The Reign Of Law Part 11

His father sat on one side of the fireplace, watching the open door for the entrance of his son. He appeared slightly bent over in his chair.

Plainly the days of rough farm-work and exposure were over for him, prematurely aged and housed. There was about him--about the shape and carriage of the head--in the expression of the eye most of all, perhaps,--the not wholly obliterated markings of a thoughtful and powerful breed of men. His appearance suggested that some explanation of David might be traceable in this quarter. For while we know nothing of these deep things, nor ever shall, in the sense that we can supply the proofs of what we conjecture; while Nature goes ever about her ancient work, and we cannot declare that we have ever watched the operations of her fingers, think on we will, and reason we must, amid her otherwise intolerable mysteries. Though we accomplish no more in our philosophy than the poor insect, which momentarily illumines its wandering through the illimitable night by a flash from its own body.

Lost in obscurity, then, as was David's relation to his mother, there seemed some gleams of light discernible in that between father and son.

For there are men whom nature seems to make use of to connect their own offspring not with themselves but with earlier sires. They are like sluggish ca.n.a.ls running between far-separated oceans--from the deeps of life to the deeps of life, allowing the freighted ships to pa.s.s. And no more does the stream understand what moves across its surface than do such commonplace agents comprehend the sons who have sprung from their own loins. Here, too, is one of Nature's greatest cruelties to the parent.

As David's father would not have recognized his remote ancestors if brought face to face, so he did not discover in David the image of them--the reappearance in the world, under different conditions, of certain elements of character found of old in the stock and line. He could not have understood how it was possible for him to transmit to the boy a nature which he himself did not actively possess. And, therefore, instead of beholding here one of Nature's mysterious returns, after a long period of quiescence, to her suspended activities and the perpetuation of an interrupted type, so that his son was but another strong link of descent joined to himself, a weak one; instead of this, he saw only with constant secret resentment that David was at once unlike him and his superior.

These two had worked side by side year after year on the farm; such comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the primeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of the merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat, hopes, and disappointments, their minds had never met. The father had never felt at home with his son; David, without knowing why--and many a sorrowful hour it had cost him--had never accepted as father the man who had brought him into the world. Each soon perceived that a distance separated them which neither could cross, though vainly both should try, and often both did try, to cross it.

As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he watched the door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his son; and to this feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement.

When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His mother followed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she locked in a closet in the wall: the iron in her blood was parsimony. Then she seated herself under the mantelpiece on the opposite side and looked silently across at the face of her husband. (She was his second wife.

His offspring by his first wife had died young. David was the only child of mature parents.) She looked across at him with the complacent expression of the wife who feels that she and her husband are one, even though their offspring may not be of them. The father looked at David; David looked into the fire. There was embarra.s.sment all round.

"How are you feeling to-night, father?" he asked affectionately, a moment later, without lifting his eyes.

"I've been suffering a good deal. I think it's the weather."

"I'm sorry."

"Do you think it's going to snow?"

The husband had lived so long and closely with his wife, that the mechanism of their minds moved much like the two wall-clocks in adjoining rooms of the house; which ticked and struck, year after year, never quite together and never far apart. When David was first with one and then with another, he was often obliged to answer the same questions twice--sometimes thrice, since his mother alone required two identical responses. He replied now with his invariable and patient courtesy--yet scarcely patient, inasmuch as this did not try him.

"What made you so late?"

David explained again.

"How much hemp did you break?"

"I didn't weigh it, father. Fifty or sixty pounds, perhaps."

"How many more shocks are there in the field?"

"Twelve or fifteen. I wish there were a hundred."

"I wish so, too," said David's mother, smiling plaintively at her husband.

"John Bailey was here after dinner," remarked David's father. "He has sold his crop of twenty-seven acres for four thousand dollars. Ten dollars a hundred."

"That's fine," said David with enthusiasm, thinking regretfully of their two or three acres.

"Good hemp lands are going to rent for twenty or twenty-five dollars an acre in the spring," continued his father, watching the effect of his words.

David got up, and going to the door, reached around against the wall for two or three sticks of the wood he had piled there. He replenished the fire, which was going down, and resumed his seat.

For a while father and son discussed in a reserved way matters pertaining to the farm: the amount of feed in the barn and the chances of its lasting; crops to be sown in the spring, and in what fields; the help they should hire--a new trouble at that time. For the negroes, recently emanc.i.p.ated, were wandering hither and thither over the farms, or flocking to the towns, unused to freedom, unused to the very wages they now demanded, and nearly everywhere seeking employment from any one in preference to their former masters as part of the proof that they were no longer in slavery. David's father had owned but a single small family of slaves: the women remained, the man had sought work on one of the far richer estates in the neighborhood.

They threshed over once more the straw of these familiar topics and then fell into embarra.s.sed silence. The father broke this with an abrupt, energetic exclamation and a sharp glance:--

"If hemp keeps up to what it is now, I am going to put in more."

"Where?" asked the son, quietly. "I don't see that we have any ground to spare."

"I'll take the woods."

"FATHER!" cried David, wheeling on him.

"I'll take the woods!" repeated his father, with a flash of anger, of bitterness. "And if I'm not able to hire the hands to clear it, then I'll rent it. Bailey wants it. He offered twenty-five dollars an acre.

Or I'll sell it," he continued with more anger, more bitterness. "He'd rather buy it than rent."

"How could we do without the woods?" inquired the son, looking like one dazed,--"without the timber and the grazing?"

"What will we do without the woods?" cried his father, catching up the words excitedly. "What will we do without the FARM?"

"What do you mean by all this, father? What is back of it?" cried David, suddenly aroused by vague fears.

"I mean," exclaimed the father, with a species of satisfaction in his now plain words, "I mean that Bailey wants to buy the farm. I mean that he urges me to sell out for my own good! tells me I must sell out! must move! leave Kentucky! go to Missouri--like other men when they fail."

"Go to Missouri," echoed the wife with dismal resignation, smiling at her husband.

"Have you sold it?" asked David, with flushed, angry face.

"No."

"Nor promised?"

"No!"

"Then, father, don't! Bailey is trying again to get the farm away from you. You and mother shall never sell your home and move to Missouri on my account."

The son sat looking into the fire, controlling his feelings. The father sat looking at the son, making a greater effort to control his. Both of them realized the poverty of the place and the need of money.

The hour was already past the father's early bed-time. He straightened himself up now, and turning his back, took off his coat, hung it on the back of his chair, and began to unb.u.t.ton his waistcoat, and rub his arms. The mother rose, and going to the high-posted bed in a corner of the room, arranged the pillows, turned down the covers, and returning, sat provisionally on the edge of her chair and released her breastpin.

David started up.

"Mother, give me a candle, will you?"

He went over with her to the closet, waited while she unlocked it and, thrusting her arm deep into its disordered depths, searched till she drew out a candle. No good-night was spoken; and David, with a look at his father and mother which neither of them saw, opened and closed the door of their warm room, and found himself in the darkness outside at the foot of the cold staircase.

XIII

A bed of crimson coals in the bottom of the grate was all that survived of his own fire.

He sat down before it, not seeing it, his candle unlighted in his hand, a tragedy in his eyes.