“I’ve lost my boy,” she said, sadly, as she watched the boat which was taking Paul away, and on the upper deck of which he stood waving his umbrella towards her.
She didn’t wave back, but raised her hands in a kind of benediction and looked after him with an indefinable yearning until he was hidden from view. Her bones were in full swing this morning, and as she resumed her work she soliloquized, “I don’t know what ails me, but I feel that something bad will come of this marriage. How can it be otherwise? I know it is mean, and may be wicked, but I can’t abide the Percys.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE PERCYS.
They were a very old Virginian family whose line of ancestry stretched backward quite as far as that of Miss Hansford, and touched the days of Cromwell, when white people were sent to Virginia and sold as slaves for a longer or shorter period of years. Among them came Samuel Percy, a Royalist, transported for some offense against the government and condemned to servitude for five years. Just what he did during the five years was not certainly known. Some said he was a blacksmith, some a tailor, and others a common field laborer, or at best an overseer of the negroes. That he was a bondman was sure and he worked out his time and then, unbroken in spirit, resolved to make for himself a name and a fortune and a family. With the latter he succeeded admirably, for the descendants of his five sons were scattered all over the South, each generation forgetting more and more that the root of the family tree in America had been a slave, and growing more and more proud of its English ancestry.
When the civil war broke out old Roger Percy owned a few negroes, a worn-out plantation and a big, rambling house in Virginia, just across the border of Maryland. Proud, morose and contrary, he seldom agreed with the people with whom he came in contact. His opinion was always the better one. With the Confederates he was a Federal,—with the Federals a Confederate, hurling anathemas at the heads of each and ordering them from his premises. As he was near the frontier he was visited at intervals by detachments from both armies, who, as he said, squeezed him dry, and at the close of the war he found himself alone, with his wife dead, his negroes gone, his house a ruin, or nearly so, and his land good for nothing. Too proud and indolent to work, he might have starved but for his only son, James, who, scoffing at a pride which would neither feed nor clothe him, found a position in the Treasury Department in Washington and offered his father a home. Grumblingly the old man accepted it, cursing the government and his small quarters and his dinners and black Sally, who waited upon him, and who, of all his negroes, had come back to him when peace was restored. Sometimes he cursed his son for being willing to take a subordinate position and work like a dog under somebody. This was what galled the worst,—working under somebody, and doing it willingly.
“I believe you have some of your great-great-grandfather’s blood in you,” he would say. “He hadn’t pluck enough to cut his master’s throat and run away. By the lord, I’d have done it.”
“I’m proud of old Sam Percy’s grit,” James would reply, “and if I knew just where he was buried I’d raise him a monument. I’m not ashamed to work, or to have some one over me.”
“I’m ashamed for you, and you a Percy,” his father would growl, forgetting that without the work he so despised he would be homeless and almost a beggar.
The climax came when James brought home a wife,—a clerk like himself in the Treasury Department. This was the straw too many and the bridal was soon followed by a funeral, the old man saying he was glad to go where the Percys could not be disgraced. Had he lived a few months longer he would have seen his son’s wife an heiress in a small way. A maiden aunt, for whom she was named and who all her life had hoarded her money earned in the cotton mills of Lowell, died and left her niece ten thousand dollars. This was a fortune to the young couple, who left their cramped quarters for a larger house, where, with the father-in-law gone and a sturdy baby boy in the cradle, they were perfectly happy for a time. Then, with scarcely an hour’s warning, the wife was taken away, stricken with cholera, and James was alone with Sally and his boy, the notorious John, or Jack, the terror of Oak City and of every neighborhood he frequented.
Jack was bright and handsome, but proud and rebellious, and learned very soon that the woman his father married within two years of his wife’s death was not his own mother. She was pretty and indolent and easy-going, and could no more cope with her step-son’s will than she could stem Niagara. She disliked him and he disliked her for no reason except that she was his stepmother, and when Clarice was born the breach widened between them, although the boy showed affection for his little sister.