The Voice of the People Part 29

"Which, occasionally, it is," added Tom seriously.

Dudley threw himself back into his chair and crossed his shapely legs.

For a moment he smoked in silence, then he removed his cigar from his mouth and flecked the ashes upon the uncarpeted floor.

"Oh! the mystery to me is," he said, "that you exist down here and live to tell the tale--or at least that you earn enough crumbs to feed the crows."

"Kingsborough crows aren't high livers," remarked Nicholas as he threw himself into the remaining chair.

Dudley laughed softly--a humorous laugh that fell pleasantly on the ear.

"That reminds me," he began whimsically. "I met a tourist with spectacles walking along Duke of Gloucester Street. 'Sir,' he said courteously, 'I am looking for Kingsborough. I am told that it is a city.' 'Sir,' I responded, with a bow that did honour to my grandfather's ghost, 'it was once a chartered city; it is now only a charter.'"

Then he turned to Tom.

"We haven't got used to the railroad yet, have we?" he asked.

Tom shook his head.

"General Battle's still protesting," he replied. "He swears it makes Kingsborough common."

Dudley thoughtfully examined his cigar, an amused smile about his mouth.

"My mother doesn't want the cows turned out of the churchyard," he observed, "because it would abolish one of Kingsborough's characteristics. She's right, too, by Jove."

"They're having a fight over it now," put in Nicholas with the gravity he rarely lost. "The people who own cows call it an 'ancient right.' The people who don't, call it sacrilege. The rector leads one faction, and the congregation has split."

"And split we smash," added Dudley. "Well, these are exciting times in Kingsborough's history; it is almost as lively as Richmond. There we had a religious convention and an elopement last week. I don't suppose you come up to that?"

Nicholas ran his hand through his hair with a habitual gesture. He was idly watching the light of Dudley's cigar and noting the quality by the aroma. He could not afford cigars himself, and he wondered how Dudley managed to do so.

"We are a people without a present," he returned inattentively. "You've heard, I take it, that an old elm has gone near the court-house."

"My mother told me. I believe she knows every brick that used to be and is not. I'm trying to get her away with me, but she won't come."

"Sally Burwell was telling me," said Tom, a dawning interest in his face, "she had tried to persuade her."

"Yes, we tried and failed. By the way, is it true that Sally's engaged to Jack Wyth? I hear it at every turn."

"I--I shouldn't be surprised," gasped Tom painfully.

"I don't believe a word of it," protested Nicholas.

"He isn't much good, eh?"

"Why, he's a brick," said Nicholas.

"He's a cad," said Tom.

Dudley laughed and blew a cloud of smoke in the air.

"Well, she's a daisy herself, and as good as gold. She's the kind of woman to flirt herself hoa.r.s.e and then settle down into dove-like domesticity. But what about Eugie? Is she really grown up? My mother declares she's splendid."

Nicholas was silent.

"Oh, she's handsome enough," Tom carelessly replied.

"But not like Sally, eh?"

"Oh, no! not like Sally."

Dudley tossed the stump of his cigar through the open window, lit a cigarette, and changed the subject. He talked easily, relating several laughable stories, referring occasionally to himself and his success, ill.u.s.trating his remarks by his experience at the bar, giving finally the exclamation of a fellow-lawyer at the close of an argument he had made: "You may be a m.u.f.f of a jurist, Webb," he had cried, "but, by George! you're a devil of an advocate!"

He was, withal, so affable, so confident, so thoroughly a good fellow, that an hour pa.s.sed before Nicholas remembered he had looked in only for a moment.

When he rose to go, Dudley gripped his hand again, slapped him on the shoulder, declared him to be a "first-rate old chap," and ended by pressing him to drop in on him when he ran up to Richmond.

Nicholas gave back the friendly grasp and pledged himself to the "dropping in." He resistingly succ.u.mbed before the inherent jovial charm.

The afternoon being Sat.u.r.day, he left town earlier than usual and spent a couple of hours with his father in the fields. The peanuts were being harvested. Amos Burr, with a peanut "share" attached to the plough, was separating the yellowed plants from the ripe nuts underground, and Nicholas, lifting the roots upon a pitchfork, shook them free from earth and threw them over the pointed staves which were the final supports of the "shocks." A negro hand went before him, driving the sticks into the sandy soil.

"I should say you might count on forty bushels an acre," remarked Nicholas cheerfully, as he lifted a detached root from a broken hill.

"It's a fair yield, isn't it?"

Amos Burr shook his head and muttered that there was "no tellin'.

Peanuts air one of the things thar's no countin' on," he added. "Wheat air another, corn air another, oats air another."

"Life is another," concluded Nicholas lightly. "Still we live and still we raise wheat and oats and corn. But I wish you'd look into market gardening. I believe it would pay you better."

"'Tain't no use," returned Amos, with his accustomed pessimism. "'Tain't no use my plantin' as long as the government ain't goin' to move, nohow.

It's been promisin' to help the farmer ever since the war, an' it ain't done nothin' for him yet but tax him."

But Nicholas, to avoid his father's political drift, fell to talking with one of the negro workers.

Several hours later, when he had changed his farm clothes, he joined Eugenia in the pasture and walked with her to Battle Hall, where the general received him with ready, if condescending, hospitality. Eugenia had instructed her family upon the changed conditions of Nicholas's social standing, but her logic was powerless to convince her father that Amos Burr's son was any better than Amos Burr had been before him.

"Pish! Pish!" he exclaimed testily, "the boy's not a lawyer--only gentlemen belong to the bar, but there's n.o.body too high or too low to be a farmer. Polite to him? Did you ever see me impolite in my own house even to a chimney sweep?"

"I never saw a chimney sweep in your own house," Eugenia retorted, whereupon he pinched her cheek and accused her of "making fun of her old father."

Now, when Nicholas sat down on one of the long green benches on the porch, the general conversed with him as he conversed with the chicken sellers who came of an afternoon to receive payment for their luckless fowls.

"This'll be a busy season for you," he observed cheerfully, in the slightly elevated voice in which he addressed his inferiors. "You'll be cutting your corn before long and seeding your winter crops. What are you planting this fall?"

He could not be induced to engage upon social topics with the young man or to allude in the most distant manner to his legal profession. He was a Burr, and a Burr was a small farmer, nothing more.

"We're ploughing for oats now, sir," responded Nicholas diffidently, "and we're going to seed a little rye with clover--if the clover's killed, the rye'll last."

"I should advise you to look after the land," said the general, stuffing the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and pressing it down with his fat thumb. "What you need is to plant it in cow-peas and turn them down.

There's nothing like them for fertilising."