The Windy Hill

by Cornelia Meigs

"He was not like the other two of us, we could see that even when we were children. He was quicker and more clever than we, and he was better, or at least wiser, at holding his tongue and keeping his temper when the occasion served. But the key to his whole character was that he could never see any possession in the hands of another without instinctively wishing to have it for himself. I have seen him move heaven and earth to get something that he did not really want, merely because it seemed of value when it belonged to some one else. There was no one more clever than he at acquiring what he desired.

"Felix Brighton prospered greatly, but he never moved out of the comfortable farmhouse of which we were all so fond. It became very beautiful under his hands, extended and improved and filled with the rarest treasures of his gathering. He was especially fond of pictures, so that there was a wealth of portraits and landscapes that he had collected or inherited, that glowed like jewels on the mellow old walls. He did us unnumbered kindnesses when we were boys, and when, on growing up, we decided that we would all three be lawyers, he set us up as partners, Peyton, Crawford & Brighton. We felt very important with our law books, our profound knowledge, our newly painted sign and very little else. Even while we were studying, it was plain that Anthony, in his erratic, changeable way, was the cleverest of us all.

"And then history repeated itself, as it so often does. The grandson of Martin Hallowell and the two great-grandsons of Reuben fell out with each other over just such a questionable enterprise as had wrecked a partnership a hundred years ago. I can see him now as he came hurrying into our office that day full of the plan for his great scheme—just a quibble of the law and the thing was done. We were all to be made rich and successful by it, he explained. There is no use in describing to you the intricacies of his idea; it was one of those shoal waters in which the honesty of young lawyers can sometimes come to grief. The pursuit of law will winnow out the true from the false; it makes an upright man a hundred times more certain and more proud of his honor: it searches out the small, weak places of a meaner man's soul.

"Anthony tried to make this project sound quite simple and straightforward, but I can remember how narrowly he watched us and how, when he attempted to laugh at our objections, his voice cracked into shrill falsetto, under pressure of his excitement. I would have argued with him, explained, tried to dissuade him, but Jasper scorned my temporizing and would have had none of it. His sense of justice blazed high within him and his words leaped forth, a very avalanche of scorn and wrath. Anthony heard him through without replying, then turned on his heel and went out. Our partnership was at an end. Later we heard that he had become involved with his scheme even before he spoke to us, that he had made himself liable for a sum of money, and that, to pay it—don't wince, Jasper, these children must know the truth—to pay it he forged Felix Brighton's name.

"There is something very terrible in the sudden destruction of your confidence in some one you have loved and trusted. Anthony is greatly changed now, although there is still a little of his old charm left. Yet you would not think of him as some one who had been an intimate part of our lives, a comrade whose cleverness we admired and whose honesty we had never doubted. And then he was suddenly blotted out of our existence. The wrong he had done was hushed up, he disappeared somewhere in the West, and it seemed that we were never to hear of him again. The years went by, Jasper's mother and then our Uncle Felix went from us. He had given me the lands on the west side of the river, since I was already owner of the cottage, the Windy Hill, and the bees that he had taught me to tend and love. To Jasper he had given the yellow stone house that had been like home for us all and his intimate possessions, the treasures it contained. He had given him also the drained farm lands by the river, a legacy that was an occupation in itself. He had seen that Jasper's bent was not really for the law, but that his best calling was the care of such an estate as this. More years passed, I became more and more absorbed in my own work down in the seaport town that has become a city, spending my holidays and my vacations in caring for the bees, not seeing Jasper so often, for he was over-busy also. And then Anthony came home.

"Whatever he had been doing in all this time we have no way of knowing. He had altered greatly, so that there seemed nothing left of his old self except his cleverness, some lingering affection for the place where he had been happy as a boy, and that old habit of coveting what other people had. He came back with a claim to make, one that went back as far as the day when Reuben and Martin Hallowell quarreled and made a hasty division of what had belonged to them in common. There had always been a slight doubt as to the title of the land upon which the yellow stone farmhouse stood, and to the upper end of the farms by the river. Anthony knew of it from the days when we studied law together and he came back determined to make that property his. I will not deny that he had some slight basis for his claim. He would accept no compromise or offer of purchase, so in the end Jasper gave in to him."

Cousin Jasper had not spoken throughout Tom Brighton's recounting of the whole affair. But now he took up the tale himself, going over the ground that, very evidently, he had pondered and argued and weighed within himself a hundred times.

"I had much and he had nothing, he was in real want and had a wife and two children besides. There was, as Tom says, some real basis for his claim since the title had never been made quite clear. And there is, further, no more bitter thing than a family quarrel, a division over the settlement of property, this one asking for what is more than his, that one fighting to hold what is not his own—no, it was unthinkable. So we settled the matter peaceably enough. I built a new house above him on the hill and he settled down in the place that had been home to all of us. He seemed to have repented of the wrong he had done and we were ready to forget it. I do not think that I ever doubted the honesty of his purpose, at first. Then it came to my wishing for some of the old possessions for my new house and he vowed that every one of them was his."

"I know," said Janet, nodding quickly. "He wouldn't give up the pictures, though he did not care for them himself. They were stored in the dust and dirt under the eaves and he asked me if you had sent me to see where he kept them. He only wanted them because they were yours."

"I suppose he meant to sell them some day," Cousin Jasper answered, "for there were several that were of almost as much value as the house itself. But less than ever was I willing to bicker and haggle over what I had really loved, and since he would not sell them to me I gave the matter up. Even then, there was a little justice on his side, for the pictures had been purchased with money from the lands that he called his. But it was my great mistake, since he did not understand at all why I yielded to him, and from that time he made certain that he had but to force me and I would relinquish everything."