The averted eyes of the slim, young thing looked wistfully across the slash to the bayou beyond. A poignant shame flooded her, the sense of sacred things profaned. Oh, if only her mother had lived, the girl mother who had died at her birth! Surely she would have understood! Or even the quiet slow-speeched father who had petted and “muched” her in secret. Since his death, ten years before, she had been terribly alone. She had only Jed—Jed Wilson, her stepmother’s boy, the magnificent big brother of her youth, who could do everything well and yet condescended to like her and be her comrade. But Jed was in far-away Texas somewhere and had been for four years.
“So I jes’ natchelly makes up my mind to help yo’. I ’low to do by you-all like yo’ own maw would. Air yo’ near through with them peas? I want ’em done right spank at twelve. Mose Hughey’s a-comin’ to dinner.”
Mellie turned a startled face on her stepmother. Her lips parted for speech, but the protest died unvoiced. What she had feared had come at last. A kind of terror surged through her. She was being prepared for the inevitable. If Mrs. Chunn had set her iron will on her marrying Hughey there would be no escape for her. Yet she knew she would rather die.
“I don’t want to—to marry,” she besought. “I druther stay with yo’, Maw.” The girl’s sweet, slow voice seemed to caress the dialect and make it lovable. “You-all have always be’n so good to me sence I was a little trick. Don’t yo’ make me marry ary man, Maw Chunn.”
“Hit ce’tainly riles me to hear you-all talk that-a-way. Hit’s plumb foolish. I reckon yo’ got to do like other folkses, Mellie Briscoe. But yo’ ain’t time to talk about that naow. Yo’ run along an’ slick up. I’ll ’tend to the dinner.”
Hughey’s narrow little shifting eyes gloated on the girl’s dainty youth and ravished the innocence of her pure outline, even while he ate voraciously of the food before him. A wolf were as fit to be mated with a lamb as the long-jawed, yellow-toothed usurer’s cunning with her fine maiden reserve. Even to Mellie’s stepmother his outstanding merit was the forty acres of rich cotton land he owned.
That he had an understanding with Mrs. Chunn was apparent, not less clear than that he counted the girl already his and the wooing a mere formality.
“Seems like nobody nevah cooked sweet taters an’ co’n pone like you’uns Miz Chunn. I ’low o’ co’se yo’ done learned Miss Mellie haow.” His wolfish little eyes leered at the girl.
Mrs. Chunn tossed the ball back, to cover her stepdaughter’s silence.
“Mellie’s a mighty good cook, Mistah Hughey, an’s yo’ say, I kin recommend her pone.”