She put her hands before her face and shook her head. When she looked up again there were vague blue circles beneath her eyes. The nervous stress of the incident and some unformulated association with the idea were obviously bearing on her heavily.
“It seems to me that we ought not to keep it,” she faltered.
“Keep it!” he thundered. “Why, we, that is our predecessors, have owned it for the last forty years, without a question. Why, Paula, are you crazy? The whole affair went through the courts forty years ago. ‘Ought not to keep it!’ The Ducie heir, this man’s father, who was then a minor, had not a scrap of paper nor one material witness, only the general understanding in the country that as Carroll Carriton happened to be in Mississippi at the time, and George Blewitt Ducie had a lot of specie from running his cotton through the blockade to England, he paid off the mortgage in gold. But that was mere hearsay, chiefly rumor of the gabble of the men who, it was claimed, had witnessed the execution of the quit-claim, and who took occasion to die immediately thereafter.”
“There is some inherent coercive evidence, to my mind, of the truth of those circumstances,” she declared. “It is too hard that the Ducies should have paid the money owed on the mortgage and then lose the place by foreclosure, and, oh, for less than the amount of the original debt.”
“But, Paula, can’t you see there is not a grain of proof that they ever paid the money? How, when, where? We held the promissory notes and the registered deed of trust and the court did not even take the matter under advisement.”
“But you know the confusion of the times,—no courts of record, no mail facilities or means of communication.”
“Much exaggerated, I believe. But at all events we had the promissory notes and the registered mortgage and they had their cock-and-bull story.”
“Oh, I should like to give it back,—it would be so noble of you. I cannot bear that we should own what the Ducies claim is theirs, and I feel sure that if it is not theirs in law it is by every moral sanction. And for such a poor price!—to lose the whole estate for the little amount, comparatively, of the debt! It is too sharp a bargain for us. How much was the amount for which the executors bought it in?”
His face changed and he did not answer. It had not been a pleasant morning, and his imperious temper had been greatly strained. “I remember,” he said, satirically, losing his self-control at last, “that you once entertained a tender interest in one of these Messieurs Ducie. I must say that I did not expect it to last so long or to go so far,—to propose to denude me of my very own, one of the finest properties in Mississippi, and vest him with it!”
Her face flushed. Her eyes flashed. “You have broken your promise! You have broken your promise!” She looked so vehement, so affronted, so earnest, that her anger tamed him for a moment.