No wholesome boy does. He doesn't know the meaning of the word—nor does Tom—and I shan't be the one to teach him. Amos Burr's son is a clever, hard-working boy, and if he will take an education from me, he shall have it."
The judge was firm. Mrs. Webb was firm also.
The judge assumed his legal manner; she assumed her hereditary one.
"It is folly to educate a person above his station," she said.
"Men make their stations, madam," replied the judge.
He sat in his great arm-chair and looked at her with reverent but determined eyes. His head was slightly bent, in deference to her dissenting voice, and his words wavered, but his will did not. In his attitude his respect for her sexually and individually was expressed, but he had argued the opposing interests in his mind, and his decision was judicial.
"I am deeply pained, my dear lady," he said, "but I cannot turn the boy away."
Mrs. Webb did not reply. She gathered up her stiff skirt and departed with folded lips.
After she had gone the judge paced his study nervously for a half-hour, giving uncertain glances towards the hall door, as if he expected the advent of an incarnate thunderbolt. In the afternoon he sent over a bottle of his best Madeira as a peace-offering. Mrs. Webb acknowledged the Madeira, not the truce. The following day General Battle called upon the judge and requested in half-hearted tones the withdrawal of Amos Burr's son. He looked excited and somewhat alarmed, and the judge recognised the hand of the player.
"My dear Tom Battle," he said soothingly, "you do not wish the poor child any harm."
"'Fore God, I don't, George," stammered the general.
"He's a quiet, unoffending lad."
The general fingered his limp cravat with agitated plump fingers. "I never passed him on the road in my life that he didn't touch his hat," he admitted, "and once he took a stone out of the gray mare's shoe."
"He has a brain and he has ambition. Think what it is to be born in a lower class and to have a mind above it."
The general's great chest trembled.
"I wouldn't injure the little chap for the world George; on my soul, I wouldn't."
"I know it, Tom."
"My own great-grandfather Battle raised himself, George."
The judge waved the fact aside as insignificant.
"Of course, Mrs. Webb is a woman," he said with sexual cynicism, "and her views are naturally prejudiced. You can't expect a woman to look at things as coolly as we do, Tom."
The general brightened.
"'Tisn't nature," he declared. "You can't expect a woman to go against nature, sir."
"And Mrs. Webb, though an unusual woman (the general nodded), is still a woman."
The general nodded again, though less emphatically.
"On my soul, she's wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Why, damme, sir, if I had that woman to brace me up I shouldn't need a julep."
And the judge, flinching from his friend's profanity, called Cæsar to bring in the decanters.
Some time later the general left and Mr. Burwell appeared, to be met and dispatched by the same arguments.
"Naturally my instincts prompt me to side with an unprotected widow," said Mr. Burwell.
"No Virginian could feel otherwise," admitted the judge in the slightly pompous tone in which he alluded to his native State.
"But as I said to my wife," continued Mr. Burwell with convincing earnestness, "these matters had best be left to men. There is no need for our wives and daughters to be troubled by them. It is for us, who are acquainted with the world and who have had wide experience, to settle all social barriers."
The judge agreed as before.
"I am glad to say that my wife takes my view of it," the other went on. "Indeed, I think she has expressed what I have said to Mrs. Webb."
"Your wife is an honour to her sex," said the judge, bowing.
Then Mr. Burwell left, and the judge spent another half-hour walking up and down his study floor. He had gained the victory, but he would have felt pleasanter had it been defeat. It was as if he had taken some secret advantage of a woman—of a widow.
But the future of Amos Burr's son was sealed so far as it lay in the judge's power to settle with circumstances, and each morning during the school term Mrs. Webb frowned down upon his hurrying figure as it sped along the street and turned the corner at the palace green. Sometimes, when snow was falling, he would shoot by like an arrow, and Dudley would say with quick compassion, as he looked up from his steaming cakes: "It's because he hasn't any overcoat, mother. He runs to keep warm."
But Mrs. Webb's placid eyes would not darken.
When the boys grew too old for school Tom and Dudley went to King's College for a couple of years, while Nicholas returned to the farm. The judge still befriended him, and the contents of Tom's class books found their way into his head sooner or later, with more information than Tom's brain could hold. One of the instructors at the college—a consumptive young fellow, whose ambitions had leaned towards the bar—gave the boy what assistance he needed, and when the work of the class-room and the farm was over, the two would meet in the dim old library of the college and plod through heavy, discoloured pages, while the portraits of painted aristocrats glowered down upon the intrusive plebeian.
Despite the hard labour of spring ploughing and the cold of early winter dawns, when he was up and out of doors, the years passed happily enough. He beheld the future through the visions of an imaginative mind, and it seemed big with promise. Sitting in the quaint old library, surrounded by faded relics and colourless traditions, he felt the breath of hushed oratory in the air, and political passion stirred in the surrounding dust. There was a niche in a small alcove, where he spent the spare hours of many a day, the words of great, long-gone Virginians lying before him; behind him, through the small square window, all the blue-green sweep of the college grounds ending where the Old Stage Road led on to his father's farm.
He plodded ardently and earnestly, the consumptive young instructor following his studies with the wistful eyes of one who sees another striving where he has striven and failed. The students met him with tolerant hilarity, and Tom Bassett, who would have kicked the Declaration of Independence across the campus in lieu of a ball, watched him with secret mirth and open championship. There had sprung up a strong friendship between the two—one of those rare affections which bend but do not break. Dudley Webb, the most brilliant member of his class and the light of his mother's eyes, began life, as he would end it, with the ready grasp of good-fellowship. He had long since outgrown his artificial, childish distrust of Nicholas, and he had as long ago forgotten that he had ever entertained it. As for Nicholas himself, he had not forgotten it, but the memory was of little moment. He had a work to do in life, and he did it as best he might. If it were the ploughing of rocky soil, so much the worse; if the uprooting of dead men's thoughts, so much the better. He slighted neither the one nor the other.
As he grew older he became tall and broad of chest, with shoulders which suggested the athlete rather than the student. His hair had darkened to a less flaming red, his eyes had grown brighter, and the freckles had faded into a general gray tone of complexion.
"He will be the ugliest man in the State," said Mr. Burwell, inflating his pink cheeks, with a return of youthful vanity, "but it is the ugliness that attracts."
Nicholas had not heard, but, had he done so, the words would have left a sting. He possessed an inherent regard for physical perfection, rendered the greater by his own tormented childhood. He was strong and vigorous and of well-knit sinews, but he would have given his muscle for Dudley Webb's hands and his brains for the other's hair.
Once, as a half-grown boy, in a fit of jealousy inspired by Dudley's good looks, he had called him "Miss Nancy," and knocked him down. When his enemy had lain at his feet on the green he had raised him up and made amends by standing motionless while Dudley lashed him with a small riding-whip. The jealousy had vanished since then, but the smart was still there.
At last the college days were over. Dudley was sent to the university of the State; Tom Bassett and Bernard Battle soon followed, and Nicholas, still plodding and still hopeful, was left in Kingsborough.
Then, upon his nineteenth birthday, the judge, who had left the bench and resumed his legal practice, sent for him and offered to take him into his office while he prepared himself for the bar.
When Nicholas descended the judge's steps he lingered for a moment in the narrow walk. His head was bent, and the books which he carried under his arm were pressed against his side. They seemed to contain all that was needed for the making of his future—those books and his impatient mind. His success was as assured as if he held it already in the hollow of his hand—and with success would come honour and happiness and all that was desired of man. It seemed to him that his lot was the one of all others which he would have chosen of his free and untrammelled will. To strive and to win; to surmount all obstacles by the determined dash of ambition; to rise from obscurity unto prominence through the sheer forces that make for power—what was better than this?
Still plunged in thought, he passed the church and followed the street to the Old Stage Road. From the college dormitories a group of students sang out a greeting, and he responded impulsively, tossing his hat in the air. In his face a glow had risen, harmonising his inharmonious features. He felt as a man feels who stands before a closed door and knows that he has but to cross the threshold to grasp the fulness of his aspiration. Yes, to-day he envied no one—neither Tom Bassett nor Dudley Webb, neither the general nor the judge. He held the books tightly under his arm and smiled down upon the road. His clumsy, store-made boots left heavy tracks in the dust, but he seemed to be treading air.
It was three o'clock in the afternoon of a murky day in early November, and the clouds were swollen with incoming autumnal rains. The open country stretched before him in monotonous grays, the long road gleaming pallid in the general drab of the landscape. As he passed along, holding his hat in his hand, his uplifted head struck the single, high-coloured note in the picture—all else was dull and leaden.
A farmer driving a cow to market neared him, and Nicholas stopped to remark upon the outlook. The farmer, a thick-set, hairy man, whose name was Turner, gave a sudden hitch to the halter to check the progress of the cow, and nodded ominously.
"Bad weather's brewin'," he said. "The wind's blowin' from the northeast; I can tell by the way that thar oak turns its leaves. It's a bad sign, and if thar ain't a-shiftin' 'fore mornin', we're likely to hev a spell."
Nicholas agreed.
"There hasn't been much rainfall lately," he added. "I reckon it has come at last and for a long stretch." His eyes swept the western horizon, where the clouds hung heavily above the pines.
"Yo' pa got his crops in?"
"Pretty much. The peanuts were harvested after the last frost."
"He ain't had much luck this year, I hear."
Nicholas shook his head.
"No less than usual. Last year he lost the brindle cow that was calving. This season the mare died."
"Well, well! He never was much for luck, nohow. Seems like he worked too hard to have Providence on his side. I allers said that Providence had ruther you'd leave a share of the business to Him. Got through school yet?"
"Yes; I'm reading law."
"Reading what?"
"I am going to study law in the judge's office—Judge Bassett, you know."
"So you can keep a tongue in yo' head when those plagued cusses come 'bout the mortgage?"
"So I can take cases to court and earn a living."
"Why don't you stick to the land and make yo' bread honest?"
"The law's honest."
Turner shook his hairy head.
"It cheated me out o' twelve bushels of 'taters las' year," he said. "Don't tell me 'bout yo' law. I know it."
Nicholas laughed.
"Come to me when I've set up, if you get in trouble," he rejoined, "and I'll get you out."
The cow gave a lunge at the ropes, and the farmer went on his way. When the man and cow had passed from sight Nicholas stopped and laughed again. He wondered if he could be really of one flesh and blood with these people—of one stuff and fibre. What had he in common with his own father—hard-working, heavy-handed Amos Burr? No, he was not of them and he had never been.
He had turned from the main road into the wood, when a girl on horseback dashed suddenly towards him from the gray perspective. She was riding rapidly, her short skirts flying, her hair blown darkly across her face. A brown-and-white pointer ran at her side.
As she caught sight of Nicholas she half rose in her saddle, giving a loud, clear call.
"Hello, Nick Burr! Hello!"
Nicholas stood aside and waited for her to come up, which she did in a moment, panting from her exercise, her face flushing into a glowing heat.
"I was looking for you," she said, waving a small willow spray in her brown hand. "I went by the farm, but you weren't there. So, you are nineteen to-day!" Her eyes shone as she looked at him. There was a singular brilliance of expression in her face, due partly to the exercise, partly to the restless animation of her features. She was at the unbecoming age when the child is merging into the woman, but her lack of grace was redeemed by her warmth of personality.
Nicholas laid his hand upon the bridle.
"Why, Genia, if I'd known you wanted me I'd have been hanging round somewhere. What is it?"
"Let me look at you."
Nicholas flushed, turning his face away from her.
"God knows, I'm ugly enough," he said.
She leaned nearer, shaking back her straight, black hair, which fell from beneath the small cap.
"I want to see if you have changed since yesterday."
He turned towards her.
"Have I?" he asked hopefully.
She regarded him gravely, though a smile played over her changeful lips.
"Not a bit. Not a freckle."
"Hang it all! I lost my freckles long ago."
"Then they've come back. There are one—two—three on your nose."
"Hold on! Let my looks alone, please."
Eugenia whistled softly, half grave, half gay.
"Down, darling!" she said to the pointer, and "be still, beauty!" to the horse. Then she turned to Nicholas again.
"I've really and truly got something to tell you, Nick Burr."
"Out with it, then. Don't worry."
She swung her long legs idly from the saddle. "Suppose I don't."
"Then don't."
"Suppose I do."
"I'll be hanged if I care!"
"Oh, you do, you story. You're just dying to know—but it's serious."
She patted the horse's neck, watching Nicholas with child-like eagerness.
"Well, I'm—I'm—there! I told you you were dying to know!"
"I'm not."
"Guess, anyway."
"Somebody coming on a visit?"
She shook her head.
"Try again, stupid."
"Miss Chris going to be married?"
"Oh, Lord, no. You aren't really a fool, Nick."
"Betsey got a baby?"
"Why, Tecumsey only came last June!"
"Then I give it up. Tell me."
"Say please."
"Please, Genia!"
"Say 'please, dear, good Genia.'"
"Please, dear, darling Genia."
"I didn't say 'darling.' I said 'good.'"
"It's the same thing."
She smiled at him with boyish eyes.
"Am I really a darling?"
"Do you really know something?"
"You bet I do."
"What is it?"
She laughed teasingly.
"It'll make you cry."
"Hurry up, Genia!"
"You'll certainly cry very loud."
"I'll shake you in a moment."
"It isn't polite to shake ladies."
"You aren't a lady. You're a vixen."
"Aunt Verbeny says I'm a limb of Satan. But will you promise not to weep a flood of tears, so I can't cross home?"
She leaned still nearer, resting her hand upon his shoulder.
"I'm going away."
"What?"
"I'm going away to-morrow at daybreak. I'm going to school. I shan't come back for a whole year. I'm—I'm going to leave papa and Aunt Chris and Jim and you."
She began to sob.
"Don't," said Nicholas sharply.
"And—and you don't care a bit. You're just a stone. Oh, I don't want to go to school!"
"I'm not a stone. I do care."
"No, you don't. And I may die and never come back any more, and you'll forget all about me."
"I shan't. Don't, I say. Do you hear me, Genia, don't."
She looked for a handkerchief, and, failing to find one, wiped her eyes on the horse's mane.
"What are you going to do when I am gone?"
"Work hard so you'll be proud of me when you come back."
"I shall be sixteen in two years."
"And I, twenty-one."
"You'll be a man—quite."
"You'll be a woman—almost."
"I don't think I shall like you so much then."
"I shall like you more."
"Why?" she asked quickly.
"Why? Oh, I don't know. Am I so awfully ugly, Genia?"
"Turn this way."
He obeyed her, flushing beneath her scrutiny.
"I shouldn't call you—awful," she replied at last.
"Am I so ugly, then?"
"Honour bright?"
"Of course," impatiently.
"Then you are—yes—rather."
He shook his head angrily.
"I didn't think you'd be mean enough to tell me so," he returned.
"But you asked me."
"I don't care if I did. You might have said something pleasant."
Her sensitive mouth drooped. "I never think of your being ugly when I'm with you," she said. "It's a good, strong kind of ugliness, anyway. I don't mind it."
He smiled again.
"Looks don't matter, anyway," she went on soothingly. "I'd rather a man would be clever than handsome;" then she added conscientiously, "only I'd rather be handsome myself."
He looked at her closely.
"I reckon you will be," he said. "Most women are. It's the clothes, I suppose."
Eugenia looked down at him for an instant in silence; then she held out her hands.
"I am going at daybreak," she said. "Will you come down to the road and tell me good-bye?"
"Why, of course."
"But we must say good-bye now, too. Did we ever shake hands before?"
"No."
"Then, good-bye. I must go."
"Good-bye, dear—darling."
She touched her horse lightly with the willow, but promptly drew rein, regarding Nicholas with her boyish eyes.
"Do you think it would make it any easier if we kissed?" she asked.
"Geriminy! I should say so!"
He caught her hands; she leaned over and he kissed her lips. She drew back with the same frank laugh, but a flush burned his face and his eyes were sparkling.
"More, Genia," he said, but she laughed and let the bridle fall.
"No—no—but it made me feel better. There, good-bye, dear, dear Nick Burr, good-bye!"
Then she dashed past him, and a whirl of dust filled the solitary air.
He looked after her until she turned her horse into the Old Stage Road, and the clatter of the hoofs was gone. When the stillness had fallen again he went slowly on his way.
In the woods the pale bodies of the beeches seemed to melt into the cloudy atmosphere. There was no wind among the trees, and the pervading dampness had robbed the yellowed leaves of their silken rustle. They fluttered softly, hanging limp from the drooping branches as if attached by invisible threads. As he went on a deep bluish smoke issued from among some far-off poplars where a farmer was burning brush in a clearing. The smoke hung low above the undergrowth, assuming eccentric outlines and varied tones of dusk. Presently the fires glimmered nearer, and he saw the red tongues of the flames and heard the parched crackling of consuming leaves. The figures of the workers were limned grotesquely against the ruddy background with a startling and unreal absence of detail. They looked like incarnate shadows—stalking between the dim beeches and the blazing brush heaps. A few drops of rain fell suddenly, and the fires began slowly to die away. At the foot of the crumbling "worm" fence, skirting the edges of the wood, deep wind-drifts of russet leaves stirred mournfully. Later they would be hauled away to assist in the winter dressing of the fallows; now they beat helplessly against the retarding rails like a vanquished army of invasion.
Nicholas left the wood and passed the field of broomsedge on his way to the house. Beyond the barnyard he saw the long rows of pine staves that had supported the shocks of peanuts, and from the direction of the field he caught sight of his father, driven homeward by the threatening rain.
Sairy Jane, who was bringing a string of dried snaps from the outhouse, called to him to hurry before the cloudburst. She was a lank, colourless girl, with bad teeth and small pale eyes. Jubal, at the churn in the hall, rested from his labours as Nicholas entered, and grinned as he pointed to his mother in the kitchen. Marthy Burr was ironing. As Nicholas crossed the threshold, she stopped in her passage from the stove and looked at him, a flash of pride softening her pain-scarred features.
"Lord, what a man you are, Nick!" she exclaimed with a kind of triumph. "When I heard yo' step on the po'ch I could have swo'ed it was yo' pa's."
Nicholas nodded at her abstractedly as he took off his hat.
"Where's pa?" he asked carelessly. "I thought he'd have got in before me. I saw him as I came up."
"I reckon he won't git in befo' he gits a drench-in'," responded his stepmother, glancing indifferently through the back window. "If he does it'll be the first time sence he war born. 'Twarn't nothin' to be done in the fields, nohow, an' so I told him, but he ain't never rested yet, an' I don't reckon he's goin' to till I bury him."
As she spoke the rain fell heavily, and presently Amos Burr came in, shaking the water from his head and shoulders.
"I told you 'twarn't no use yo' goin' to the fields befo' the rain," began his wife admonishingly. "But you're a man all over, an' it seems like you're 'bliged to go yo' own way for the sheer pleasure of goin' agin somebody else's. If I'd been pesterin' you all day long to go down thar to look at that ploughin', you'd be settin' in yo' chair now, plum dry."
Amos Burr crossed to the stove and turned his dripping back to the heat.
"Gimme a rubbin' down, Sairy Jane," he pleaded, and his daughter took a dry cloth and began mopping off the water.
Marthy Burr placed an iron on the stove and took one off.
"Whar'd you git dinner, Nick?" she inquired suddenly.
"At the judge's."
"What did they have?" demanded Jubal from the hall, ceasing the clatter of the churn. "Golly! Wouldn't I like a bite of something!"
"I shouldn't mind some strange cookin', myself," said Marthy Burr, shaking her head at one of the children who had come into the kitchen with muddy feet. "I ain't tasted anybody else's vittles for ten years, an' sometimes I feel my mouth waterin' for a change of hand in the dough."
She took one of her husband's shirts from the pile of freshly dried clothes, spread it on the ironing-board, and sprinkled it with water. Then she moistened her finger and applied it to the iron.
Amos Burr looked up from before the stove, where he still sat drying.
"You're a man now, Nick," he said slowly, as if the words had been revolving in his brain for some time and he had just received the power of speech.
"Yes, pa."
"Whatever he is, he don't git it from his pa," put in Marthy Burr as she bent over the shirt. "He ain't got nothin' of yo'rn onless it's yo' hair, an' that's done sobered down till you wouldn't know it."
Amos waited patiently until she had finished, and then went on heavily as if the pause had been intentional, not enforced.
"You've got as much schoolin' as most city chaps," he said. "Much good it'll do you, I reckon. I never saw nothin' come of larnin' yet, 'cep'n worthlessness. But you'd set yo' mind on it, an' you've got it."
"Thar warn't none of yo' hand in that, Amos Burr," cried his wife, checking him again before he had recovered breath from his last sentence. "Many's the night I've wrastled with you till you war clean wore out with sleeplessness, 'fo' you'd let the child keep on at his books."
"I ain't never seen no good come of it," repeated Burr stolidly; then he returned to Nicholas.
"I reckon you'll want to do somethin' for the family, now," he said, "seein' yo' ma is well wore out an' the brindle cow died calvin', an' Sairy Jane is a hard worker."
Nicholas looked at him without speaking.
"Yes?" he said inquiringly, and his voice was dull.
"I was talkin' to Jerry Pollard," continued his father, letting his slow eyes rest upon his son's, "an' he said you war as likely a chap as thar was roun' here, and he reckoned you'd be pretty quick in business."
"Yes?" said Nicholas again in the same tone.
Amos Burr was silent for a moment, and his wife filled in the pause with a series of running interjections. When they were over her husband took up his words.
"He wants a young fellow about his store, he says, as can look arter the books an' the business. He's gittin' too old to keep up with the city ways an' look peart at the ladies—he'll pay a nice little sum in cash every week."
"Yes?" repeated Nicholas, still interrogatively.
"An' he wants to know if you'll take the place—you're jest the sort of chap he wants, he says—somebody as will be bright at praisin' up the calicky to the gals when they come shoppin'. Thar's nothin' like a young man behind the counter to draw the gals, he says."
Nicholas shook his head impatiently, clasping the books tightly beneath his arm. His gaze had grown harsh and repellent.
"But I am going into the judge's office," he answered. "I am going—" Then he checked himself, baffled by the massive ignorance he confronted.
Amos Burr drew one shoulder from the fire and offered the other. A slow steam rose from his smoking shirt, and the room was filled with the odour of scorching cotton.
"Thar ain't much cash in that, I reckon," he said.
Nicholas took a step forward, still facing his father with obstinate eyes. One of the books slipped from his arm and fell to the floor, with open leaves, but he let it lie. He was watching his father's jaws as they rose and fell over the quid of tobacco.
"No, there is not much cash in that," he repeated.
"Things have gone mighty hard," said Amos Burr. "It's been a bad year. I ain't sayin' nothin' 'bout the work yo' ma an' Sairy Jane an' me have done. That don't seem to count, somehow. But nothin' ain't come straight, an' thar ain't a cent to pay the taxes. If we can't manage to tide over this comin' winter thar'll have to be a mortgage in the spring."
Sairy Jane began to cry softly. One of the children joined in.
"Give me time," said Nicholas breathlessly. "Give me time. I'll pay it all in time." Then the sound of Sairy Jane's sobs maddened him and he turned upon her with an oath. "Damn you! Can't you be quiet?"
It seemed to him that they were all closing upon him and that there was no opening of escape.
Marthy Burr put down her iron and came to where he stood, laying her hand upon his sleeve.
"Don't mind 'em, Nick," she said, and her sharp voice broke suddenly. "Go ahead an' make a man of yo'self, mortgage or no mortgage."
Nicholas lifted his gaze from the floor and looked into his stepmother's face. Then he looked at her hand as it lay upon his arm. That trembling hand brought to him more fully than words, more clearly than visions, the pathos of her life.
"Don't you worry, ma," he said quietly at last. "It'll be all right. Don't you worry."
Then he let her hand slip from his shoulder and left the room.
He passed out upon the back porch and stood gazing vacantly across the outlook.
It rained heavily, the drops descending in horizontal lengths like a fantastic fall of colourless pine needles. Overhead the clouds were black, impenetrable.
Through the falling rain he looked at the view before him, at the overgrown yard, at the manure heaps near the stable, at the grim rows of staves in the peanut field, at the sombre and deserted landscape. A raw wind blew in gusts from the northeast, and the distorted ailanthus tree in the yard moaned and wrung its twisted limbs. Sharp, unpleasant odours came from the pig-pen in the barnyard, where the rain was scattering the slops in the trough. A bull bellowed in a far-off pasture. Before the hen-house door several dripping fowls strutted with wilted feathers.
He saw it all in silence, with the dogged eyes of one whose gaze is turned inward. He made no gesture, uttered no exclamation. He was as motionless as the lintel of the door on which he leaned.
Suddenly a gust of wind whipped the rain into his face. He turned, reëntered the house, closed the door carefully, and went upstairs.
The next morning Nicholas went into the judge's study and declined the offer of the day before.
"I shan't read law, after all," he said slowly. "There is a business opening for me here, and I'll take advantage of it." He spoke in set phrases, as if he had rehearsed the sentences many times.
"Business!" echoed the judge incredulously. "Why, what business is going on in Kingsborough?"
Nicholas flushed a deep red, but his glance did not waver.
"Jerry Pollard wants me in his store, sir."
The judge removed his glasses, wiped them deliberately on his silk handkerchief, put them on again, and regarded the younger man attentively.
"And you wish to go into Jerry Pollard's store?" he inquired.
"I think it is the best thing I can do."
"The best paying thing, I presume?"
"Yes, sir."
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the judge testily. "What is the world coming to? I suppose Tom will be writing me next that he intends to keep a stall in market. Well, you know best, of course. You may do as you please; but may I ask if you are going to bargain in Latin and multiply by criminal law in Jerry Pollard's store?"
"No, sir."
"Then, what in the—what in the—I really feel the need of a strong expression—what in the world did you take the trouble to educate yourself for?"
Nicholas was looking at the floor, and he did not raise his eyes. His face was hard and set.
"Because I was a fool," he answered shortly.
"And now, if I may ask?"
"A fool still—but I've found it out."
The judge leaned back in his chair and tapped the ledge of his desk meditatively.
"Have you fully decided?" he asked.
Nicholas nodded.
"I have thought it over," he said quietly.
"Then there's nothing to be done, I suppose. I hope the compensation will satisfy you. Jerry Pollard is said to be somewhat tight-fisted, but your business instincts may be equal to his acquirements. Now, I have a number of letters, so, if you don't mind, I will bid you good-day."
He bowed, and Nicholas left the study and went out of the house.
Rain was still falling, and small pools of water had formed on the palace green. Straight ahead the lane of maples stretched like a line of half-extinguished fires, and the ground beneath was strewn with wet, red leaves. The slanting sheets of rain gave a sombre aspect to the town—to the time-beaten buildings along the unpaved streets and to the commons, where the water stood in grassy hollows. Beneath the gray sky the scene assumed a spectre-like suggestion of death and decay—the death of laughter that seemed still to echo faintly from the vanished stones—the decay of royal charters and of kingly grants. The very air was reminiscent of a yesterday that was perished; the red, wet leaves painted the brown earth in historic colours.
Nicholas turned the corner at the church and passed on to Jerry Pollard's store—a long, low structure fronting on the main street—and entered by a single step from the sidewalk. The show windows on either side the entrance displayed a motley selection from the varied assortment of a "general" store—cheap silks and high-coloured calicos, men's shirts and women's shoes, cravats and hairpins, suspenders and corsets. On the sidewalk near the doorway there was a baby carriage, a saddle, and a collection of farming implements. As Nicholas crossed the threshold a pink-cheeked girl passed him, her arms filled with bundles, and at the counter an old negro woman was pricing red flannel.
Jerry Pollard, a coarse-featured, full-bearded man of sixty years, was behind the counter. Nicholas caught his persuasive tones as he leaned over, holding the end of the bolt of flannel in his hands.
"Now, look here, Aunty, you ain't going to find such a bargain as this anywhere else in town. Take my oath on that. Every thread wool and forty-four inches wide. Only thirty cents a yard, too. I got it at an auction in Richmond, or I couldn't let it go at double that price. How much? All right."
The flannel was measured off with skilful manipulations of the yardstick and the scissors, the parcel was handed to the old negro woman, and the change was dropped into the till. Then Jerry Pollard came from behind the counter and slapped Nicholas upon the shoulder.
"Hello, my boy!" he said. "So your pa has taken me at my word, and here you are. Well, Jerry Pollard's word's his bond, and he ain't going back on it. So, when you feel like it, you can step right in and get to business. When'll you begin? To-day? No time like the present time's my motto."
"To-morrow!" returned Nicholas hastily. "I've got some things to wind up. I'll come to-morrow."
"All right. I'm your man. To-morrow at seven sharp?"
Then a purchaser appeared, and Jerry Pollard went forward, his business smile returning to his face.
The purchaser was Mrs. Burwell, and, as Nicholas passed out, she looked up from a pair of waffle-irons she was selecting and nodded pleasantly.