"Well, I'll be glad of that," Mrs. Bruce said, plaintively. "I have got sorter used to my step-children, but they ain't the same as a body's own flesh and blood. I'm proud of you, Luke," she added, tremulously. "After all my fears that you'd not come to much, you've turned out to be my main-stay. You'll be a great man before you die. Anybody that kin make an' throw away ten thousand dollars as easy as you have, ain't no small potato as men go these days. I reckon the trouble with us all is that none of us had brains enough to comprehend what yore aims was. But Ann Boyd did. She's the most wonderful woman that ever lived in this part of the country, anyhow—kicked an' shoved about, hated an' hatin', an' yet ever' now an' then hittin' the nail square on the head an' doin' somethin' big an' grand—something Christ-like an' holy—like what she done when she with-drawed her suit agin Gus Willard, simply because it would throw Mark out of a job to go on with it."
"Yes, she's a good woman, mother."
Mrs. Bruce went out, so that her son might go to sleep, but he slept very little. All night, at intervals, the buzz of low voices and sudden outbursts of merriment reached him and found soothing lodgment in his satisfied soul. Then, too, he was revelling in the memory of Virginia Hemingway's eyes and voice, and a dazzling hope that his meeting with her had inspired.
His mother stole softly into his room towards the break of day. This time it was to bring an old shawl, full of holes and worn to shreds, which she cautiously spread over him, for the mountain air had grown cool. She thought him asleep, but as she was turning away he caught her hand and drew her down and kissed her.
"Why, Luke!" she exclaimed; "don't be foolish! What's got in you? I—" But her voice had grown husky, and her words died away in an irrepressible sob. She did not stir for an instant, then she put her arms round his neck and kissed him.
[XVII]
It was in the latter part of August. Breezes with just a touch of autumnal crispness bore down from the mountain-sides, clipping from their stems the first dead and dying leaves, and swept on across Ann Boyd's level cotton-fields, where she was at work at the head of a score of cotton-pickers—negro men, boys, women, and girls. There were certain social reasons why the unemployed poor white females would not labor under this strange woman, though they needed her ready money as badly as the blacks, and that, too, was a constant thorn in the flesh of Ann's pride. She could afford to pay well for work, inasmuch as her planting and harvesting were invariably profitable. She had good agricultural judgment, and she used it. Even her cotton picking would average up better to the acre than any other farmer's, for she saw to it that her workers put in good time and left no white, fluttering scrap on stalk, leaf, or bole to attract the birds looking for linings for their winter's nests. When her black band had left a portion of her field, it was as if a forest fire had swept over it, leaving it brown and bare. The negroes were always ready to work for her, for the best of them were never criticised for having done so. The most fault-finding of her enemies had even been glad of the opportunity to call attention to the fact that only negroes would sink so low as to toil by her side. But the blacks didn't care, and in their taciturn fidelity they never said aught against her. As a rule, the colored people had contempt for the "pore white trash," and reverenced the ex-slave-holder and his family; but Ann Boyd was neither one nor the other. She was rich, and therefore powerful—a creature to be measured by no existing standards. When they worked for their old owners and others of the same impoverished class, they were asked to take in payment old clothing, meat—and not the choicest—from the smoke-house, and grain from the barn, or a questionable order to some store-keeper who, being dubious about the planter's account himself, usually charged double in self-protection. But on Ann's place it was different. At the end of each day, hard, jingling cash was laid into their ready palms, and it was symbolic of the freedom which years before had been talked about so much, but which somehow had appeared in name only. Yes, Ann Boyd was different. Coming in closer contact with her than the whites, they knew her better and felt her inherent worth. They always addressed her as "Miss Ann," and as "Miss Ann" she was known among them far and near—a queer, powerful individuality about whose private life—having naught to lose or gain by it—they never gossiped.
On the present day, when the sun dipped below the mountain-top, Ann raised the cow's horn, which she always wore at her belt, and blew a resounding blast upon it. This was the signal that the day's toil was ended, and yet so faithful were her black allies that each tried to complete the row he happened to be on before he brought in his bag. The crop for the year was good over all that portion of the state, and the newspapers, which Ann read carefully by candle-light at night, were saying that, owing to the little cotton being produced in other parts of the South, the price was going to be high. And that meant that Ann Boyd would be a "holder" in the market—not needing ready money, her bales would remain in a warehouse in Darley till the highest price had been reached in the long-headed woman's judgment, which in this, too, was always good—so good, in fact, that the Darley cotton speculators were often guided by it to their advantage.
The gathering-bags all in the cotton-house, Ann locked the rusty padlock, paid the toilers from her leather bag, and trudged home to her well-earned supper. When that was prepared and eaten, she moved her chair to the front porch and sat down; but the air was cool to unpleasantness, and she moved back into the gracious warmth of the big, open fire. All the afternoon her heart had thrilled over a report that Jane Hemingway's small cotton crop was being hastily and carelessly gathered and sold at the present low price by the man who held a mortgage on it. It pleased Ann to think that Jane would later hear of her own high receipts and be stung by it. Then, too, she had heard that Jane was more and more concerned about her bodily affliction and the inability to receive proper treatment. Yes, Jane was getting payment for what she had done in such an underhanded way, and Ann was glad of it.
Other things had not gone to please Ann of late. She had tried her best to be in sympathy with Luke King's action in paying out his last dollar of ready money for a farm for his family, whom she heartily despised for their treatment of her, but she could not see it from the young man's sanguine and cheerful stand-point. She had seen the Bruce family driving by in one of the old-fashioned vehicles the Dickersons had owned, and the sight had seemed ludicrous to her. "The boy will never amount to anything," she said. "He'll be poor all his life. He'll let anybody impose on him." And yet she loved him with a strange, insistent affection she could hardly understand. Even when she had bitterly upbraided him for that amazing act of impulsive generosity, as he sat in her doorway the next morning, and she saw the youthful blaze of enthusiasm in his eyes as he essayed to justify his course by the theories of life which had guided him in his professional career—even then an impulse was tugging at her heart to listen and believe the things he was so ardently declaring would free her from her bondage to hate and avarice. She could have kissed him as she might have kissed a happy, misguided son, and yet her coldness, her severity, she argued, was to be for his ultimate good. He had sent her copies of his new paper, with his editorials proudly marked in blue pencil. They were all in the same altruistic vein, and, strange to say, the extracts printed from leading journals all over the South in regard to his work were full of hearty approval. He had become a great factor for good in the world. He was one man who had the unfaltering courage of his convictions. Ann laughed to herself as she recalled all she had said to him that day. No wonder that he had thrown it off with a smile and a playful kiss, when such high authorities were backing him up. True, he might live in such a way as never to need the money which had been her weapon of defence, and he might finally rise to a sort of penniless greatness. Besides, his life was one thing, hers another. No great calamity had come to him in youth, such as she had known and so grimly fought; no persistent enemy was following his track with the scent and bay of a blood-hound, night and day seeking to rend him to pieces.