As I recall the day when I first came face to face with real trouble, with a trouble that leaves in the heart a never-healing wound, it was the brightest of all that summer. It was one of those days when there was not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough stubble were the smoothest of paths, and the clatter of the machine the sweetest of music. Above the raucous clacking I heard my mother calling, and, suspecting some needless injunction not to get overheated, I pretended not to hear and looked the other way. But she was insistent. When we had rounded the field again, she crossed the road to the fence; the reaper stopped, and on a day so still that a dog's bark carried a mile there was no escape from her uplifted voice. Reluctantly Penelope and I abandoned our enchanting travel and obeyed the summons.
"Penelope," my mother said, taking the girl by the hand, "come into the house. Your uncle is here."
Penelope stopped and looked up into my mother's face, and there was wonder in her eyes. She had forgotten her uncle, so rarely had she heard her father speak of him, and I was quicker than she to grasp the meaning of his coming, for I remembered that Rufus, who never had had a real idea, who made his first success by giving away a prize with every pound of tea. I believed that he had come to take Penelope from me, and with every step I saw my fears confirmed.
"Your Uncle Rufus," my mother said, and she closed her lips very tightly as she walked on.
The parlor shades were up—an ominous sign, for the parlor would only be opened to a person of importance. Had the Professor visited us, the humbler sitting-room would have been quite good enough to receive him in, and it seemed a strange commentary on his harsh judgment that his brother should be ushered into the stately chamber where the very air grew old in dignified seclusion. Still more forcibly was this idea impressed on my mind when I stood at the door and saw my father sitting very erect, on a most uncomfortable chair, listening respectfully to the stranger's rapid words.
Rufus Blight spoke in a loud voice; he lolled in the big walnut rocker, with his arm stretched across the centre table, to the peril of my mother's precious Swiss chalet and the glass dome which protected it; on the family Bible his fingers were beating a tattoo as carelessly as they might have done on the counter of his general store. There was nothing in his appearance to suggest kin to the lean and cadaverous Professor. The Professor always seemed to move with effort, but his brother was alive all over. Though short and fat, he had none of the placidity which we associate with corpulence. As he talked his hands moved restlessly; his bristling red mustache accentuated the play of his lips; his heavy gold watch-chain moved up and down with his breathing; even his hair was alert.
"He is a remarkable man—I might say, a very remarkable man," were the words that came to us as we entered the hall. "Of course, you couldn't understand him—few could. He had to go his own way and would take help from no one, not even his brother. Upon my word, Judge——"
Our entrance checked him. He rose, and with arms akimbo stood gazing down at Penelope. She, clinging to my mother, her cheek pressed against her as she half turned from him, looked up at him, abashed and wondering, for to her small mind there was in this stranger something awe-inspiring. The sleek man in spotless, creaseless clothes, with polished boots and close-shaved, powdered, barbered face, was so different from her unkempt father that she could hardly believe him kin. Baal would have seemed as near to her, and had the idol stretched out his arms to take her into his destroying embrace, she could hardly have been more frightened than when she saw Mr. Blight's fat hands reaching toward her. Mr. Blight smiled, and well he might, for this slip of a girl gazing up at him was of his own blood, and all that was good in that blood found expression in her sweetness. He had come prepared to see a slattern, ill-fed, unkempt, the true daughter of shiftless parents and a wretched mountain home; he had found a graceful little body, and he wanted to take her into his possession at once.
"Penelope," he exclaimed, "don't you know your Uncle Rufus?"
There was no particular reason why Penelope should know her Uncle Rufus. She could have submitted herself as easily to the embrace of any well-dressed, smiling stranger, and she shrank back, but my mother pushed her forward within reach of the restless hands.