_ 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.
"It will kill mother!" he said angrily. "It will kill mother!
Why, she almost died when Docia broke her Bohemian bowl."
"She must never know," answered Cynthia, while the tears streamed
unheeded down her cheeks. "When she is carried out one day for
her airing, she shall go back into the other house. It is a short
time now at best--she may die at any moment from any shock--but
she must die without knowing this. There must be quiet at the
end, at least. Oh, poor mother! poor mother!"
She raised her hands to her convulsed face, and Christopher saw
the tears trickle through her thin fingers,
"She must never know," repeated the boy. "She must never know if
we can help it."
"We must help it," cried Cynthia passionately. "We must work our
fingers to the bone to help it, you and I."
"And Lila?" asked the boy, curiously just even in the intensity
of his emotion. "Mustn't Lila work, too?"
Cynthia sobbed--hard, strangling sobs that rattled like stones
within her bosom.
"Lila is only a girl," she said, "and so pretty, so pretty."
The boy nodded.
"Then don't let's make Lila work," he responded sturdily.
Selfish in her supreme unselfishness, the woman turned and kissed
his brow, while he struggled, irritated, to keep her off.
"Don't let's, dear," she said, and that was all. _