“Father!” called Charlie after him, “does this mean that I must leave my home?”
The old man swung around and faced him almost savagely.
“Your home!” he cried, “your home! Since when have you possessed it? Didn’t I get it from my father as a reward of faithfulness? Hasn’t my work an’ my money made it the best place in Meredith County? Didn’t I bring you up in it? Didn’t my money feed and clothe you? Didn’t my money educate you an’ spoil you in the best school in this end o’ the state? Didn’t I cater to your whims an’ follies an’ laziness for years at my own expense? An’ when you saw fit to get married, and hadn’t a cent o’ your own to support a wife on, an’ wasn’t likely to get it by your own exertions, didn’t I keep you both under my own roof an’ save you from starvation? An’ what have you ever done to pay for it? An’ now you call it your home; an’ next you’ll be orderin’ me to vacate. I want you to understand that this home, an’ this house, an’ this farm, an’ everything there is here is mine. Do you hear? It’s mine, mine, mine!”
When Abner Pickett was angry, the blood mounted slowly to his neck, then to his chin and face, and finally suffused his forehead with its glow. He was angry now; more angry than Charlie had ever seen him before save once; and that was when a man from Port Lenox offered him a hundred dollars for a corner of his graveyard on which to erect a cider mill.
And Charlie was angry in his turn. Up to this moment he had been impatient and impulsive; now, stung by unjust reproaches, the hot blood of passion went surging through his veins.
“You say what is not true!” he cried. “Since I was eighteen I have earned enough and more than enough to support myself and those dependent on me. And in all that time I have received from you only discouragement and ridicule, and abuse and cruelty. I could stand it. I had learned through years of suffering to stand it. But when, in the presence of my wife, you kept it up, she could not fathom you; it made her heartsick and homesick and sorrowful, and in the end it killed her! I say she could have conquered disease, but her sympathy for me and her fear of you, that killed her! Now I, too, have said my last word. To-morrow I shall go. When you can treat me justly I will come again, and not till then.”
He turned on his heel, strode down the road, past the graveyard, lifting his hat reverently as he went by, and then was lost in the deepening shadows of the glen.
Abner Pickett started homeward in a daze. His son’s terrible charge against him came upon him like a stroke of lightning, and left him blinded and bewildered.
“I killed her?” he murmured to himself. “I killed her? I that loved her so; that would ’a’ cut off my right hand for her any day? What does he mean? What Satan’s falsehood is it he has given me?”