Virginia Part 14

"I don't think he's a fool," returned Mrs. Peachey, reflecting how wonderfully she had "managed" the great man, "but, of course, he's queer--all writers are queer, aren't they?"

"He's kept it up longer than I thought, but I reckon he's about ready to give in," pursued Cyrus, ignoring her question as he did all excursions into the region of abstract wonder. "If he'll start in to earn his living now, I'll let him have a job on the railroad out in Matoaca City.

I meant to teach him a lesson, but I shouldn't like Henry's son to starve. I've nothing against Henry except that he was too soft. He was a good brother as brothers go, and I haven't forgotten it."

"Perhaps, if you'd talk to Oliver," suggested Mrs. Peachey. "I'm afraid I couldn't induce him to come to you, but----"

"Oh, I ain't proud--I don't need to be," interrupted Cyrus with a chuckle. "Only fools and the poor have any use for pride. I'll look in upon him sometime along after supper, and see if he's come to his wits since I last talked to him."

"Then, I'm glad I came to you. Tom would be horrified almost to death if he knew of it--but I've always said that when an idea crosses my mind just like that," she snapped her thumb and forefinger, "there's something in it."

As she rose from her seat, she looked up at him with the coquetry which was so inalienable an attribute of her soul that, had the Deity a.s.sumed masculine shape before her, she would instinctively have used this weapon to soften the severity of His judgment. "It was so kind of you not to send me away, Mr. Treadwell," she said in honeyed accents.

"It is a pleasure to meet such a sensible woman," replied Cyrus, with awkward gallantry. Her flattery had warmed him pleasantly, and in the midst of the dried husks of his nature, he was conscious suddenly that a single blade of living green still survived. He had ceased to feel old--he felt almost young again--and this rejuvenation had set in merely because a middle-aged woman, whom he had known since childhood, had shown an innocent pleasure in his society. Mrs. Peachey's traditional belief in the power of s.e.x had proved its own justification.

When she had left him, Cyrus sat down again, and took up his pipe from the railing where he had placed it. "I'll go round and have some words with the young scamp," he thought. "There's no use waiting until after supper. I'll go round now while it is light."

Then, as if the softening impulse were a part of the Sabbath stillness, he leaned over the bed of sunflowers, and fixed his eyes on the pinkish tower of Saint James' Church, which he could see palely enkindled against the afterglow. A single white cloud floated like a dove in the west, and beneath it a rain of light fell on the shadowy roofs of the town. The air was so languorous that it was as if the day were being slowly smothered in honeysuckle, the heavy scent of which drifted to him from the next garden. A vast melancholy--so vast that it seemed less the effect of a Southern summer than of a universal force residing in nature--was liberated, with the first cooling breath of the evening, from man and beast, from tree and shrub, from stock and stone. The very bricks, sun-baked and scarred, spoke of the weariness of heat, of the parching thirst of the interminable summers.

But to Cyrus the languor and the intense sweetness of the air suggested only that the end of a hot day had come. "It's likely to be a drought,"

he was thinking while his upward gaze rested on the illuminated tower of the church. "A drought will go hard with the tobacco."

Having emptied his pipe, he was about to take down his straw hat from a nail on the wall, when the sound of the opening gate arrested him, and he waited with his eyes fixed on the winding brick walk, where the negro washerwoman appeared presently with a basket of clean clothes on her head. Beneath her burden he saw that there were some primitive attempts at Sunday adornment. She wore a green muslin dress, a little discoloured by perspiration, but with many compensating flounces; a bit of yellow ribbon floated from her throat, and in her hand she carried the festive hat which would decorate her head after the removal of the basket. Her figure, which had once been graceful, had grown heavy; and her face, of a light gingerbread colour, with broad, not unpleasant features, wore a humble, inquiring look--the look of some trustful wild animal that man has tamed and only partly domesticated. Approaching the steps, she brought down the basket from her head, and came on, holding it with a deprecating swinging movement in front of her.

"Howdy, Marster," she said, as if uncertain whether to stop or to pa.s.s on into the doorway.

"Howdy, Mandy," responded Cyrus. "There's a hot spell coming, I reckon."

Lowering the basket to the floor of the porch, the woman drew a red bandanna handkerchief from her bosom and began slowly to wipe the drops of sweat from her face and neck. The acrid odour of her flesh reached Cyrus, but he made no movement to draw away from her.

"I'se been laid up wid er st.i.tch in my side, Marster, so I'se jes got dese yer close done dis mawnin'. Dar wan' noner de chillen at home ter tote um down yer, so I low I 'uz gwine ter drap by wid um on my way ter church."

As he did not reply, she hesitated an instant and over her features, which looked as if they had been flattened by a blow, there came an expression which was half scornful, half inviting, yet so little personal that it might have been worn by one of her treetop ancestors while he looked down from his sheltering boughs on a superior species of the jungle. The chance effect of light and shadow on a grey rock was hardly less human or more primitive.

"I'se gittin' moughty well along, Marster," she said; "I reckon I'se gittin' on toward a hunnard."

"Nonsense, Mandy, you ain't a day over thirty-five. There's a plenty of life left in you yet."

"Go way f'om yer, Marster; you knows I'se a heap older 'n dat. How long ago was. .h.i.t I done fust come yer ter you all?"

He thought a moment. A question of calculation always interested him, and he prided himself on his fine memory for dates.

"You came the year our son Henry died, didn't you? That was in '66--eighteen years ago. Why, you couldn't have been over fifteen that summer."

For the first time a look of cunning--of the pathetic cunning of a child pitted against a man--awoke in her face.

"En Miss Lindy sent me off befo' de year was up, Marster. My boy Jubal was born de mont' atter she done tu'n me out." She hesitated a minute, and then added, with a kind of savage coquetry, "I 'uz a moughty likely gal, Marster. You ain't done furgit dat, is you?"

Her words touched Cyrus like the flick of a whip on a sore, and he drew back quickly while his thin lips grew tight.

"You'd better take that basket into the house," he said sharply.

In the negress's face an expression of surprise wavered for a second and then disappeared. Her features resumed their usual pa.s.sive and humble look--a look which said, if Cyrus could have read human nature as easily as he read finance, "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding. Am I not what you have made me? Have I not been what you wanted? And yet you despise me for being the thing you made."

"I didn't mean nuttin', Marster. I didn't mean nuttin'," she protested aloud.

"Then get into the house," retorted Cyrus harshly, "and don't stand gaping there. Any more of your insolence and I'll never let you set foot in this yard again."

"'Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin'! Gawd a' moughty, I didn't mean nuttin'! I jes lowed as you mought be willin' ter gun me fo' dollars a mont' fur de was.h.i.+n'. My boy Jubal----"

"I'll not give you a red cent more. If you don't want it, you can leave it. Get out of here!"

All the primitive antagonism of race--that instinct older than civilization--was in the voice with which he ordered her out of his sight. "It was downright blackmail. The fool was trying to blackmail me," he thought. "If I'd yielded an inch I'd have been at her mercy.

It's a pretty pa.s.s things have come to when men have to protect themselves from negro women." The more he reflected on her impudence, the stronger grew his conviction that he had acted remarkably well.

"Nipped it in the root. If I hadn't----" he thought.

And behind him in the doorway the washerwoman continued to regard him, over the lowered clothes basket, with her humble and deprecating look, which said, like the look of a beaten animal: "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding because you are stronger than I."

Taking down his hat, Cyrus turned away from her, and descended the steps. "I'll look up Henry's son before supper," he was thinking. "Even if the boy's a fool, I'm not one to let those of my own blood come to want."

CHAPTER X

OLIVER SURRENDERS

When Cyrus's knock came at his door, Oliver crossed the room to let in his visitor, and then fell back, startled, at the sight of his uncle. "I wonder what has brought him here?" he thought inhospitably. But even if he had put the question, it is doubtful if Cyrus could have enlightened him--for the great man was so seldom visited by an impulse that when, as now, one actually took possession of him, he obeyed the pressure almost unconsciously. Like most men who pride themselves upon acting solely from reason, he was the abject slave of the few instincts which had managed to take root and thrive in the stony ground of his nature. The feeling for family, which was so closely entwined with his supreme feeling for property that the two had become inseparable, moved him to-day as it had done on the historic occasion when he had redeemed the mortgaged roof over the heads of his spinster relations. Perhaps, too, some of the vague softness of June had risen in him and made him gentler in his judgments of youth.

"I didn't expect you or I'd have straightened up a bit," said Oliver, not overgraciously, while he hastily pushed his supper of bread and tea to one end of the table. He resented what he called in his mind "the intrusion," and he had no particular objection to his uncle's observing his resentment. His temper, never of the most perfect equilibrium, had been entirely upset by the effects of a June Sunday in Dinwiddie, and the affront of Cyrus's visit had become an indignity because of his unfortunate selection of the supper hour. Some hidden obliquity in the Treadwell soul, which kept it always at cross-purposes with life, prevented any lessening of the deep antagonism between the old and the young of the race. And so incurable was this obliquity in the soul of Cyrus, that it forced him now to take a tone which he had resolutely set his mind against from the moment of Mrs. Peachey's visit. He wanted to be pleasant, but something deep down within him--some inherited tendency to bully--was stronger than his will.

"I looked in to see if you hadn't about come to your senses," he began.

"If you mean come to your way of looking at things--then I haven't,"

replied Oliver, and added in a more courteous tone, "Won't you sit down?"

"No, sir, I can stand long enough to say what I came to say," retorted the other, and it seemed to him that the pleasanter he tried to make his voice, the harsher grew the sound of it in his ears. What was it about the rascal that rubbed him the wrong way only to look at him?

"As you please," replied Oliver quietly. "What in thunder has he got to say to me?" he thought. "And why can't he say it and have it over?"

While Cyrus merely despised him, he detested Cyrus with all the fiery intolerance of his age. "Standing there like an old turkey gobbler, ugh!" he said contemptuously to himself.

"So you ain't hungry yet?" asked the old man, and felt that the words were forced out of him by that obstinate cross-grain in his nature over which he had no control.

"I've just had tea."

"You haven't changed your mind since you last spoke to me, eh?"

"No, I haven't changed my mind. Why should I?"