There was scarcely a negro on the plantation who did not know what had happened when Ross Carr staggered out of the house and passed his chafing horse and the groom as if he had forgotten his own property.
Baseless mountains which had been piling lucent peak over peak, now seemed to sink in smoke to the effacement of the sun. Stretches of forest and road, plantation and dimpled hill, from horizon to horizon, ceased smiling; for the day’s heat was about to pass off in drenching rain.
This cloudy interval before the thunder-burst was just the time for stealing corn to roast at the quarters in the evening. So Peachy crept on all fours down narrow avenues to avoid agitating the corntops, such telltales are the tassel fingers. His sack already bulged; but unexpectedly he came against a man stretched out in the dirt face downward—Miss Ma’ky’s Mist’ Ross Carr!
Peachy backed away from the spectacle, the grinding of teeth and the swelling of veins on a man’s neck! Not until many cornstalks screened him had Peachy the courage to burst recklessly down a slim alley, spilling his stolen ears, while corn leaves slashed his face with their edged sabres. The superstitious African instinctively fled from anguish so dumb and dreadful.
While the county was shocked by America Poynton’s adoption of Ross Carr’s child, her beauty as a bride softened all critics. She went to live with her husband on her plantation, and there the baby grew into robust and happy boyhood. Reticence on the subject of Becky Inchbald was diffused through her small world. At that date a small world held all the acts of many lives.
Even Miss Sally Vandewater, swelling her visiting list with another hospitable home, grew into complete harmony with the judge’s wife on this delicate subject.
Becky Inchbald went on a long visit to Tennessee. News came back that she had married there; and in the course of years that she had died.
So far as human knowledge goes, Ross Carr’s wife took no shrewish revenge, though a woman of her nature must have suffered from the blot. She always spoke of his son as “our eldest boy,” and he grew up among brothers and sisters without noting that he was part alien, until some neighbor dropped the fact in his ear. Personally he was much like his father, whose sin matured its bitterest fruit when that child threw himself on the ground to sob in secret agony because the beautiful and tender woman he loved with such devotion was really not his mother.