________________________________________________
_ At twelve o'clock the next day, Carraway, walking in the June
brightness along the road to the Blake cottage, came suddenly, at
the bend of the old icepond, upon Maria Fletcher returning from a
morning ride. The glow of summer was in her eyes, and though her
face was still pale, she seemed to him a different creature from
the grave, repressed girl of the night before. He noticed at once
that she sat her horse superbly, and in her long black habit all
the sinuous lines of her figure moved in rhythm with the rapid
pace.
As she neared him, and apparently before she had noticed his
approach, he saw her draw rein quickly, and, screened by the
overhanging boughs of a blossoming chestnut, send her glance like
a hooded falcon across the neighbouring field. Following the aim
of her look, he saw Christopher Blake walking idly among the
heavy furrows, watching, with the interest of a born
agriculturist, the busy transplanting of Fletcher's crop. He
still wore his jean clothes, which, hanging loosely upon his
impressive figure, blended harmoniously with the dull-purple
tones of the upturned soil. Beyond him there was a background of
distant wood, still young in leaf, and his bared head, with the
strong, sunburned line of his profile, stood out as distinctly as
a portrait done in early Roman gold.
That Maria had seen in him some higher possibility than that of a
field labourer was soon evident to Carraway, for her horse was
still standing on the slight incline, and as he reached her side
she turned with a frank question on her lips.
"Is that one of the labourers--the young giant by the fence?"
"Well, I dare say he labours, if that's what you mean. He's young
Blake, you know."
"Young Blake?" She bent her brows, and it was clear that the name
suggested only a trivial recollection to her mind. "There used to
be some Blake children in the old overseer's house--is this one
of them."
"Possibly; they live in the overseer's house."
She leaned over, fastening her heavy gauntlet. "They wouldn't
play with me, I remember; I couldn't understand why. Once I
carried my dolls over to their yard, and the boy set a pack of
hounds on me. I screamed so that an old Negro ran out and drove
them off, and all the time the boy stood by, laughing and calling
me names. Is that he, do you think?"
"I dare say. It sounds like him."
"Is he so cruel?" she asked a little wistfully.
"I don't know about that--but he doesn't like your people. Your
grandfather had some trouble with him a long time ago."
"And he wanted to punish me?--how cowardly."
"It does sound rather savage, but it isn't an ordinary case, you
know. He's the kind of person to curse 'root and branch,' from
all I hear, in the good old Biblical fashion."
"Oh, well, he's certainly very large, isn't he?"
"He's superb," said Carraway, with conviction.
"At a distance--so is that great pine over there," she lifted her
whip and pointed across the field; then as Carraway made no
answer, she smiled slightly and rode rapidly toward the Hall.
For a few minutes the lawyer stood where she had left him,
watching in puzzled thought her swaying figure on the handsome
horse. The girl fretted him, and yet he felt that he liked her
almost in spite of himself--liked something fine and fearless he
found in her dark eyes; liked, too, even while he sneered, her
peculiar grace of manner. There was the making of a woman in her
after all, he told himself, as he turned into the sunken road,
where he saw Christopher already moving homeward. He had meant to
catch up with him and join company on the way, but the young man
covered ground so quickly with his great strides that at last
Carraway, losing sight of him entirely, resigned himself to going
leisurely about his errand.
When, a little later, he opened the unhinged whitewashed gate
before the cottage, the place, as he found it, seemed to be
tenanted solely by a family of young turkeys scratching beneath
the damask rose-bushes in the yard. From a rear chimney a dark
streak of smoke was rising, but the front of the house gave no
outward sign of life, and as there came no answer to his
insistent knocks he at last ventured to open the door and pass
into the narrow hall. From the first room on the right a voice
spoke at his entrance, and following the sound he found himself
face to face with Mrs. Blake in her massive Elizabethan chair.
"There is a stranger in the room," she said rigidly, turning her
sightless eyes; "speak at once."
"I beg pardon most humbly for my intrusion," replied Carraway,
conscious of stammering like an offending schoolboy, "but as no
one answered my knock, I committed the indiscretion of opening a
closed door."
Awed as much by the stricken pallor of her appearance as by the
inappropriate grandeur of her black brocade and her thread lace
cap, he advanced slowly and stood awaiting his dismissal.
"What door?" she demanded sharply, much to his surprise.
"Yours, madam."
"Not answer your knock?" she pursued, with indignation. "So that
was the noise I heard, and no wonder that you entered. Why, what
is the matter with the place? Where are the servants?"
He humbly replied that he had seen none, to be taken up with her
accustomed quickness of touch.
"Seen none! Why, there are three hundred of them, sir. Well,
well, this is really too much. I shall put a butler over Boaz
this very day."
For an instant Carraway felt strangely tempted to turn and run as
fast as he could along the sunken road--remembering, as he
struggled with the impulse, that he had once been caught at the
age of ten and whipped for stealing apples. Recovering with an
effort his sense of dignity, he offered the suggestion that Boaz,
instead of being seriously in fault, might merely have been
engaged in useful occupations "somewhere at the back."
"What on earth can he have to do at the back, sir?" inquired the
irrepressible old lady; "but since you were so kind as to
overlook our inhospitable reception, will you not be equally good
and tell me your name?"
"I fear it won't enlighten you much," replied the lawyer
modestly, "but my name happens to be Guy Carraway."
"Guy--Guy Carraway," repeated Mrs. Blake, as if weighing each
separate letter in some remote social scales. " I've known many a
Guy in my day--and that part, at least, of your name is quite
familiar. There was Guy Nelson, and Guy Blair, and Guy Marshall,
the greatest beau of his time--but I don't think I ever had the
pleasure of meeting a Carraway before."
"That is more than probable, ma'am, but I have the advantage of
you, since, as a child, I was once taken out upon the street
corner merely to see you go by on your way to a fancy ball, where
you appeared as Diana."
Mrs. Blake yielded gracefully to the skilful thrust.
"Ah, I was Lucy Corbin then," she sighed. "You find few traces of
her in me now, sir."
"Unfortunately, your mirror cannot speak for me."
She shook her head.
"You're a flatterer--a sad flatterer, I see," she returned, a
little wistfully; "but it does no harm, as I tell my son, to
flatter the old. It is well to strew the passage to the grave
with flowers."
"How well I remember that day, " said Carraway, speaking softly.
"There was a crowd about the door, waiting to see you come out,
and a carpenter lifted me upon his shoulder. Your hair was as
black as night, and there was a circle round your head."
"A silver fillet," she corrected, with a smile in which there was
a gentle archness.
"A fillet, yes; and you carried a bow and a quiver full of
arrows. I declare, it seems but yesterday."
"It was more than fifty years ago," murmured the old lady. Well,
well, I've had my day, sir, and it was a merry one. I am almost
seventy years old, I'm half dead, and stone blind into the
bargain, but I can say to you that this is a cheerful world in
spite of the darkness in which I linger on. I'd take it over
again and gladly any day--the pleasure and the pain, the light
and the darkness. Why, I sometimes think that my present
blindness was given me in order that I might view the past more
clearly. There's not a ball of my youth, nor a face I knew, nor
even a dress I wore, that I don't see more distinctly every day.
The present is a very little part of life, sir; it's the past in
which we store our treasures."
"You're right, you're right," replied Carraway, drawing his chair
nearer the embroidered ottoman and leaning over to stroke the
yellow cat; "and I'm glad to hear so cheerful a philosophy from
your lips."
"It is based on a cheerful experience--I've been as you see me
now only twenty years."
Only twenty years! He looked mutely round the soiled whitewashed
walls, where hung a noble gathering of Blake portraits in massive
old gilt frames. Among them he saw the remembered face of Lucy
Corbin herself, painted under a rose-garland held by smiling
Loves.
"Life has its trials, of course, " pursued Mrs. Blake, as if
speaking to herself. "I can't look out upon the June flowers, you
know, and though the pink crape-myrtle at my window is in full
bloom I cannot see it."
Following her gesture, Carraway glanced out into the little yard;
no myrtle was there, but he remembered vaguely that he had seen
one in blossom at the Hall.
"You keep flowers about you, though," he said, alluding to the
scattered vases of June roses.
"Not my crape-myrtle. I planted it myself when I first came home
with Mr. Blake, and I have never allowed so much as a spray of it
to be plucked."
Forgetting his presence, she lapsed for a time into one of the
pathetic day-dreams of old age. Then recalling herself suddenly,
her tone took on a sprightliness like that of youth.
"It's not often that we have the pleasure of entertaining a
stranger in our out-of-the-way house, sir so may I ask where you
are staying--or perhaps you will do us the honour to sleep
beneath our roof. It has had the privilege of sheltering General
Washington."
"You are very kind," replied Carraway, with a gratitude that was
from his heart, "but to tell the truth, I feel that I am sailing
under false colours. The real object of my visit is to ask a
business interview with your son. I bring what seems to me a very
fair offer for the place."
Grasping the carved arms of her chair, Mrs. Blake turned the
wonder in her blind eyes upon him.
"An offer for the place! Why, you must be dreaming, sir! A Blake
owned it more than a hundred years before the Revolution."
At the instant, understanding broke upon Carraway like a
thundercloud, and as he rose from his seat it seemed to him that
he had missed by a single step the yawning gulf before him. Blind
terror gripped him for the moment, and when his brain steadied he
looked up to meet, from the threshold of the adjoining room, the
enraged flash of Christopher's eyes. So tempestuous was the
glance that Carraway, impulsively falling back, squared himself
to receive a physical blow; but the young man, without so much as
the expected oath, came in quietly and took his stand behind the
Elizabethan chair.
"Why, what a joke, mother," he said, laughing; "he means the old
Weatherby farm, of course. The one I wanted to sell last year,
you know."
"I thought you'd sold it to the Weatherbys, Christopher."
"Not a bit of it--they backed out at the last; but don't begin to
bother your head about such things; they aren't worth it. And
now, sir," he turned upon Carraway, "since your business is with
me, perhaps you will have the goodness to step outside."
With the feeling that he was asked out for a beating, Carraway
turned for a farewell with Mrs. Blake, but the imperious old lady
was not to be so lightly defrauded of a listener.
"Business may come later, my son," she said, detaining them by a
gesture of her heavily ringed hand. "After dinner you may take
Mr. Carraway with you into the library and discuss your affairs
over a bottle of burgundy, as was your grandfather's custom
before you; meanwhile, he and I will resume our very pleasant
talk which you interrupted. He remembers seeing me in the old
days when we were all in the United States, my dear."
Christopher's brow grew black, and he threw a sharp and malignant
glance of sullen suspicion at Carraway, who summoned to meet it
his most frank and open look.
"I saw your mother in the height of her fame," he said, smiling,
"so I may count myself one of her oldest admirers, I believe. You
may assure yourself," he added softly, "that I have her welfare
very decidedly at heart."
At this Christopher smiled back at him, and there was something
of the June brightness in his look.
"Well, take care, sir," he answered, and went out, closing the
door carefully behind him, while Carraway applied himself to a
determined entertaining of Mrs. Blake.
To accomplish this he found that he had only to leave her free,
guiding her thoughts with his lightest touch into newer channels.
The talk had grown merrier now, and he soon discovered that she
possessed a sharpened wit as well as a ready tongue. From subject
to subject she passed with amazing swiftness, bearing down upon
her favourite themes with the delightful audacity of the talker
who is born, not made. She spoke of her own youth, of historic
flirtations in the early twenties, of great beaux she had known,
and of famous recipes that had been handed down for generations.
Everywhere he felt her wonderful keenness of perception, that
intuitive understanding of men and manners which had kept her for
so long the reigning belle among her younger rivals.
As she went on he found that her world was as different from his
own as if she dwelt upon some undiscovered planet--a world
peopled with shades and governed by an ideal group of abstract
laws. She lived upon lies, he saw, and thrived upon the sweetness
she extracted from them. For her the Confederacy had never
fallen, the quiet of her dreamland had been disturbed by no
invading army, and the three hundred slaves, who had in reality
scattered like chaff before the wind, she still saw in her
cheerful visions tilling her familiar fields. It was as if she
had fallen asleep with the great blow that bad wrecked her body,
and had dreamed on steadily throughout the years. Of real changes
she was as ignorant as a new-born child. Events had shaken the
world to its centre, and she, by her obscure hearth, had not felt
so much as a sympathetic tremor. In her memory there was no
Appomattox, news of the death of Lincoln had never reached her
ears, and president had peacefully succeeded president in the
secure Confederacy in which she lived. Wonderful as it all was,
to Carraway the most wonderful thing was the intricate tissue of
lies woven around her chair. Lies--lies--there had been nothing
but lies spoken within her hearing for twenty years. _
Read next: Book I- The Inheritance: Chapter VII. In Which a Stand Is Made
Read previous: Book I- The Inheritance: Chapter V. The Wreck of the Blakes
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