Jan Snip had been rendered speechless. Until the actual arrival of the team and wagon at six he counted them as mysteriously lost and DeJong’s widow clearly gone mad. August Hempel’s arrival next day with Julie seated beside him in the light spider-phaeton drawn by two slim wild-eyed quivering grays made little tumult in Jan’s stunned mind by now incapable of absorbing any fresh surprises.
In the twelve years’ transition from butcher to packer Aug Hempel had taken on a certain authority and distinction. Now, at fifty-five, his hair was gray, relieving the too-ruddy colour of his face. He talked almost without an accent; used the idiomatic American speech he heard about the yards, where the Hempel packing plant was situated. Only his d’s were likely to sound like t’s. The letter j had a slightly ch sound. In the last few years he had grown very deaf in one ear, so that when you spoke to him he looked at you intently. This had given him a reputation for keenness and great character insight, when it was merely the protective trick of a man who does not want to confess that he is hard of hearing. He wore square-toed shoes with soft tips and square-cut gray clothes and a large gray hat with a chronically inadequate sweat-band. The square-cut boots were expensive, and the square-cut gray clothes and the large gray hat, but in them he always gave the effect of being dressed in the discarded garments of a much larger man.
Selina’s domain he surveyed with a keen and comprehensive eye.
“You want to sell?”
“No.”
“That’s good.” (It was nearly goot as he said it.) “Few years from now this land will be worth money.” He had spent a bare fifteen minutes taking shrewd valuation of the property from fields to barn, from barn to house. “Well, what do you want to do, heh, Selina?”
They were seated in the cool and unexpectedly pleasing little parlour, with its old Dutch lustre set gleaming softly in the cabinet, its three rows of books, its air of comfort and usage.
Dirk was in the yard with one of the Van Ruys boys, surveying the grays proprietorially. Jan was rooting in the fields. Selina clasped her hands tightly in her lap—those hands that, from much grubbing in the soil, had taken on something of the look of the gnarled things they tended. The nails were short, discoloured, broken. The palms rough, calloused. The whole story of the last twelve years of Selina’s life was written in her two hands.
“I want to stay here, and work the farm, and make it pay. I can. By next spring my asparagus is going to begin to bring in money. I’m not going to grow just the common garden stuff any more—not much, anyway. I’m going to specialize in the fine things—the kind the South Water Street commission men want. I want to drain the low land. Tile it. That land hasn’t been used for years. It ought to be rich growing land by now, if once it’s properly drained. And I want Dirk to go to school. Good schools. I never want my son to go to the Haymarket. Never. Never.”
Julie stirred with a little rustle and click of silk and beads. Her gentle amiability was vaguely alarmed by the iron quality of determination in the other’s tone.