“Like a millstone, I will. Like a mountain.”
“Mountain is no matter. I’ll get you. You’ll be glad to be got.... I’ll show you what a man can do. When I set-to I’m a real lover.”
She wanted his face between her hands at that moment, but she would not trust her tenderness. She remembered her grandfather’s withered body, his shrunken maleness, and she was broken by pity. She made her pity resemble scorn as she turned apart and laid the fiddlestick carefully in the case beside the fiddle. The evening was over.
“When I come I’ll be a real lover. The kind you’ll want. I know you.”
“Slam the door after you when you go, so it’ll lock. Please do. Just slam it hard.”
“Two months I gave you. Time flies. It’s half gone already. Goen fast.”
“Just slam it hard. Save me a trip out to the door.”
She had brought other papers from the cupboard in the back room, and she sat busy with these all of a day and half a night. She was weary now of the stale odors of decayed paper and dust, weary of the truth which was now established. Her father was father also to three mulattoes. Letters from her mother’s relatives touched the matter as if it were beyond dispute, reiterated it as if it were a knowledge well premised and antedating the discussions of funds and settlements. She laid all the letters relating to this subject in a pile together and studied them in order. They were letters from her mother’s father, now dead.
Her hands on the fiddle were weak and apathetic, startled into numbness. She put the instrument aside, shut it tenderly away into its case and sat staring at the flames or she moved suddenly to some new posture. She felt as if she were alone with her grandfather in this; Conway had been shut away as tenderly as had been the fiddle; Albert was avoided as pertaining somehow too nearly to the facts. She read the letters again, eating their words, leaping ahead to the telling phrases. “This is the last of your share from your mother’s estate. Make it go as far as it will. You knew when you married Horace Bell that he was the father of two blacks.... I will come whenever I can, or your brother will manage to go by Anneville on his way back from the meet.... You better turn your attention to something else. Take up church work.... Dropped his litter in the alley behind the jail. The half-wit, Dolly Brown, for God’s sake! Old Josie’s girl was a handsome wench, but slobbering Dolly Brown.... A strange taste in wenches.”