________________________________________________
_ As they followed the descending road between flowering chestnuts,
Blake Hall rose gradually into fuller view, its great oaks
browned by the approaching twilight and the fading after-glow
reflected in a single visible pane. Seen close at hand, the house
presented a cheerful spaciousness of front--a surety of light and
air--produced in part by the clean white, Doric columns of the
portico and in part by the ample slope of shaven lawn studded
with reds of brightly blooming flowers. From the smoking chimneys
presiding over the ancient roof to the hospitable steps leading
from the box-bordered walk below, the outward form of the
dwelling spoke to the imaginative mind of that inner spirit which
had moulded it into a lasting expression of a racial sentiment,
as if the Virginia creeper covering the old brick walls had
wreathed them in memories as tenacious as itself.
For more than two hundred years Blake Hall had stood as the one
great house in the county--a manifestation in brick and mortar of
the hereditary greatness of the Blakes. To Carraway, impersonal
as his interest was, the acknowledgment brought a sudden vague
resentment, and for an instant he bit his lip and hung
irresolute, as if more than half-inclined to retrace his steps. A
slight thing decided him--the gaiety of a boy's laugh that
floated from one of the lower rooms and swinging his stick
briskly to add weight to his determination, he ascended the broad
steps and lifted the old brass knocker. A moment later the door
was opened by a large mulatto woman, in a soiled apron, who took
his small hand-bag from him and, when he asked for Mr. Fletcher,
led him across the great hall into the unused drawing-room.
The shutters were closed, and as she flung them back on their
rusty hinges the pale June twilight entered with the breath of
mycrophylla roses. In the scented dusk Carraway stared about the
desolate, crudely furnished room, which gave back to his troubled
fancy the face of a pitiable, dishonoured corpse. The soul of it
was gone forever--that peculiar spirit of place which makes every
old house the guardian of an inner life--the keeper of a family's
ghost. What remained was but the outer husk, the disfigured
frame, upon which the newer imprint seemed only a passing insult.
On the high wainscoted walls he could still trace the vacant
dust-marked squares where the Blake portraits had once
hung--lines that the successive scrubbings of fifteen years had
not utterly effaced. A massive mahogany sofa, carved to represent
a horn of plenty, had been purchased, perhaps at a general sale
of the old furniture, with several quaint rosewood chairs and a
rare cabinet of inlaid woods. For the rest, the later additions
were uniformly cheap and ill-chosen--a blue plush "set," bought,
possibly, at a village store, a walnut table with a sallow marble
top, and several hard engravings of historic subjects.
When the lawyer turned from a curious inspection of these works
of art, he saw that only a curtain of flimsy chintz, stretched
between a pair of fluted columns, separated him from the
adjoining room, where a lamp, with lowered wick, was burning
under a bright red shade. After a moment's hesitation he drew the
curtain aside and entered what he took at once to be the common
living-room of the Fletcher family.
Here the effect was less depressing, though equally
uninteresting--a paper novel or two on the big Bible upon the
table combined, indeed, with a costly piano in one corner, to
strike a note that was entirely modern. The white crocheted
tidies on the chair-backs, elaborated with endless patience out
of innumerable spools of darning cotton, lent a feminine touch to
the furniture, which for an instant distracted Carraway's mental
vision from the impending personality of Fletcher himself. He
remembered now that there was a sister whom he had heard vaguely
described by the women of his family as "quite too hopeless," and
a granddaughter of whom he knew merely that she had for years
attended an expensive school somewhere in the North. The grandson
he recalled, after a moment, more distinctly, as a pretty,
undeveloped boy in white pinafores, who had once accompanied
Fletcher upon a hurried visit to the town. The gay laugh had
awakened the incident in his mind, and he saw again the little
cleanly clad figure perched upon his desk, nibbling bakers' buns,
while he transacted a tedious piece of business with the vulgar
grandfather.
He was toying impatiently with these recollections when his
attention was momentarily attracted by the sound of Fletcher's
burly tones on the rear porch just beyond the open window.
"I tell you, you've set all the niggers agin me, and I can't get
hands to work the crops."
"That's your lookout, of course," replied a voice, which he
associated at once with young Blake. "I told you I'd work three
days because I wanted the ready money; I've got it, and my time
is my own again."
"But I say my tobacco's got to get into the ground this
week--it's too big for the plant-bed a'ready, and with three days
of this sun the earth'll be dried as hard as a rock."
"There's no doubt of it, I think."
"And it's all your blamed fault," burst out the other angrily;
"you've gone and turned them all agin me--white and black alike.
Why, it's as much as I can do to get a stroke of honest labour in
this nigger-ridden country."
Christopher laughed shortly.
"There is no use blaming the Negroes," he said, and his
pronunciation of the single word would have stamped him in
Virginia as of a different class from Fletcher; "they're usually
ready enough to work if you treat them decently."
"Treat them!" began Fletcher, and Carraway was about to fling
open the shutters, when light steps passed quickly along the hall
and he heard the rustle of a woman's silk dress against the
wainscoting.
"There's a stranger to see you, grandfather," called a girl's
even voice from the house; "finish paying off the hands and come
in at once."
"Well, of all the impudence!" exclaimed the young man, with a
saving dash of humour. Then, without so much as a parting word,
he ran quickly down the steps and started rapidly in the
direction of the darkening road, while the silk dress rustled
upon the porch and at the garden gate as the latch was lifted.
"Go in, grandfather!" called the girl's voice from the garden, to
which Fletcher responded as decisively.
"For Heaven's sake, let me manage my own affairs, Maria. You seem
to have inherited your poor mother's pesky habit of meddling."
"Well, I told you a gentleman was waiting," returned the girl
stubbornly. "You didn't let us know he was coming, either, and
Lindy says there isn't a thing fit to eat for supper."
Fletcher snorted, and then, before entering the house, stopped to
haggle with an old Negro woman for a pair of spring chickens
hanging dejectedly from her outstretched hand, their feet tied
together with a strip of faded calico.
"How much you gwine gimme fer dese, marster?" she inquired
anxiously, deftly twirling them about until they swung with heads
aloft.
Rising to the huckster's instinct, Fletcher poked the offerings
suspiciously beneath their flapping wings.
"Thirty cents for the pair--not a copper more," he responded
promptly; "they're as poor as Job's turkey, both of 'em."
"Lawdy, marster, you know better'n dat."
"They're skin and bones, I tell you; feel 'em yourself. Well,
take it or leave it, thirty cents is all I'll give."
"Go 'way f'om yere, suh; dese yer chickings ain' no po' w'ite
trash--dey's been riz on de bes' er de lan', dey is--en de aigs
dey wuz hatched right dar in de middle er de baid whar me en my
ole man en de chillun sleep. De hull time dat black hen wuz
a-settin', Cephus he was bleeged ter lay right spang on de bar'
flo' caze we'uz afeared de aigs 'ould addle. Lawd! Lawd! dey wuz
plum three weeks a-hatchin', en de weather des freeze thoo en
thoo. Cephus he's been crippled up wid de rheumatics ever sence.
Go 'way f'om yer, marster. I warn't bo'n yestiddy. Thirty cents!"
"Not a copper more, I tell you. Let me go, my good woman; I can't
stand here all night."
"Des a minute, marster. Dese yer chickings ain' never sot dey
feet on de yearth, caze dey's been riz right in de cabin, en
dey's done et dar vittles outer de same plate wid me en Cephus.
Ef'n dey spy a chice bit er bacon on de een er de knife hit 'uz
moughty likely ter fin' hits way down dir throat instid er down
me en Cephus'."
"Let me go, I say--I don't want your blamed chickens; take 'em
home again."
"Hi! marster, I'se Mehitable. You ain't fergot how peart I use
ter wuk w'en you wuz over me in ole marster's day. You know you
ain' fergot Mehitable, suh. Ain't you recollect de time ole
marster gimme a dollar wid his own han' caze I foun' de biggest
wum in de hull 'baccy patch? Lawd! dey wuz times, sho's you bo'n.
I kin see ole marster now es plain es ef twuz yestiddy, so big en
shiny like satin, wid his skin des es tight es a watermillion's."
"Shut up, confound you!" cut in Fletcher sharply.
"If you don't stop your chatter I'll set the dogs on you. Shut
up, I say!"
He strode into the house, slamming the heavy door behind him, and
a moment afterward Carraway heard him scolding brutally at the
servants across the hall.
The old Negress had gone muttering from the porch with her unsold
chickens, when the door softly opened again, and the girl, who
had entered through the front with her basket of flowers, came
out into the growing moonlight.
"Wait a moment, Aunt Mehitable," she said. "I want to speak to
you."
Aunt Mehitable turned slowly, putting a feeble hand to her dazed
eyes. "You ain' ole miss come back agin, is you, honey?" she
questioned doubtfully.
"I don't know who your old miss was," replied the girl, "but I am
not she, whoever she may have been. I am Maria Fletcher. You
don't remember me--yet you used to bake me ash-cakes when I was a
little girl."
The old woman shook her head. "You ain' Marse Fletcher's chile?"
"His granddaughter--but I must go in to supper. Here is the money
for your chickens--grandpa was only joking; you know he loves to
joke. Take the chickens to the hen-house and get something hot to
eat in the kitchen before you start out again."
She ran hurriedly up the steps and entered the hall just as
Fletcher was shaking hands with his guest. _
Read next: Book I- The Inheritance: Chapter III. Showing That a Little Culture Entails Great Care
Read previous: Book I- The Inheritance: Chapter I. The Man in the Field
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