Gilma had never found Aunt Halifax’s company so intensely disagreeable as at that moment. He thanked her for the coffee, and went away so suddenly as to startle her. But her good humor never flagged. She called out to him from the doorway:
“Oh, Mista Gilma! You reckon dey knows who Pol’cy b’longs to now?”
He somehow did not feel quite prepared to face Septime; and he lingered along the road. He even stopped a while to rest, apparently, under the shade of a huge cottonwood tree that overhung the bayou. From the very first, a subtle uneasiness, a self-dissatisfaction had mingled with his elation, and he was trying to discover what it meant.
To begin with, the straightforwardness of his own nature had inwardly resented the sudden change in the bearing of most people toward himself. He was trying to recall, too, something which the lawyer had said; a little phrase, out of that multitude of words, that had fallen in his consciousness. It had stayed there, generating a little festering sore place that was beginning to make itself irritatingly felt. What was it, that little phrase? Something about—in his excitement he had only half heard it—something about dead men’s shoes.
The exuberant health and strength of his big body; the courage, virility, endurance of his whole nature revolted against the expression in itself, and the meaning which it conveyed to him. Dead men’s shoes! Were they not for such afflicted beings as Septime? as that helpless, dependent woman up there? as those two little ones, with their poorly fed, poorly clad bodies and sweet, appealing eyes? Yet he could not determine how he would act and what he would say to them.
But there was no room left in his heart for hesitancy when he came to face the group. Septime was still crouched in his uncle’s chair; he seemed never to have left it since the day of the funeral. Ma’me Brozé had been crying, and so had the children—out of sympathy, perhaps.
“Mr. Septime,” said Gilma, approaching, “I brought those aff’davits about the hoss. I hope you about made up yo’ mind to turn it over without further trouble.”
Septime was trembling, bewildered, almost speechless.
“Wat you mean?” he faltered, looking up with a shifting, sideward glance. “The whole place b’longs to you. You tryin’ to make a fool out o’ me?”
“Fo’ me,” returned Gilma, “the place can stay with Mr. Gamiche’s own flesh an’ blood. I’ll see Mr. Pax’on again an’ make that according to the law. But I want my hoss.”