CHAPTER XXIV
THE MAN WHO WON
Richard De Jarnette sat alone in the library at Elmhurst—the home of his fathers for generations back. It was a gloomy room. The furniture and the hangings were dark and massive. Everything spoke of a bygone age and a lack of woman's touch. Faded moreen curtains hung over Venetian blinds and shut out God's glorious sunlight. Both had been new when Richard De Jarnette's mother was a bride. Nobody had ever thought it worth while to change them.
In the center of the room the claw-footed mahogany table was piled with books and papers. Mammy Cely kept the place beautifully clean, but she was forbidden to touch the table.
The very books on the shelves belonged to another century,—the English poets bound in sheep, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson's Dictionary—well worn, Josephus, D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation," and kindred sorts, and on the lower shelves Scott's Bible—in many ponderous tomes, and the "Comprehensive Commentary." On one shelf in the old-fashioned "secretary" were a few volumes that spoke a woman's taste at a time when women must not read the virile things their brothers found good food. Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Sigourney in blue and gold, a Flora's Album, the "Language of Flowers," and Gift Books and "Annuals" in resplendent bindings that suggested the poverty within. These books had been Richard's mother's, and they looked cowed and overshadowed by the masculine array that lined the room. All the moneyed De Jarnettes had been planters, but with the reading habit, and there had been a preacher and a doctor in the family who, dying without issue, had bequeathed their libraries to the shelves of Elmhurst. The red cover of the book that Richard De Jarnette held in his hand seemed almost an impertinence among this staid, respectable assemblage in sheep and calf. It looked so new, and fresh and modern.
But while it was all this, it was not holding him to-night. It would have taken more even than dear John Fiske to shut out from his ears the echo of this day's doings—fragments from the attorney's pleas, Mrs. Pennybacker's incisive whisper which reached his ear and lodged there, "Who gave him that right?"
He tried to throw it all aside. It was over now and he had won. The child was upstairs safe asleep. He was sick and tired of the subject. He would get his mind on something else. It was for this that he had brought out "Virginia and her Neighbors." And he turned resolutely to the book.
But somehow the face of the woman he had defeated rose up between him and the printed page. He could not see the words for it. For one brief space he had held his vanquished enemy passive in his arms, her head against his breast. He could not rid himself of the sight of her face as she lay there.
He put the book down and threw his head back against the leather-covered chair. His eyes encountered those of his mother fixed upon him—his young mother whom he had never known. She looked down upon him from the portrait over the mantel. With the hateful pertinacity that the eyes in portraits sometimes show, they followed him whichever way he turned. They were very sad eyes. He had never liked to look at the portrait on that account. His mother had not been a happy woman. That he knew from Mammy Cely, and he would have guessed it, he had sometimes thought, from the character of the face that hung beside it. There was a sternness about the features of his father that did not promise much for a woman's happiness.
Richard De Jarnette was not an imaginative man, but there was something about his mother's eyes that in all these years he had never seen there—a questioning, reproachful look. They had never followed him about as they did to-night. He moved impatiently, half turning away from the portrait, and took up his book again. He read on resolutely, turning page after page with clock-like regularity. He would not give up to such folly!