“That is it, exactly,” said the dejected one. “And I’d much rather be shot full of holes.”
Carfax took another dose of his own prescription of silence. Then he said: “What is going to come of it?—after you have made her understand?”
“The only thing that can come of it. While I have insisted, and still insist, that there has never been any sentiment wasted between us, the fact remains that Elizabeth is a woman, and she isn’t going to sit down meekly and say, ‘All right, Vance, dear; never mind,’ when I make her understand that I have been trying my hardest to make love to another woman. She has plenty of spirit; she can fairly set you afire with those brown eyes of hers when the occasion demands it.”
“Well?” said Carfax.
“It will be all over but the shouting, then. She will doubtless tell me what she thinks of me and break the engagement, there and then—or try to. But that is the one thing I can’t let her do, Poictiers. She needs the Uncle Byrd legacy, and I mustn’t let her lose it.”
Carfax got up and reached for the matches and his bed-room candle. “No,” he said slowly; “you mustn’t let her lose the legacy. To a man up a tree it would seem that the money is about all she is going to salvage out of the wreck.” With which unkind daggering of the sinner whose sin had found him out, he went to bed.
XXIII
At Westwood House
THE autumn Sunday afternoon figured as the flawless half of a day of perfection, with the sky a vivid blue and the hardwood forest of the mountain top, lately touched by the first sharp frosts, a riot of gorgeous coloring. On the broad veranda of the ancient manor-house of Westwood the conversation, which had been desultory at best, languished in sympathy with the reposeful spell of time and place and the peaceful surroundings.
With a gently worded phrase of apology to his daughter’s guest, the judge had pleaded an old man’s privilege, dragging his chair to the farther end of the veranda and lighting his corn-cob pipe in courteous isolation. Tregarvon marked the bit of old-fashioned chivalric deference to Elizabeth, and wondered how many men of his own generation would be as thoughtfully considerate of the small amenities.
The thought was one of a series emphasizing the gross incredibility of the theory involving Richardia’s father in the conspiracy against the Ocoee. That the white-haired, ruddy-faced Chesterfield of Westwood House might challenge an antagonist, give him the choice of weapons, and afterward kill him unflinchingly, was easily conceivable. But that he would descend to the methods of the dynamiter or the midnight assassin was momently growing more and more unbelievable.