“Go to the devil!”
Aunt Keturah was naturally offended at this.
“I didn’t never think my mistis’ son gwin’ talk dat discontemptuous way to de mammy dat nuss him and Miss ’Lizbeth, and Marse Miles, an’ lay yo’ par out, and your mar, an’ set by Miss ’Lizbeth an’ hole her han’ ’twell de bref lef’ her body—” For your true African never omits to mention any family tragedy or sorrow or other lugubrious proceedings in which he or she may have had a part.
“Well, old lady, I didn’t exactly mean what I said—”
“Well, den, you hadn’t orter said nuttin’ like it—”
“I know it. If you were to go to the devil, I don’t know what would become of me.”
“Dat’s so, honey. An’ ain’t no wife gwi’ do fur you like yo’ po’ ole mammy”—for the possibility of Pembroke’s marriage was extremely distasteful to Keturah, as portending her downfall and surrender of the keys.
Colonel Berkeley had often been to Malvern since his return, but Olivia, not since she was a child, when she would go over with her mother, and played in the garden with Miles. Then Pembroke was a tall, overbearing boy, a remorseless tease, whose only redeeming trait, in her childish eyes, was the wonderful stories he could tell out of books—when he chose. Elizabeth she remembered—a beautiful, haughty girl, who alternately snubbed and petted her. It seemed so long ago. They were to come to luncheon at two o’clock. When Olivia and her father drove up, with Cave in the carriage with them, whom they had picked up on the road, Pembroke had been called off for a moment by a client who was interviewing him in “the office”—that necessary adjunct of every professional man, and most of the gentry in Virginia, a comfortable one or two-roomed building, a little back of the “great house,” where the master kept his books and accounts, his guns and hunting paraphernalia, where his dogs had the right of entry and his women kind had not.
The house had once been imposing. Two wings rambled off from the center building. One was overgrown with ivy, and looked both comfortable and picturesque under the tall and branching elms. The other was gaunt and scorched and weather-beaten. The heat had cracked the windows and had forced the bricks out of place. One pillar of the porch on that side was gone. The damage to the house was really not great, but apparently it was ruined.
Miles met them at the door—Miles, once the handsome scapegrace, and now the blighted, the unfortunate. The spectacle of his marred face was in melancholy keeping with what surrounded him.