"Hit air p'int blank no use er wushin' thet, Milly," he slowly and firmly declared, "fur he air dead sot onto 'em an' he air a goin' wi' 'em. In fac', he air them sort er folks his own self, he air, Milly."
The girl's eyes slowly brimmed with big tears, and without further words she crept off to bed. White sat and smoked in a gloomy way for a long while, his face showing more than usually gaunt and wrinkled in the dim light of the flickering pine knots on the hearth. He shook his head from time to time, as if dissatisfied with such results as his thoughts produced. Once he spoke out rather fiercely.
"Hit air a dern shame!" he exclaimed, in a voice so fierce and bitter that it awoke his wife. And yet he was too simple-minded to dream of the worst. With the queer pride of the mountaineer, he was viewing the predicament simply from a social standpoint.
CHAPTER XI.
DALLYING.
The quail-shoot, after the enthusiastic contest of the first day, abated to a sort of desultory skirmish, each sportsman going into the field as best suited his mood. The weather bred a languor, peculiarly Southern and dreamy, which was aided by the quietude and isolation of the place. The bustle and activity with which the sport had begun became irregularly intermittent. Day after day the sky was serene and cloudless, tinted with that cool, bird-egg blue, tender, delicate, transparent, against which the lines of wood came out with a peculiar semi-tropical effect. Nearly all the time there was a breeze, not the rollicking Northern wind that whisks things about, but a fitful breath that palpitated lazily in the tops of the dull old trees and stirred the vines and plants and dry, thin grass in a fashion wholly indefinite and aimless. It was a luxury to idle around in the shadowy nooks and corners of DeKay Place, where the spirit of old times hovered like a vague, fascinating perfume. Life lost its rough angles here, its outlines softening down to harmonize with the monotonous equipoise of its surroundings. The river had the charm of all low-country streams, a warm, slow, lagging motion, a look of lapsing away into some strange, silent, unexplored region; its murmur was a lingering, never quite ended good-by.
To Reynolds those were days of deep and sweet excitement into which now and then darted a pang like a stab in the heart. He was with Agnes Ransom a great deal. Shy and strangely limited in conversation as she was, he yet found her monosyllables and simplest phrases quite enough to hold him to her side. She had not read a great deal of art and literature, she had but fragmentary glimpses of knowledge, her round of life had been confined to a small compass: still she seemed to have gathered a great deal, and a depth rather than a width of experience was in some subtle way suggested by her words and looks.
Moreton was unreservedly happy. Born sportsman as he was, it must have been a genuine old-time love that made him prefer sitting on the veranda or on one of the rustic benches with Miss Noble to following the pointers and setters afield under the cloudless sky and over-warm beams of this waning, low-country winter. He also allowed himself to become interested to a certain extent in the plans of Miss Crabb. From his English point of view, this eager, outspoken, persistent young woman, with her mingled air of freshness, alertness and strangely hindered ambition, was a very novel and interesting study. He recognized and respected the worthiness and purity of her aims, whilst he could not keep from regarding her doings with a curiosity little short of that with which he would have observed the gambols of a rare species of monkey. He had not been long enough in America to become indifferent to the oddities and sharp salients of American character and our social contrasts and discords, nor had his tastes resigned themselves to such breezy, democratic familiarity as Miss Crabb insisted upon; but he was a good hater of shams, and her genuineness appealed to him in its spirit if not in its manner. He walked with her an hour back and forth on one of the long verandas, scarcely aware how much he was promising when he agreed to make some sketches for her. He had been, as the reader knows, an art-student once, but had lacked either talent or industry or both, getting on no further than to become a clever sketcher. Miss Crabb told him all she knew touching every subject she could think of, even going so far as to give the details of the distressing tragic circumstances under which Mrs. Ransom had been made a widow. It was a sad story of a mere girl marrying a handsome, dashing, rather reckless youth, who led her a romantic life for a time and finally deserted her, going away to Texas where he had been killed in a street fight with a desperado at San Antonio. Such stories were rather common in the South at one time. The first decade after the close of the war was, in the Gulf States, one of humiliation, nervousness, doubt—a decade that soured and vitiated many young lives, making almost outlaws of youths who, under a milder influence would have been good citizens, or at least, harmless ones. Sudden poverty, the stagnation of agriculture and trade, the ebbing of all commercial tides, the swift leveling of social eminences, and the desperation that followed dire defeat, were supplemented and aggravated by political annoyances of the most grievous nature. But the one demoralizing element most active and potent was the prejudice, deep-seated and woven into the very tissues of the Southern youth, against gaining a livelihood by manual labor in plebeian employments. Of course it is no wonder that this prejudice existed, indeed it would have been amazing if it had not existed; but the result was the destruction of many young men who really had in them the qualities that go, under ordinary circumstances, to make up valuable citizens.
Herbert Ransom came of an honorable and once wealthy family at Pensacola, Florida. He was one of what has been rather familiarly termed the "first crop of young men since the war," which means that during the war he was too young to be a soldier, and became a man soon after its close. He was bright, handsome, vain, unprincipled, and yet he passed current in society and married Agnes DeKay, a beautiful girl scarcely sixteen, whose father, a brother of General DeKay, was very poor, very proud and very old. For a time the young people lived a sweet, idyllic sort of life on an old plantation near Mariana, Florida; but Ransom's restless, rollicking nature would not be confined to mere domestic quietude. He tried speculation in cotton with just enough success to lead him swiftly to financial ruin. The plantation was sold at a great sacrifice and Agnes had to return to her father, while Ransom went to western Texas with the avowed purpose of looking after some wild lands belonging to his father's estate, but really with no hope of ever again seeing his wife. He had been gone nearly a year when the news of his tragic death in a street fight in San Antonio reached his relations in Pensacola. Soon after this Agnes' parents died and she was left with an income barely sufficient to support her. She had no children, and, with a widowed aunt, she lived in the old family homestead at Pensacola, until General DeKay came and persuaded her to become his adopted daughter. This meager outline of what seemed to Moreton a most pathetic story, fell glibly from the lips of Miss Crabb, along with sundry shrewd strictures upon social laws that render women so powerless to struggle with adversity and neglect.
"When a woman gets married," she observed, "she becomes helpless. She plunges into the gulf of matrimony with a mill-stone at her neck, so that she may be sure to disappear utterly. If she ever again comes to the surface it is but to air troubles for which there is no cure."