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.