Mrs. Worthington was much more easily won over to Hugh’s opinion than ’Lina, who, when told of the arrangement, raised a perfect hurricane of expostulations and tears. They’d be a county talk, she said; nobody would come near them, and she might as well enter a nunnery at once; besides, hadn’t Hugh enough on his hands already without taking more?
“If my considerate sister really thinks so, hadn’t she better try and help herself a little?” retorted Hugh in a blaze of anger. “I’ve only paid two hundred and fifty dollars for her since she came here, to say nothing of that bill at Harney’s due in January.”
’Lina began to cry, and Hugh, repenting of his harsh speech as soon as it was uttered, but far too proud to take it back, strode up and down the room, chafing like a young lion.
“Come, children, it’s after midnight, let us adjourn until to-morrow,” Mrs. Worthington said, by way of ending the painful interview, at the same time handing a candle to Hugh, who took it silently and withdrew, banging the door behind him with a force which made ’Lina start and burst into a fresh flood of tears.
“I’m a brute, a savage,” was Hugh’s not very self complimentary soliloquy, as he went up the stairs. “What did I want to twit Ad for? What good did it do, only to make her mad and bother mother? I wish I could do better, but I can’t. Confound my badness!” and having by this time reached his own door, Hugh entered his room, and drawing a chair to the fire always kindled for him at night, sat down to think.
CHAPTER III.
HUGH’S SOLILOQUY.
“One, two, three, yes, as good as four women and a child,” he began, “to say nothing of the negroes, who all must eat and drink. A goodly number for one whose income is hardly as much as some young men spend every year upon themselves; and the hardest of all is the having people call me stingy and mean, the seeing young girls lift their eyebrows and wink when young Hunks, as Ad says they call me, appears, and the knowing that this opinion of me is encouraged and kept alive by the remarks and insinuations of my own sister, for whom I’ve denied myself more than one new coat that she might have the dress she coveted,” and in the red gleam of the firelight the bearded chin quivered for a moment as Hugh thought how unjust ’Lina was to him, and how hard was the lot imposed upon him.
Soon recovering his composure he continued, “There’s that bill at Harney’s, how in the world I’m to pay it when it comes due is more than I know. These duds,” and he glanced ruefully at his coarse clothes, “will look a heap worse than they do now,” and shifting the position of his feet, which had hitherto rested upon the hearth, to a more comfortable and suggestive one upon the mantel, Hugh tried to find a spot in which he could economize.
“I needn’t have a fire in my room nights,” he said, as a coal fell into the pan and thus reminded him of its existence, “and I won’t, either. It’s nonsense for a great hot-blooded clown like me to be babied with a fire. I’ve no tags to braid, no false switches to comb out and hide, only a few buttons to undo, a shake or so, and I’m all right. So there’s one thing, the fire—quite an item, too, at the rate coal is selling. Then there’s coffee. I can do without that, I suppose, though it will be perfect torment to smell it, and Hannah makes such splendid coffee, too; but will is everything. Fire, coffee—I’m getting on famously. What else?”
“Tobacco,” something whispered, but Hugh answered promptly, “No, sir, I shan’t! I’ll sell my shirts, before I’ll give up my best friend. It’s all the comfort I have when I get a fit of the blues. Oh, you needn’t try to come it!” and Hugh shook his head defiantly at his unseen interlocutor, urging that ’twas a filthy practice at best, and productive of no good. “You needn’t try for I won’t,” and Hugh deliberately lighted a cigar and resumed his soliloquy, while he complacently watched the little blue rings curling so gracefully above his head. “Blamed if I can think of any thing else, but maybe I shall. I might sell something, I suppose. There’s Harney wants to buy Bet, but Ad never rides any other horse, and she does ride uncommonly well, if she is Ad. There’s the negroes, more than I need,” but from this suggestion Hugh turned away quite as decidedly as from the one touching his tobacco. “He didn’t believe much in negroes any way, surely not in selling them; besides that, nobody’d want them after they’d been spoiled as he had spoiled them,” and he laughed aloud as he fancied a new master trying to break in old Chloe, who had ruled at Spring Bank so long that she almost fancied she owned it. No, Hugh wouldn’t sell his servants, and the negroes sleeping so soundly in their cabins had nothing to fear from him.