CHAPTER XVIII
About a quarter of a mile from Stacey’s house lay the village of Meldrun, straggling along one side of a small river, which, having flowed prettily through the Carroll property, its steep banks massed with rhododendrons, issued thence into practical life, like a business man after a condescending hour with the arts. It fell, that is, into rapids, the water power from which was utilized by a small hosiery factory. Around this plant had grown up the village, consisting of a company store and of some fifty incredibly abject huts, leaning at strange angles, propped up anyhow, when in acute danger of collapse, by logs; the effect of the whole like that of a Vorticist picture.
The beginning of many of Stacey’s rides led him perforce through this ignoble place. The brick factory itself stood close beside the road he must follow, on a narrow strip of ground between it and the river, and through the broken glass of its windows slovenly girls leered out at him or shouted uncomplimentary remarks, and he could see the pale, hard-featured faces of ten- and twelve-year old children. If Stacey was walking Duke, he would wave his hat as he passed, but mostly he went through the town at a gallop. He rode well, and with his impassive, rather stern face, he must have looked like some callous medieval condottiere. No one in Meldrun would have heard of condottieri, but the effect would be the same.
Really, however, Stacey was far from impassive. This misery of which he caught a glimpse troubled him profoundly,—the more since, so far as he could see, there was nothing he could do about it. Yet, oddly, he rode through Meldrun oftener than he needed to.
The house of the factory owner, a Mr. Langdon, stood on the crest of a low hill some distance back to the left just before the village began; on one side its grounds adjoined the Carroll property. It was an imposing pillared mansion built as a plantation house before the Civil War, but Stacey gazed across at it grimly each time that he rode out through Meldrun. However, he did not see what he could do about this, either. He tried to dismiss both house and village from his thoughts.
Mr. Langdon himself, a pleasant-faced elderly man with a young wife and three small daughters, he knew by sight and nodded to curtly when they happened to meet. But, for all his deliberate isolation, he had been unable not to pick up a few scraps of gossip here and there, and also there was Elijah, an unquenchable fountain of information. So Stacey learned that the Langdons were a South Carolina family; that they had formerly owned the house and a thousand acres round about—the whole valley, indeed, including the property that was now Mr. Carroll’s; that they had lost everything during the Civil War and emigrated to Georgia; and that it was only five years ago that the present Mr. Langdon had returned, to buy back the family home and with it the hosiery factory that had been erected by some one else. Stacey also learned, listening distractedly to Elijah, that there was no love for the factory owner among his employees, and that that one young fellow—“yes, suh, he’s bad, Mistuh Stacey!”—had said “how he was goin’ to get Mistuh Langdon one day.”
“Well—and then?” thought Stacey, with a shrug of his shoulders, finding the intention laudable enough, but seeing no solution of anything in it.
But one night toward the end of April Stacey, lying awake on his sleeping-porch, became aware of an odd glow in the moonless night. “A fire, of course,” he thought, as he got quickly out of bed to make sure that it was not in his own house. Houses hereabouts always burned down sooner or later, what with the general carelessness and the lack of any fire department. But from his porch, which faced west, Stacey could not see the fire. It must be somewhere to the east, since it reddened the near side of the shrubbery on the lawn and shone fantastically against the glossy leaves of a tulip tree.
He hurried down the hall to the other end of the house. But tall trees and the distant barrier of white pines that marked the Carroll boundary cut off his view, and he could make out only that the fire was somewhere in Meldrun. The confused murmur of many voices reached him.
He threw on some clothes, slipped an electric flash-light into his pocket, then ran downstairs. Elijah was just starting up then. The old man was breathless with haste and excitement. “It—it am Mistuh Langdon’s house ’at’s buhnin’, Mistuh Stacey!” he stuttered. “My Lawd, but she shuah is buhnin’, suh!”