"Why did he shoot a policeman? He knew he'd hang for it," returned Cyrus sharply, and he added, "Of course I can't get him away. He'll have to take his deserts. Your race has got to learn that when you break the law, you must pay for it."
At first he had made as if to push by her, but when she did not move, he thought better of it and waited for her to speak. The sound of her heavy breathing, like the breathing of some crouching beast, awoke in him a curious repulsion. If only one could get rid of such creatures after their first youth was over! If only every careless act could perish with the impulse that led to it! If only the dried husks of pleasure did not turn to weapons against one! These thoughts—or disjointed snatches of thoughts like these—passed in a confused whirl through his brain as he stood there. For an instant it was almost as if his accustomed lucidity of purpose had deserted him; then the disturbance ceased, and with the renewal of order in his mind, his life-long habit of prompt decision returned to him.
"Your race has got to learn that when you break the law you must pay for it," he repeated—for on that sound principle of justice he felt that he must unalterably take his stand.
"He's all de boy I'se got, Marster," rejoined the negress, with an indifference to the matter of justice which had led others of her colour into those subterranean ways where abstract principles are not. "You ain' done furgot 'im, Marster," she added piteously. "He 'uz born jes two mont's atter Miss Lindy turnt me outer hyer—en he's jes ez w'ite ez ef'n he b'longed ter w'ite folks."
But she had gone too far—she had outraged that curious Anglo-Saxon instinct in Cyrus which permitted him to sin against his race's integrity, yet forbade him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he bore any part in the consequences of that sin. Illogical, he might have admitted, but there are some truths so poisonous that no honest man could breathe the same air with them.
Taking out his pocket-book, he slowly drew a fifty dollar bill from its innermost recesses, and as slowly unfolded it. He always handled money in that careful fashion—a habit which he had inherited from his father and his grandfather before him, and of which he was entirely unconscious. Filtering down through so many generations, the mannerism had ceased at last to be merely a physical peculiarity, and had become strangely spiritual in its suggestion. The craving for possession, the singleness of desire, the tenacity of grasp, the dread of relinquishment, the cold-blooded determination to keep intact the thing which it had cost so much to acquire—all that was bound up in the spirit of Cyrus Treadwell, and all that would pass at last with that spirit from off the earth, was expressed in the gesture with which he held out the bit of paper to the woman who had asked for his help. "Take this—it is all I can do for you," he said, "and don't come whining around me any more. Black or white, the man that commits a murder has got to hang for it."
A sound broke from the negress that resembled a human cry of grief less than it did the inarticulate moan of an animal in mortal pain. Then it stopped suddenly, strangled by that dull weight of usage beneath which the primal impulse in her was crushed back into silence. Instinctively, as if in obedience to some reflex action, she reached out and took the money from his hand, and still instinctively, with the dazed look of one who performs in delirium the customary movements of every day, she fell back, holding her apron deprecatingly aside while he brushed past her. And in her eyes as she gazed after him there dawned the simple wonder of the brute that asks of Life why it suffers.
Beyond the alley into which the gate opened, Cyrus caught sight of Gabriel's erect figure hurrying down the side street in the direction of the Old Ladies' Home, and calling out to him, he scrambled over the ash heaps and tomato cans, and emerged, irritated but smiling, into the sunlight.
"I'm on my way to the bank. We'll walk down together," he remarked almost gently, for, though he disapproved of Gabriel's religious opinions and distrusted his financial judgment, the war-like little rector represented the single romance of his life.
"I had intended stopping at the Old Ladies' Home, but I'll go on with you instead," responded Gabriel. "I've just had a message from one of our old servants calling me down to Cross's Corner," he pursued, "so I'm in a bit of a hurry. That's a bad thing, that murder down there yesterday, and I'm afraid it will mean trouble for the negroes. Mr. Blylie, who came to market this morning, told me a crowd had tried to lynch the fellow last night."