"Well, my boy, I don't misunderstand you.I never knew a man yet to begin a love affair with a panegyric on virtue.She's an estimable woman, I dare say, and I presume she's plain.""Plain!" gasped Christopher."Why, she's beautiful--at least, you think so when you see her smile.""So she smiled through her tears, eh?"
Christopher started angrily."Can you sit there on that log and laugh at such a thing?" he demanded.
"Come, come," protested Tucker, "an honest laugh never turned a sweet deed sour since the world began--and that was more than sweet; it was fine.I'd like to know that woman, Christopher.""You could never know her--no man could.She's all clear and bright on the surface, but all mystery beneath.""Ah, that's it; you see, there was never a fascinating woman yet who was easy to understand.Wasn't it that shrewd old gallant, Bolivar Blake, who said that in love an ounce of mystery was worth a pound of morality?""It's like him: he said a lot of nonsense," commented Christopher."But to think," he added after a moment, "that she should be Bill Fletcher's granddaughter!""Well, I knew her mother," returned Tucker, "and she was as honest, God-fearing a body as ever trod this earth.She stood out against Fletcher to the last, you know, and worked hard for her living while that scamp, her husband, drank them both to death.
There are some people who are born with a downright genius for honesty, and this girl may be one of them.""I don't know--I don't know," said Christopher, in a voice which had grown spiritless.Then after an instant in which he stared blankly down at Tucker's ant-hill, he turned hurriedly away and followed the little straggling path to the barn door.
>From the restlessness that pricked in his limbs there was no escape, and after entering the barn he came out again and went down into the pasture to the long bench beside the poplar spring.
Here, while the faint shadows of the young leaves played over him, he sat with his head bent forward and his hands dropped listlessly between his knees.
Around him there was the tender green of the spring meadows, divided by a little brook where the willows shone pure silver under the April wind.Near at hand a catbird sang in short, tripping notes, and in the clump of briars by the spring a rabbit sat alert for the first sound.So motionless was Christopher that he seemed, sitting there by the pale gray body of a poplar, almost to become a part of the tree against which he leaned--to lose, for the time at least, his share in the moving animal life around him.
At first there was mere blankness in his mind--an absence of light and colour in which his thoughts were suddenly blotted out;then, as the wind raised the hair upon his brow, he lifted his eyes from the ground, and with the movement it seemed as if his life ran backward to its beginning and he saw himself not as he was to-day, but as he might have been in a period of time which had no being.
Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him--a Blake by force of blood and circumstance.The world lay before him--bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this life upon the earth.For an instant the glow lasted--the beauty dwelt upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the brutal truth in all its nakedness; he knew himself for what he was--a man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts.He had sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the moment of fulfilment.
To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment he felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw him--that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end.It was not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon--it was rather the excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard.He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the breach with Fletcher.That, at least was his work, and his alone--the bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart and snarled.It was a human life that he had taken in his hand--he saw that now in his first moment of awakening--a life that he had destroyed as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him.Day by day, step by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose, and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.
With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the light.
CHAPTER X.By the Poplar Spring The next day he watched for her anxiously until she appeared over the low brow of the hill, her arms filled with books, and Agag trotting at her side.As she descended slowly into the broad ravine where he awaited her under six great poplars that surrounded the little spring, he saw that she wore a dress of some soft, creamy stuff and a large white hat that shaded her brow and eyes.She looked younger, he noticed, than she had done in her black gown, and he recalled while she neared him the afternoon more than six years before when she had come suddenly upon him while he worked in his tobacco.
"So you are present at the roll-call?" she said, laughing, as she sat down on the bench beside him and spread out the books that she had brought.
"Why, I've been sitting here for half an hour," he answered.
"What a shame--that's a whole furrow unploughed, isn't it?""Several of them; but I'm not counting furrows now.I'm getting ready to appall you by my ignorance." He spoke with a determined, reckless gaiety that lent a peculiar animation to his face.
