She was feeling the comfort of his cheerfulness when he left her to go to bed, although she was sore in conscience and spirit, sore in mind and heart.
“The Lord never gave any woman a son like him,” said she as the sound of Joe’s steps fell quiet overhead, “and I’ve sold him into slavery and bondage, just to save my own unworthy, coward’y, sneakin’ self!”
CHAPTER II
A DRY-SALT MAN
Joe was afoot early. His mother came to the place in the fence where the gate once stood to give him a last word of comfort, and to bewail again her selfishness in sending him away to serve as bondboy under the hard hand of Isom Chase. Joe cheered her with hopeful pictures of the future, when the old home should be redeemed and the long-dwelling shadow of their debt to Isom cleared away and paid. From the rise in the road which gave him the last sight of the house Joe looked back and saw her with her head bowed to the topmost rail of the fence, a figure of dejection and woe in the security which she had purchased for herself at such a heavy price.
Although Joe moved briskly along his way, his feet as light as if they carried him to some destination of certain felicity, there was a cloud upon his heart. This arrangement which his mother had made in an hour of panic had disordered his plans and troubled the bright waters of his dreams. Plans and dreams were all his riches. They were the sole patrimony of value handed down from Peter Newbolt, the Kentucky gentleman, who had married below his state and carried his young mountain wife away to the Missouri woods to escape the censure of family and criticism of friends.
That was the only legacy, indeed, that Joe was conscious of, but everybody else was aware that old Peter had left him something even more dangerous than dreams. That was nothing less than a bridling, high-minded, hot-blooded pride–a thing laughable, the neighbors said, in one so bitterly and hopelessly poor. 22
“The pore folks,” the neighbors called the Newbolts in speaking of them one to another, for in that community of fairly prosperous people there was none so poor as they. The neighbors had magnified their misfortune into a reproach, and the “pore folks” was a term in which they found much to compensate their small souls for the slights which old Peter, in his conscious superiority, unwittingly put upon them.
To the end of his days Peter never had been wise enough to forget that nature had endowed him, in many ways, above the level of the world to which Fate had chained his feet, and his neighbors never had been kind enough to forget that he was poor.
Even after Peter was dead Joe suffered for the family pride. He was still spoken of, far and near in that community, as the “pore folks’s boy.” Those who could not rise to his lofty level despised him because he respected the gerund, and also said were where they said was, and there are, where usage made it they is. It was old Peter’s big-headedness and pride, they said. What business had the pore folks’s boy with the speech of a school-teacher or minister in his mouth? His “coming” and his “going,” indeed! Huh, it made ’em sick.