He started up, wrote, paid, and smiled as he shut his empty purse. His mother sighed in amiable pensiveness, saying, "This is a mystery to me, my son."
"No more than it is to me," dryly responded John, angered by this new sting from his old knowledge of her ways. It was her policy always to mystify those who had the best right to understand her. "I shall try to solve it," he added.
"I should rather not have you speak of it at once," she replied, almost hurriedly. "You'll know why in a few days." Her blush came again. This time John saw it and marvelled anew. He tossed himself back on his bed, fevered with irritation.
"Mother"—he fiercely shifted his pillows and looked at the ceiling—"the chief mystery to me is that you seem to care so little for the loss of our lands!"
"I thought you told me that Major Garnet considered those sixty acres as almost worthless."
"I believe he does."
Her voice became faint. "I would gladly explain, son, if you were only well enough to hear me—patiently."
He lay rigidly still, with every nerve aching. His hands, locked under his head, grew tight as he heard her rise and draw near. He shut his eyes hard as she laid on his wrinkling forehead a cold kiss moistened with a tear, and melted from the room.
"Mother!" he called, appeasingly, as the door was closing; but it clicked to; she floated down the stairs. He turned his face into the pillow and clenched his hands. By and by he turned again and exclaimed, as from some long train of thought, "'Better off without Widewood than with it,' am I? On my soul! I begin to believe it. But if you can see that so clearly, O! my poor little unsuspicious mother, why can't you even now understand that they were thieves and robbed us? Who—who—what—can have so blinded you?"
He left the bed and moved to his most frequent seat, the north window. Thence, in the western half of the view, he could see the three counties' "mother of learning and useful arts," fair, large-grown Rosemont, glistening on her green hills in each day's setting sun, a lovely frontispiece to the ever-pleasant story of her master's redundant prosperity. Her June fledglings were but just gone and she was in the earliest days of her summer rest. "Enlarged and superbly equipped and embellished," the newspapers said of her in laudatory headlines, and it was true that "no expense had been spared." Not any other institution in Dixie spread such royal feasts of reason and information for her children, at lavish cost to herself, low price to them, and queenly remuneration to the numerous members of the State Legislature who came to discourse on Agriculture, Mining, Banking, Trade, Journalism, Jurisprudence, Taxation, and Government.