CHAPTER VIII. Between the Devil and the Deep Sea
There was a cheerful blaze in the old lady's parlour, and she was sitting placidly in her Elizabethan chair, the yellow cat dozing at her footstool. Lila paced slowly up and down the room, her head bent a little sideways, as she listened to Tucker's cheerful voice reading the evening chapter from the family Bible. His crutch, still strapped to his right shoulder, trailed behind him on the floor, and the smoky oil lamp threw his eccentric shadow on the whitewashed wall, where it hung grimacing like a grotesque from early Gothic art.
"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it," he read in his even tones; "if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be condemned."
The old lady tapped the arm of her chair and turned her sightless eyes upon the Bible, as if Solomon in person stood there awaiting judgment.
"I always liked that verse, brother," she remarked, "though I am not sure that I consider it entirely proper reading for the young. Aren't you tired walking, Lila?"
"Oh, no, mother."
"Well, we mustn't take the Scriptures literally, you know, my child; if we did, I fear a great deal of trouble would come of it—and surely it is a pity to magnify the passion of love when so very many estimable persons get along quite comfortably without it. You remember my remarking how happy Miss Belinda Morrison always appeared to be, and so far as I know she never had a suitor in her life, though she lived to be upward of eighty."
"Oh, mother! and yet you were so madly in love with father—you remember the fancy ball."
"The fancy ball occupied only one night, my dear, and I've had almost seventy years. I married for love, as you certainly know—at my age, I suppose I might as well admit it—but the marriage happened to be also entirely suitable, and I hope that I should never have been guilty of anything so indelicate as to fall in love with a gentleman who wasn't a desirable match."
Lila flushed and bit her lip.
"I don't care about stations in life, nor blood, nor anything like that," she protested.
The old lady sighed. "We won't have any more of Solomon, Tucker, "she observed. "I fear he will put notions into the child's head. Not care about blood, indeed! What are we coming to, I wonder? Well, well, I suppose it is what I deserve for allowing myself to fall so madly in love with your father. When I look back now it seems to me that I could have achieved quite as much with a great deal less expenditure of emotion."
"Now, now, Lucy, " said Tucker, closing the gilt clasps of the Bible, "you're not yet seventy, and by the time you reach eighty you will see things clearer. I'm a good deal younger than you, but I'm two-thirds in the grave already, which makes a difference. My life's been long and pleasant as it is, but when I glance back upon it now I tell you the things I regret least in it are my youthful follies. A man must be very far in his dotage, indeed, when he begins to wear a long face over the sharp breaths that he drew in youth. I came very near ruining myself for a woman once, and the fact that I was ready to do it—even though I didn't—is what in the past I like best to recall to-day. It makes it all easier and better, somehow, and it seems to put a zest into the hours I spend now on my old bench. To have had one emotion that was bigger than you or your universe is to have had life, my dear."
The old lady wiped her eyes. "It may be so, brother, it may be so," she admitted; "but not before Lila. Is that you, Christopher?"
The young man came in and crossed slowly to the fire, bending for an instant over her chair. He was conscious suddenly that his clothes smelled of the fields and that the cold water of the well had not cleansed his face and hands. All at once it came to him with something of a shock that this bare, refined poverty was beyond his level—that about himself there was a coarseness, a brutality even, that made him shrink from contact with these others—with his mother, with Lila, with poor, maimed Tucker in his cotton suit. Was it only a distinction in manner, he wondered resentfully, or did the difference lie still deeper in some unlikeness of soul? For the first time in his life he felt ill at ease in the presence of those he loved, and as his eyes dwelt moodily on Lila's graceful figure—upon the swell of her low bosom, her swaying hips, and the free movement of her limbs—he asked himself bitterly if he had aught in common with so delicate and rare a thing? And she? Was her blithe acquiescence, after all, but an assumed virtue, to whose outward rags she clung? Was it possible that there was here no inward rebellion, none of that warfare against Destiny which at once inspirited and embittered his heart?
His face grew dark, and Uncle Boaz, coming in to stir the fire, glanced up at him and sighed.
"You sho' do look down in de mouf, Marse Chris," he observed.
Christopher started and then laughed blankly. "Well, I'm not proof against troubles, I reckon," he returned. "They're things none of us can keep clear of, you know."
Uncle Boaz chuckled under his breath. "Go 'way f'om yer, Marse
Chris; w'at you know 'bout trouble—you ain' even mah'ed yet."
"Now, now, Boaz, don't be putting any ideas against marriage in his head," broke in the old lady. "He has remained single too long as it is, for, as dear old Bishop Deane used to say, it is surely the duty of every gentleman to take upon himself the provision of at least one helpless female. Not that I wish you to enter into marriage hastily, my son, or for any merely sentimental reasons; but I am sure, as things are, I believe one may have a great many trials even if one remains single, and though I know, of course, that I've had my share of trouble, still I never blamed your poor father one instant—not even for the loss of my six children, which certainly would not have happened if I had not married him. But, as I've often told you, my dear, I think marriage should be rightly regarded more as a duty than as a pleasure. Your Aunt Susannah always said it was like choosing a partner at a ball; for my part, I think it resembles more the selecting of a brand of flour."
"And to think that she once cried herself sick because Christopher went hunting during the honeymoon!" exclaimed Tucker, with his pleasant laugh.
"Ah, life is long, and one's honeymoon is only a month, brother," retorted the old lady; "and I'm not saying anything against love, you know, when it comes to that. Properly conducted, it is a very pleasant form of entertainment. I've enjoyed it mightily myself; but I'm nearing seventy, and the years of love seem very small when I look back. There are many interesting things in a long life, and love for a man is only one among them; which brings me, after all, to the conclusion that the substance of anybody's house is a large price to pay for a single feeling."
Christopher leaned over her and held out his arms.
"It is your bedtime, mother—shall I carry you across?" he asked; and as the old lady nodded, he lifted her as if she were a child and held her closely against his breast, feeling his tenderness revive at the clasp of her fragile hands. When he placed her upon her bed, he kissed her good-night and went up the narrow staircase, stooping carefully to avoid the whitewashed ceiling above.
Once in his room, he threw off his coat and sat down upon the side of his narrow bed, glancing contemptuously at his bare brown arms, which showed through the openings in his blue shirt sleeves. He was still smarting from the memory of the sudden selfconsciousness he had felt downstairs, and a pricking sensitiveness took possession of him, piercing like needles through the boorish indifference he had worn. All at once he realised that he was ashamed of himself—ashamed of his ignorance, his awkwardness, his brutality—and with the shame there awoke the slow anger of a sullen beast. Fate had driven him like a whipped hound to the kennel, but he could still snarl back his defiance from the shadow of his obscurity. The strong masculine beauty of his face—the beauty, as Cynthia had said, of the young David—confronted him in the little greenish mirror above the bureau, and in the dull misery of the eyes he read those higher possibilities, which even to-day he could not regard without a positive pang. What he might have been seemed forever struggling in his look with what he was, like the Scriptural wrestle between the angel of the Lord and the brute. The soul, distorted, bruised, defeated, still lived within him, and it was this that brought upon him those hours of mortal anguish which he had so vainly tried to drown in his glass. From the mirror his gaze passed to his red and knotted hand, with its blunted nails, and the straight furrow grew deeper between his eyebrows. He remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition—the ambition of his childhood—had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order. He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left unfinished. Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough. In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit of the student go out of him forever, and after a few winter nights, when he fell asleep over his books, he had sunk slowly to the level of the small tobacco growers among whom he lived. With him also was the curse of apathy—that hereditary instinct to let the single throw decide the issue, so characteristic of the reckless Blakes. For more than two hundred years his people had been gay and careless livers on this very soil; among them all he knew of not one who had gone without the smallest of his desires, nor of one who had permitted his left hand to learn what his right one cast away. Big, blithe, mettlesome, they passed before him in a long, comely line, flushed with the pleasant follies which had helped to sap the courage in their descendants' veins.
At first he had made a pitiable attempt to remain "within his class," but gradually, as time went on, this, too, had left him, and in the end he had grown to feel a certain pride in the ignorance he had formerly despised—a clownish scorn of anything above the rustic details of his daily life. There were days even when he took a positive pleasure in the degree of his abasement, when but for his blind mother he would have gone dirty, spoken in dialect, and eaten with the hounds. What he dreaded most now were the rare moments of illumination in which he beheld his degradation by a blaze of light—moments such as this when he seemed to stand alone upon the edge of the world, with the devil awaiting him when he should turn at last. Years ago he had escaped these periods by strong physical exertion, working sometimes in the fields until he dropped upon the earth and lay like a log for hours. Later, he had yielded to drink when the darkness closed over him, and upon several occasions he had sat all night with a bottle of whisky in Tom Spade's store. Both methods he felt now to be ineffectual; fatigue could not deaden nor could whisky drown the bitterness of his soul. One thing remained, and that was to glut his hatred until it should lie quiet like a gorged beast.
Steps sounded all at once upon the staircase, and after a moment the door opened and Cynthia entered.
"Did you see Fletcher's boy, Christopher?" she asked. "His grandfather was over here looking for him."
"Fletcher over here? Well, of all the impudence!"
"He was very uneasy, but he stopped long enough to ask me to persuade you to part with the farm. He'd give three thousand dollars down for it, he said."
She dusted the bureau abstractedly with her checked apron and then stood looking wistfully into the mirror.
"Is that so? If he'd give me three million I wouldn't take it," answered Christopher.
"It seems a mistake, dear," said Cynthia softly; "of course, I'd hate to oblige Fletcher, too, but we are so poor, and the money would mean so much to us. I used to feel as you do, but somehow I seem all worn out now—soul as well as body. I haven't the strength left to hate."
"Well, I have," returned Christopher shortly, "and I'll have it when I'm gasping over my last breath. You needn't bother about that business, Cynthia; I can keep up the family record on my own account. What's the proverb about us—'a Blake can hate twice as long as most men can love'—that's my way, you know."
"You didn't finish it," said Cynthia, turning from the bureau; "it's all downstairs in the 'Life of Bolivar Blake'; you remember Colonel Byrd got it off in a toast at a wedding breakfast, and Great-grandfather Bolivar was so proud of it he had it carved above his library door."
"High and mighty old chap, wasn't he? But what's the rest?"
"What he really said was: 'A Blake can hate twice as long as most men can love, and love twice as long as most men can live.'"
Christopher looked down suddenly at his great bronzed hands. "Oh, he needn't have stuck the tail of it on," he remarked carelessly; "but the first part has a bully sound."
When Cynthia had gone, he undressed and threw himself on the bed, but there was a queer stinging sensation in his veins, and he could not sleep. Rising presently, he opened the window, and in the frosty October air stood looking through the darkness to the light that twinkled in the direction of Blake Hall. Faint stars were shining overhead, and against the indistinct horizon something obscure and black was dimly outlined—perhaps the great clump of oaks that surrounded the old brick walls. Somewhere by that glimmer of light he knew that Fletcher sat hugging his ambition like a miser, gloating over the grandson who would grow up to redeem his name. For the weak, foolish-mouthed boy Christopher at this moment knew neither tolerance nor compassion; and if he stooped to touch him, he felt that it was merely as he would grasp a stick which Fletcher had taken for his own defense. The boy himself might live or die, prosper or fail, it made little difference. The main thing was that in the end Bill Fletcher should be hated by his grandson as he was hated by the man whom he had wronged.