“I don’t know, Amos—I hope not.”
Morey had returned home that morning after a winter in school at Richmond and a visit to his uncle in New York State. To him the old house appeared much the same, and his mother was in no wise changed. With her he had as yet had no talk over the affairs of the plantation and, after his morning coffee, he had hurried with Amos to the village two miles away on an errand. The hints that Amos had dropped unconsciously startled him, but the sky was blue, the air was soft, there was the smell of mint in the neglected grass and he was but eighteen years old.
“Meet me where the barn used to be,” he exclaimed suddenly and, turning ran toward the house.
[CHAPTER II]
BREAKFAST ON THE GALLERY.
Aspley Place, once the center of a large estate and the scene of much hospitality in Colonel Aspley Marshall’s lifetime, was now surrounded by a farm of less than two hundred acres. Mortimer, or “Morey” as he was always called, and his mother, had been left dependent upon the estate at Colonel Marshall’s death three years before. At first it was not known that Colonel Marshall was financially involved. But his debts almost consumed his supposed enormous and valuable tobacco plantation. Out of the settlement Major Carey, his executor, saved for the widow and her son the home. But it and the little farm immediately about the house was mortgaged to Major Carey himself, who from year to year renewed the notes for borrowed money.
On these few worn and almost exhausted acres a faithful retainer, an old negro, Marshall or “Marsh” Green, who had been Colonel Marshall’s servant from babyhood, made desperate efforts to provide a living for his mistress. He and his boy Amos Green lived in the sole remaining cabin of the old quarters, where, in the time of Colonel Marshall’s father and in the days when Amos Green’s grandfather was a boy, there had been a street of log huts beneath big oaks, and a hundred slaves might be counted. Marsh Green and his boy now lived in a cabin patched with store boxes, beneath a roof mended with flattened lard tins.
It was now many a day since the Marshalls had killed their own hogs, and as for the old oaks, Colonel Aspley himself had sold them. In truth, Morey’s father was neither a successful farmer nor a frugal business man. He believed in the past, was a kind parent and husband, had his mint juleps regularly, lived up to his patrimony and left for Morey nothing more than the recollection of a chivalrous and proud father, a mortgaged plantation, old Marsh Green and fat Betty, his hunter.
But these things Morey neither knew nor understood. Mrs. Marshall had a vague belief that what she called her “private fortune” would amply care for her and for Morey’s education. She neither knew the amount of this nor her real income. In fact, this fortune, left to her by an uncle, was a meagre five thousand dollars, and the $250 it produced annually, which Captain Barber’s bank at Lee’s Court House collected and held for her, was always overdrawn.