Part 14 (1/2)
”I don't think he's a fool,” returned Mrs. Peachey, reflecting how wonderfully she had ”managed” the great man, ”but, of course, he's queer--all writers are queer, aren't they?”
”He's kept it up longer than I thought, but I reckon he's about ready to give in,” pursued Cyrus, ignoring her question as he did all excursions into the region of abstract wonder. ”If he'll start in to earn his living now, I'll let him have a job on the railroad out in Matoaca City.
I meant to teach him a lesson, but I shouldn't like Henry's son to starve. I've nothing against Henry except that he was too soft. He was a good brother as brothers go, and I haven't forgotten it.”
”Perhaps, if you'd talk to Oliver,” suggested Mrs. Peachey. ”I'm afraid I couldn't induce him to come to you, but----”
”Oh, I ain't proud--I don't need to be,” interrupted Cyrus with a chuckle. ”Only fools and the poor have any use for pride. I'll look in upon him sometime along after supper, and see if he's come to his wits since I last talked to him.”
”Then, I'm glad I came to you. Tom would be horrified almost to death if he knew of it--but I've always said that when an idea crosses my mind just like that,” she snapped her thumb and forefinger, ”there's something in it.”
As she rose from her seat, she looked up at him with the coquetry which was so inalienable an attribute of her soul that, had the Deity a.s.sumed masculine shape before her, she would instinctively have used this weapon to soften the severity of His judgment. ”It was so kind of you not to send me away, Mr. Treadwell,” she said in honeyed accents.
”It is a pleasure to meet such a sensible woman,” replied Cyrus, with awkward gallantry. Her flattery had warmed him pleasantly, and in the midst of the dried husks of his nature, he was conscious suddenly that a single blade of living green still survived. He had ceased to feel old--he felt almost young again--and this rejuvenation had set in merely because a middle-aged woman, whom he had known since childhood, had shown an innocent pleasure in his society. Mrs. Peachey's traditional belief in the power of s.e.x had proved its own justification.
When she had left him, Cyrus sat down again, and took up his pipe from the railing where he had placed it. ”I'll go round and have some words with the young scamp,” he thought. ”There's no use waiting until after supper. I'll go round now while it is light.”
Then, as if the softening impulse were a part of the Sabbath stillness, he leaned over the bed of sunflowers, and fixed his eyes on the pinkish tower of Saint James' Church, which he could see palely enkindled against the afterglow. A single white cloud floated like a dove in the west, and beneath it a rain of light fell on the shadowy roofs of the town. The air was so languorous that it was as if the day were being slowly smothered in honeysuckle, the heavy scent of which drifted to him from the next garden. A vast melancholy--so vast that it seemed less the effect of a Southern summer than of a universal force residing in nature--was liberated, with the first cooling breath of the evening, from man and beast, from tree and shrub, from stock and stone. The very bricks, sun-baked and scarred, spoke of the weariness of heat, of the parching thirst of the interminable summers.
But to Cyrus the languor and the intense sweetness of the air suggested only that the end of a hot day had come. ”It's likely to be a drought,”
he was thinking while his upward gaze rested on the illuminated tower of the church. ”A drought will go hard with the tobacco.”
Having emptied his pipe, he was about to take down his straw hat from a nail on the wall, when the sound of the opening gate arrested him, and he waited with his eyes fixed on the winding brick walk, where the negro washerwoman appeared presently with a basket of clean clothes on her head. Beneath her burden he saw that there were some primitive attempts at Sunday adornment. She wore a green muslin dress, a little discoloured by perspiration, but with many compensating flounces; a bit of yellow ribbon floated from her throat, and in her hand she carried the festive hat which would decorate her head after the removal of the basket. Her figure, which had once been graceful, had grown heavy; and her face, of a light gingerbread colour, with broad, not unpleasant features, wore a humble, inquiring look--the look of some trustful wild animal that man has tamed and only partly domesticated. Approaching the steps, she brought down the basket from her head, and came on, holding it with a deprecating swinging movement in front of her.
”Howdy, Marster,” she said, as if uncertain whether to stop or to pa.s.s on into the doorway.
”Howdy, Mandy,” responded Cyrus. ”There's a hot spell coming, I reckon.”
Lowering the basket to the floor of the porch, the woman drew a red bandanna handkerchief from her bosom and began slowly to wipe the drops of sweat from her face and neck. The acrid odour of her flesh reached Cyrus, but he made no movement to draw away from her.
”I'se been laid up wid er st.i.tch in my side, Marster, so I'se jes got dese yer close done dis mawnin'. Dar wan' noner de chillen at home ter tote um down yer, so I low I 'uz gwine ter drap by wid um on my way ter church.”
As he did not reply, she hesitated an instant and over her features, which looked as if they had been flattened by a blow, there came an expression which was half scornful, half inviting, yet so little personal that it might have been worn by one of her treetop ancestors while he looked down from his sheltering boughs on a superior species of the jungle. The chance effect of light and shadow on a grey rock was hardly less human or more primitive.
”I'se gittin' moughty well along, Marster,” she said; ”I reckon I'se gittin' on toward a hunnard.”
”Nonsense, Mandy, you ain't a day over thirty-five. There's a plenty of life left in you yet.”
”Go way f'om yer, Marster; you knows I'se a heap older 'n dat. How long ago was. .h.i.t I done fust come yer ter you all?”
He thought a moment. A question of calculation always interested him, and he prided himself on his fine memory for dates.
”You came the year our son Henry died, didn't you? That was in '66--eighteen years ago. Why, you couldn't have been over fifteen that summer.”
For the first time a look of cunning--of the pathetic cunning of a child pitted against a man--awoke in her face.
”En Miss Lindy sent me off befo' de year was up, Marster. My boy Jubal was born de mont' atter she done tu'n me out.” She hesitated a minute, and then added, with a kind of savage coquetry, ”I 'uz a moughty likely gal, Marster. You ain't done furgit dat, is you?”
Her words touched Cyrus like the flick of a whip on a sore, and he drew back quickly while his thin lips grew tight.