________________________________________________
_ Carraway had risen to meet his host in a flutter that was almost
one of dread. In the eight years since their last interview it
seemed to him that his mental image of his great client had
magnified in proportions--that Fletcher had "out-Fletchered"
himself, as he felt inclined to put it. The old betrayal of his
employer's dependence, which at first had been merely a suspicion
in the lawyer's mind, had begun gradually, as time went on, to
bristle with the points of significant details. In looking back,
half-hinted things became clear to him at last, and he gathered,
bit by bit, the whole clever, hopeless villainy of the
scheme--the crime hedged about by law with all the prating
protection of a virtue. He knew now that Fletcher--the old
overseer of the Blake slaves--had defrauded the innocent as
surely as if he had plunged his great red fist into the little
pocket of a child, had defrauded, indeed, with so strong a blow
that the very consciousness of his victim had been stunned. There
had been about his act all the damning hypocrisy of a great
theft--all the air of stern morality which makes for the popular
triumph of the heroic swindler.
These things Carraway understood, yet as the man strode into the
room with open palm and a general air of bluff hospitality--as if
he had just been blown by some fresh strong wind across his
tobacco fields--the lawyer experienced a relief so great that the
breath he drew seemed a fit measure of his earlier foreboding.
For Fletcher outwardly was but the common type of farmer, after
all, with a trifle more intelligence, perhaps, than is met with
in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest,
sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was
written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a
bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now
brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the
room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a
masculine sincerity naked and unashamed--as if his large
coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to
conceal the stains it bore. Hale, hairy, vehement, not without a
quality of Rabelaisian humour, he appeared the last of all men
with whom one would associate the burden of a troubled
conscience.
"Sorry to have kept you--on my word I am," he began heartily;
"but to tell the truth, I thought thar'd be somebody in the house
with sense enough to show you to a bedroom. Like to run up now
for a wash before supper?"
It was what one expected of him, such a speech blurted in so
offhand a manner, and the lawyer could barely suppress a
threatening laugh.
"Oh, it was a short trip," he returned, "and a walk of five miles
on a day like this is one of the most delightful things in life.
I've been looking out at your garden, by the way, and--I may as
well confess it--overhearing a little of your conversation."
"Is that so?" chuckled Fletcher, his great eyebrows overhanging
his eyes like a mustache grown out of place. "Well, you didn't
hear anything to tickle your ears, I reckon. I've been having a
row with that cantankerous fool, Blake. The queer thing about
these people is that they seem to think I'm to blame every time
they see a spot on their tablecloths. Mark my words, it ain't
been two years since I found that nigger Boaz digging in my
asparagus bed, and he told me he was looking for some shoots for
ole miss's dinner."
"The property idea is very strong in these rural counties, you
see," remarked the lawyer gravely. "They feel that every year
adds a value to the hereditary possession of land, and that when
an estate has borne a single name for a century there has been a
veritable impress placed upon it. Your asparagus bed is merely an
item; you find, I fancy, other instances."
Fletcher turned in his chair.
"That's the whole blamed rotten truth," he admitted, waving his
great red hand toward the door; "but let's have supper first and
settle down to talk on a full stomach. Thar's no hurry with all
night before us, and that, to come to facts, is why I sent for
you. No lawyer's office for me when I want to talk business, but
an easy-chair by my own table and a cup of coffee beforehand."
As he finished, a bell jangled in the hall, and the door opened
to admit the girl whom Carraway had seen a little earlier upon
the porch.
"Supper's a good hour late, Maria," grumbled Fletcher, looking at
his heavy silver watch, "and I smelt the bacon frying at six
o'clock."
For an instant the girl looked as if she had more than half an
intention to slap his face; then quickly recovering her
self-possession, she smiled at Carraway and held out a small
white hand with an air of quiet elegance which was the most
noticeable thing in her appearance.
"I am quite a stranger to you, Mr. Carraway," she said, with a
laugh, "but if you had only known it, I had a doll named after
you when I was very small. Guy Carraway!--it seemed to me all
that was needed to make a fairy tale."
The lawyer joined in her laugh, which never rose above a
carefully modulated minor. "I confess that I once took the same
view of it, my dear young lady," he returned, "so I ended by
dropping the name and keeping only the initial. Your grandfather
will tell you that I am now G. Carraway and nothing more. I
couldn't afford, as things were, to make a fairy tale of my life,
you see."
"Oh, if one only could!" said the girl, lowering her full dark
eyes, which gave a piteous lie to her sullen mouth.
She was artificial, Carraway told himself with emphasis, and yet
the distinction of manner--the elegance--was certainly the point
at which her training had not failed. He felt it in her tall,
straight figure, absurdly overdressed for a granddaughter of
Fletcher's; in her smooth white hands, with their finely polished
nails; in her pale, repressed face, which he called plain while
admitting that it might become interesting; in her shapely head
even with its heavy cable of coal-black hair.
What she was her education had made of her--the look of serene
distinction, the repose of her thin-featured, colourless face,
refined beyond the point of prettiness--these things her training
had given her, and these were the things which Carraway, with his
old-fashioned loyalty to a strong class prejudice, found himself
almost resenting. Bill Fletcher's granddaughter had, he felt, no
right to this rare security of breeding which revealed itself in
every graceful fold of the dress she wore, for with Fletcher an
honest man she would have been, perhaps, but one of the sallow,
over-driven drudges who stare like helpless effigies from the
little tumbledown cabins along country roadsides.
Fletcher, meanwhile, had filled in the pause with one of his
sudden burly dashes into speech.
"Maria has been so long at her high-and-mighty boarding-school,"
he said, "that I reckon her head's as full of fancies as a cheese
is of maggots. She's even got a notion that she wants to turn out
all this new stuff--to haul the old rubbish back again but I say
wait till the boy comes on--then we'll see, we'll see."
"And in the meantime we'll go in to supper," put in the girl with
a kind of hopeless patience, though Carraway could see that she
smarted as from a blow. "This is Will, Mr. Carraway," she added
almost gaily, skillfully sweeping her train from about the feet
of
a pretty, undersized boy of fourteen years, who had burst into
the room with his mouth full of bread and jam. "He's quite the
pride of the family, you know, because he's just taken all the
honours of his school."
"History, 'rithmatic, Latin--all the languages," rolled out
Fletcher in a voice that sounded like a tattoo. "I can't keep up
with 'em, but they're all thar, ain't they, sonny?"
"Oh, you could never say 'em off straight, grandpa," retorted the
boy, with the pertness of a spoiled girl, at which, to Carraway's
surprise, Fletcher fairly chuckled with delight.
"That's so; I'm a plain man, the Lord knows," he admitted, his
coarse face crinkling like a sundried leaf of tobacco.
"We've got chickens for supper--broiled," the boy chattered on,
putting out his tongue at his sister; "that's why Lindy's havin'
it an hour late she's been picking 'em, with Aunt Mehitable
helping her for the feathers. Now don't shake your head at me,
Maria, because it's no use pretending we have 'em every night,
like old Mrs. Blake."
"Bless my soul!" gasped Fletcher, nettled by the last remark. "Do
you mean to tell me those Blakes are fools enough to eat spring
chicken when they could get forty cents apiece for 'em in the
open market?"
"The old lady does," corrected the boy glibly. "The one who wears
the queer lace cap and sits in the big chair by the hearth all
day--and all night, too, Tommy Spade says, 'cause he peeped
through once at midnight and she was still there, sitting so
stiff that it scared him and he ran away. Well, Aunt Mehitable
sold her a dozen, and she got a side of bacon and a bag of meal."
"Grandfather, you've forgotten Aunt Saidie," broke in Maria, as
Fletcher was about to begin his grace without waiting for a dumpy
little woman, in purple calico, who waddled with an embarrassed
air from her hasty preparations in the pantry. At first Carraway
had mistaken her for an upper servant, but as she came forward
Maria laid her hand playfully upon her arm and introduced her
with a sad little gaiety of manner. "I believe she has met one of
your sisters in Fredericksburg," she added, after a moment.
Clearly she had determined to accept the family in the lump, with
a resolution that--had it borne less resemblance to a passive
rage could not have failed to glorify a nobler martyrdom. It was
not affection that fortified her--beyond her first gently
tolerant glance at the boy there had been only indifference in
her pale, composed face--and the lawyer was at last brought to
the surprising conclusion that Fletcher's granddaughter was
seeking to build herself a fetish of the mere idle bond of blood.
The hopeless gallantry of the girl moved him to a vague feeling
of pity, and he spoke presently with a chivalrous desire of
making her failure easy.
"It was Susan, I think," he said pleasantly, shaking hands with
the squat little figure in front of him, "I remember her speaking
of it afterward."
"I met her at a church festival one Christmas Eve," responded
Aunt Saidie, in a high-pitched, rasping voice. "The same evening
that I got this pink crocheted nuby." She touched a small pointed
shawl about her shoulders. "Miss Belinda Beale worked it and it
was raffled off for ten cents a chance."
Her large, plump face, overflushed about the nose, had a natural
kindliness of expression which Carraway found almost appealing;
and he concluded that as a girl she might have possessed a common
prettiness of feature. Above her clear blue eyes a widening
parting divided her tightly crimped bands of hair, which still
showed a bright chestnut tint in the gray ripples.
"Thar, thar, Saidie," Fletcher interrupted with a frank
brutality, which the lawyer found more repelling than the memory
of his stolen fortune. "Mr. Carraway doesn't want to hear about
your fascinator. He'd a long ways rather have you make his
coffee."
The little woman flushed purple and drew back her chair with an
ugly noise from the head of the lavishly spread table.
"Set down right thar, suh," she stammered, her poor little
pretense of ease gone from her, "right thar between Brother Bill
and me."
"You did say it, Aunt Saidie, I told you you would," screamed the
pert boy, beginning an assault upon an enormous dish of
batterbread.
Maria flinched visibly. "Be silent, Will," she ordered.
"Grandfather, you must really make Will learn to be polite."
"Now, now, Maria, you're too hard on us," protested Fletcher,
flinging himself bodily into the breach, "boys will be boys, you
know--they warn't born gals."
"But she did say it, Maria," insisted the boy, "and she bet me a
whole dish of doughnuts she wouldn't. She did say 'set'; I heard
her." Maria bit her lip, and her flashing eyes filled with angry
tears, while Carraway, as he began talking hurriedly about the
promise of tobacco, resisted valiantly an impulse to kick the
pretty boy beneath the table. As his eyes traveled about the
fine old room, marking its mellow wainscoting and the whitened
silver handles on the heavy doors, he found himself wondering
with implacable approval if this might not be the beginning of a
great atonement.
The boy's mood had varied at the sight of his sister's tears, and
he fell to patting penitently the hand that quivered on the
table. "You needn't give me the doughnuts, Aunt Saidie; I'll make
believe you didn't say it," he whispered at last.
"Do you take sugar, Mr. Carraway?" asked Miss Saidie, flushed and
tremulous at the head of the overcrowded table, with its massive
modern silver service. Poor little woman, thought the lawyer,
with his first positive feeling of sympathy, she would have been
happier frying her own bacon amid bouncing children in a
labourer's cabin. He leaned toward her, speaking with a grave
courtesy, which she met with the frightened, questioning eyes of
a child. She was "quite too hopeless," he reluctantly admitted
--yet, despite himself, he felt a sudden stir of honest human
tenderness--the tenderness he had certainly not felt for
Fletcher, nor for the pretty, pert boy, nor even for the elegant
Maria herself.
"I was looking out at the dear old garden awhile ago," he said,
"and I gathered from it that you must be fond of flowers--since
your niece tells me she has been away so long."
She brightened into animation, her broad, capable hands fumbling
with the big green-and-gold teacups.
"Yes, I raise 'em," she answered. "Did you happen to notice the
bed of heartsease? I worked every inch of that myself last
spring--and now I'm planting zinnias, and touch-me-nots, and
sweet-williams they'll all come along later."
"And prince's-feather," added the lawyer, reminiscently; "that
used to be a favourite of mine, I remember, when I was a country
lad."
"I've got a whole border of 'em out at the back large, fine
plants, too--but Maria wants to root 'em up. She says they're
vulgar because they grow in all the niggers' yards."
"Vulgar!" So this was the measure of Maria, Carraway told
himself, as he fell into his pleasant ridicule. "Why, if God
Almighty ever created a vulgar flower, my dear young lady, I have
yet to see it."
"But don't you think it just a little gaudy for a lawn,"
suggested the girl, easily stung to the defensive.
"It looks cheerful and I like it," insisted Aunt Saidie,
emboldened by a rare feeling of support. "Ma used to have two big
green tubs of it on either side the front door when we were
children, and we used to stick it in our hats and play we was
real fine folks. Don't you recollect it, Brother Bill?"
"Good Lord, Saidie, the things you do recollect!" exclaimed
Fletcher, who, beneath the agonised eyes of Maria, was drinking
his coffee from his saucer in great spluttering gulps.
The girl was in absolute torture: this Carraway saw in the white,
strained, nervous intensity of her look; yet the knowledge served
only to irritate him, so futile appeared any attempt to soften
the effect of Fletcher's grossness. Before the man's colossal
vulgarity of soul, mere brutishness of manner seemed but a
trifling phase. _
Read next: Book I- The Inheritance: Chapter IV. Of Human Nature in the Raw State
Read previous: Book I- The Inheritance: Chapter II. The Owner of Blake Hall
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