Reuben bowed and pa.s.sed on, a little flattered by the other"s intimate tone, while Gay followed Kesiah into the drawing-room, and put a question to her which had perplexed him since the night of his arrival.
"Aunt Kesiah, was old Reuben Merryweather on friendly terms with my uncle?"
She started and looked at him with a nervous twitching of her eyelids.
"I think so, Jonathan, at least they appeared to be. Old Reuben was born on the place when the Jordans still lived here, and I am sure your uncle felt that it would be unjust to remove him. Then they fought through the war together and were both dangerously wounded in the same charge."
He gazed at her a moment in silence, narrowing his intense blue eyes which were so like the eyes of Reuben"s granddaughter.
"Did my uncle show any particular interest in the girl?" he inquired, and added a little bitterly, "It"s not fair to me that I shouldn"t know just where I am standing."
"Yes, he did show a particular interest in her and was anxious that she should be educated above her station. She was even sent off to a boarding-school in Applegate, but she ran away during the middle of the second session and came home. Her grandfather was ill with pneumonia, and she is sincerely devoted to him, I believe."
"Was there any mention of her in Uncle Jonathan"s will?"
"None whatever. He left instructions with Mr. Chamberlayne, however, which are to be made known next April on Molly"s twenty-first birthday.
It is all rather mysterious, but we only know that he owned considerable property in the far West, which he left away from us and in trust to his lawyer. I suppose he thought your mother would not be alive when the girl came of age; for the doctors had agreed that she had only a few years to live at the utmost."
"What in the devil did my poor mother have to do with it?"
She hesitated an instant, positively scowling in her perplexity.
"Only that I think--I believe your Uncle Jonathan would have married the girl"s mother--Janet Merryweather--but for your mother"s influence."
"How in the deuce! You mean he feared the effect on her?"
"He broke it to her once--his intention, I mean--and for several days afterwards we quite despaired of her life. It was then that she made him promise--he was quite distracted with remorse for he adored Angela--that he would never allude to it again while she was alive. We thought then that it would be only for a short while, but she has outlived him ten years in spite of her heart disease. One can never rely on doctors, you know."
"But what became of the girl--of Janet Merryweather, I mean?"
"That was the sad part, though it happened so long ago--twenty years--that people have almost forgotten. It seems that your uncle had been desperate about her for a time--before Angela came to live with him--and Janet counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind--perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her characteristics, I am told, though I"ve never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns in the neighbourhood."
"Uncle Jonathan appears to have been too ready with his promises, but, I suppose, he thought there was a difference between his obligation to Janet Merryweather and to his brother"s widow?"
"There was a difference, of course. Janet Merryweather could hardly have had Angela"s sensitive feelings--or at least it"s a comfort to think that, even if it happens not to be true. Before the war one hardly ever heard of that cla.s.s, mother used to say, it was so humble and unpresuming--but in the last twenty-five or thirty years it has overrun everything and most of the land about here has pa.s.sed into its possession."
She checked herself breathlessly, surprised and indignant that she should have expressed her feelings so openly.
"Yes, I dare say," returned Jonathan--"The miller Revercomb is a good example, I imagine, of just the thing you are speaking of--a kind of new plant that has sprung up like fire-weed out of the ashes. Less than half a century produced him, but he"s here to stay, of that I am positive.
After all, why shouldn"t he, when we get down to the question? He--or the stock he represents, of course--is already getting hold of the soil and his descendants will run the State financially as well as politically, I suppose. We can"t hold on, the rest of us--we"re losing grip--and in the end it will be pure pluck that counts wherever it comes from."
"Ah, it"s just that--pluck--but put the miller in the crucible and you"ll find how little pure gold there is to him. It is not in prosperity, but in poverty that the qualities of race come to the surface, and this remarkable miller of yours would probably be crushed by a weight to which poor little Mrs. Bland at the post-office--she was one of the real Carters, you know--would hardly bend her head."
"Perhaps you"re right," he answered, and laughed shortly under his breath, "but in that case how would you fix the racial characteristics of that little firebrand, Molly Merryweather?"
CHAPTER VII
GAY RUSHES INTO A QUARREL AND SECURES A KISS
At dawn next morning Jonathan Gay, who had spent a restless night in his uncle"s room, came out into the circular drive with his gun on his shoulder, and strolled in the direction of the meadows beyond the haunted Poplar Spring at the end of the lawn. It was a rimy October morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled into a frosty stillness at daybreak.
"By Jove, it"s these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay, with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn"t have managed to make themselves more of a nuisance."
Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion, he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt, somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a hole." "One can"t acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but a condemnation."
With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard gra.s.s in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made through the mist. At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him, and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with muzzles held close to the moist ground.
For a minute Gay"s angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot.
Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.
"You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "so you"re not only shooting my partridges, but you"re actually shooting them before my eyes."
"What"s that?" asked Archie, only half understanding the words, "were you after that bird yourself then?"
"Well, rather, my friend, and I"ll trouble you at the same time to hand over that string on your shoulder."
"Hand them over? Well, I like that! Why, I shot them."
"But you shot them on my land didn"t you?"
"What in the devil do you mean by that? My folks have shot over these fields before yours were ever heard of about here. A bird doesn"t happen to be yours, I reckon, just because it takes a notion to fly over your pasture."
"Do you mean to tell me that you don"t respect a man"s right to his game?"
"A man"s game is the bird in the bag, not in the air, I reckon. This land was open hunting in the time of the Jordans, and we"re not going to keep off of it at the first bid of any Tom-fool that thinks he"s got a better right to it."
The a.s.sumption of justice angered Gay far more than the original poaching had done. To be flouted in his own pasture on the subject of his own game by a handsome barbarian, whom he had caught red-handed in the act of stealing, would have appealed irresistibly to his sense of humour, if it had not enraged him.
"All the same I give you fair warning," he retorted, "that the next time I find you trespa.s.sing on my land, I"ll have the law after you."
"The law--bosh! Do you think I"m afraid of it?"
Somewhere at the back of Gay"s brain, a curtain was drawn, and he saw clearly as if it were painted in water colour, an English landscape and a poacher, who had been caught with a stolen rabbit, humbly pulling the scant locks on his forehead. Well, this was one of the joys of democracy, doubtless, and he was in for the rest of them. These people had got the upper hand certainly, as Aunt Kesiah had complained.
"If you think I"ll tamely submit to open robbery by such insolent rascals as you, you"re mistaken, young man," he returned.
The next instant he sprang aside and knocked up Archie"s gun, which had been levelled at him. The boy"s face was white under his sunburn, and the feathers on the partridges that hung from his shoulder trembled as though a strong wind were blowing.
"Rascal, indeed!" he stammered, and spat on the ground after his words in the effort to get rid of the taste of them, "as if the whole county doesn"t know that you"re another blackguard like your uncle before you.
Ask any decent woman in the neighbourhood if she would have been seen in his company!"
His rage choked him suddenly, and before he could speak again the other struck him full in the mouth.
"Take that and hold your tongue, you young savage!"