John eyed him curiously. His preconceived notions of hostility were undergoing an extraordinary change, a change at once rapid, and, to him, amazing, incomprehensible. I fancy he tried to rein them back, to bring them to a standstill, while he took a calmer survey of the situation, but, for all his endeavours, he found they had suddenly got beyond his control.
“I wonder,” hazarded he, “if you’d mind my asking you something. What gave you the first clue—the idea of starting out on this quest of yours?”
“The clue?” David laughed. “It’s a bit of a yarn, I can tell you. You want it? Sure?”
John nodded.
“Well,” quoth David, “you can call it luck, chance if you like. We’ve always known we hailed as a family originally from England. That knowledge has been handed down to us as a bit of tradition. I was born in Philadelphia, and riz there, as they say in the States, till I was going ten. Then my father made for Africa. There’s no need to enter into the details of that move; they’re beside the mark. He took a small farm in the Hex River Valley. He had a few old things that belonged to his father and grandfather before him. They were stored away in a chest. I used to look inside it when I was a youngster, and see coats, and waistcoats, and neck stocks, and a fusty old book or two lying in it. I never smell camphor without thinking of that chest.
“As I grew older, I left it alone, didn’t think about it. I guess my father hadn’t bothered about it much more than I did. He died when I was fifteen, and my mother ran the farm. She was a capable woman. I helped her all I could, and there were men to do the work. But she was boss till I was one and twenty. Then she turned it over to me to run,—root, stock, and barrel. She was cute, though, the way she’d talk things over with me, telling me all the time what was best to do, and making me think that I had figured out the plans. Later on she left it really to me, not just in the name of it. That was when I’d got the right hang of things.
“Then she dropped suddenly out of all the man way of thinking, and just sat knitting and smiling in the chimney corner, or letting me drive her around in the buggy, with never a talk of business unless I began the subject. It’s seven years ago that she died.” He stopped.
John was silent.
“I missed her,” went on David presently, “I missed her badly. The place wasn’t the same. I went roving around trying to think she wasn’t gone—but I’ll get maudlin if I go on with that. It wasn’t the bit I set out to tell you, anyway. One afternoon I was in the lumber room feeling lonesomer than ever. I don’t know what took me there if it wasn’t just fate. Then I looked at that chest again. I opened it, and the smell of camphor rushed out at me, making me think more than ever of my mother. She was mad after camphor, putting it among everything to keep away the moth.
“To get away from my thoughts I began pulling out the things in the box, stuffy books, coats, waistcoats, and all. There was one coat, a snuff-coloured one, that might have been worn in the time of the Georges, I calculated. I sat looking at it, and wondering which of my grandparents had worn it, and what kind of a man he was, and all the things a fellow does think when he’s got his grandsire’s stuff before him. After a bit I began going through the pockets. I found a tiny horn snuff-box in one, and that set me off searching closer. I’d come to the last pocket, when I found what gave me that clue you were asking about. I found a letter.”