The Purchase Price by Emerson Hough (ebook reader screen .txt) 📕

"Old—old—it's an old, tumble-down ruin, that's what it is," he grumbled. "Everything in sixes and sevens—a man like that—and an ending like this to it all."

He had called several times before he could get any attendance from the shiftless blacks. These, quick to catch any slackening in the reins of the governing power which controlled their lives, dropped back into unreadiness and pretense more and more each hour.

"What it needs here is a woman," grumbled Jamieson to himself. "All the time, for that matter. But this one's got to stay now, I don't care who she is. There must be some one here to run things for a month or two. Besides, she's got his life in her two hands, some way. If she left now, might as well shoot him at once. Oh, hell! when I die, I want to go to a womanless world. No I don't, either!"

His decision he at last announced to Josephine herself when finally the latter appeared to make inquiry regarding the sick master of Tallwoods.

"My dear girl," said he, "I am a blunt man, not a very good doctor maybe, and perhaps not much of a gentleman, I don't know—never stopped to ask myself about it. But now, anyhow, I don't know how you happened to be here, or who you are, or when you are going away, and I'm not going to ask you about any of those things. What I want to say is this: Mr. Dunwody is going to be a very sick man. He hasn't got any sort of proper care here, there's no one to run this place, and I can't stay here all the time myself. Even if I did stay, all I could do would be to give him a dose of quinine or calomel once in a while, and that isn't what he needs. He needs some one to be around and watch after things—this whole place is sick, as much as the owner of it. I reckon you've got to help me, my dear."

She looked at him, her large, dark eyes slightly contracting, making neither protest nor assent. He drew a long breath of satisfaction.

"Of course you'll stay," he said; "it's the right thing to do, and we both know it. You don't want to kill a man, no matter how much he desires or deserves it. Doctors and women—they sometimes are fatal, but they don't consciously mean to be, now do they? We don't ask many questions out here in these hills, and I will never bother you, I feel entirely free to ask you to remain at least for a few days—or maybe weeks."

[Illustration: Doctors and women—they sometimes are fatal.]

Her eyes still were on his face. It was a face fit for trust. "Very well," said she at length, quietly. "If you think it is necessary."

It was thus that Josephine St. Auban became the head of Tallwoods household. Not that week did she leave, nor the next, nor the one thereafter. The winter advanced, it was about to wane, and still she remained. Slowly, the master advanced toward recovery. Meantime, under charge of the mistress, the household machine fell once more into proper ways. The servants learned obedience. The plans for the work of the spring somehow went on much as formerly. Everywhere there became manifest the presence of a quiet, strong, restraining and self-restrained influence.

In time the doctor became lighter in his speech, less frequent in his visits. "You're not going to lose that musical leg, Dunwody," said he. "Old Ma Nature beats all us surgeons. In time she'll fill you in a nice new bone along there maybe, and if you're careful you'll have two feet for quite a while yet to come. You've ruined old Eleazar's fiddle, though, taking that E string! Did I ever tell you all about that coon dog of mine I had, once?"

Dunwody at last reached the point of his recovery where he could grin at these remarks; but if anything, he had grown more grim and silent than before. Once in a while his eyes would linger on the face of Josephine. Little speech of any kind passed between them. There were no callers at Tallwoods, no news came, and apparently none went out from that place. It might have been a fortress, an island, a hospital, a prison, all in one.

At length Dunwody was able safely to leave his room and to take up a resting place occasionally in the large library across the hall. Here one day by accident she met him. He did not at first note her coming, and she had opportunity now carefully to regard him, as he stood moodily looking out over the lawn. Always a tall man, and large, his figure had fined down in the confinement of the last few weeks. It seemed to her that she saw the tinge of gray crawling a little higher on his temples. His face was not yet thin, yet in some way the lines of the mouth and jaw seemed stronger, more deeply out. It was a face not sullen, yet absorbed, and above all full, now, of a settled melancholy.

"Good morning," said he, smiling, as he saw her. "Come in. I want to talk to you. But please don't resume our old argument about the compromise, and about slavery and the rights of man. You've been trying—all these weeks when I've been down and helpless and couldn't either fight or run away—to make me be a Bentonite, or worse, an abolitionist—trying, haven't you? to make me an apostate, faithless to my state, my beliefs, my traditions—and I suppose you'd be shrewd enough to add, faithless to my material interests. Please don't, this morning. I don't want subjective thought. I don't want algebra. I don't want history or law, or medicine. I want—"

She stood near the window, at some distance removed from him, even as she passed stopping to tidy Up a disarranged article on the tables here or there. He smiled again at this. "Where is Sally?" he asked. "And how about your maid?"

"Some one must do these things," she answered. "Your servants need watching. Sally is never where I can find her. Jeanne I can always find—but it is with her young man, Hector!"

He shook his head impatiently. "It all comes on you—work like this. What could I have done without you? But yourself, how are you coming on? That arm of yours has pained me—"

"It ceased to trouble me some time since. The doctor says, too, that you'll be quite well, soon. That's fine."

He nodded. "It's wonderful, isn't it?" said he. "You did it. Without you I'd be out there." He nodded toward the window, beyond which the grass-grown stones of the little family graveyard might be seen. "You're wonderful."

He wheeled painfully toward her presently, "Listen. We two are alone here, in spite of ourselves. Face to face again, in spite of all, and well enough, now, both of us, to go back to our firing lines before long. We have come closer together than many men and women get to be in a good many years; but we're enemies, and apart, now. At least you have seen me pretty much as I am—a savage—not much more. I've seen you for what you are—one woman out of hundreds, of thousands. There isn't going to be any woman in my life, after you.—Would you mind handing me that paper, please?"

He passed the document to her opened. "Here's what I meant to do if I didn't come through. It wasn't much. But I am to pay; and if I had died, that was all I could pay. That's my last will and testament, my dear girl. I have left you all I have. It is a legal will. There'll never be any codicil."

She looked at him straight. "It is not valid," she said. "Surely you are not of sound mind!"

He looked about him at the room, for the first time in his memory immaculately neat. From a distance there came the sound of a contented servant's voice. An air of rest and peace seemed in some way to be all about him. He sighed. "I never will be of sound mind again, I fear.

"Make this paper valid!" he suddenly demanded. "Give me my sound mind too. You've given me back my body sound."

Her lips parted in a smile sufficient to show the row of her white and even teeth, "You are getting well. It is time for me to go. As to this—" She handed him back the paper folded.

"You think it's only an attempt to heal the soreness of my conscience, don't you?" he said after a time, shaking his head. "It was; but it was more. Well, you can't put your image out of my heart, anyhow. I've got that. So you're going to leave me now? Soon? Let it be soon. I suppose it has to come."

"My own affairs require me. There is no possible tenure on which I could stay here much longer. Not even Jeanne—"

"No," said he, at length, again in conviction, shaking his head.
"There isn't any way."

"You make it so hard," said she. "Why are you so stubborn?"

"Listen!" He turned, and again there came back to his face the old fighting flush. "I faced the loss of a limb and said I couldn't stand that and live. Now you are going to cut the heart out of me. You ask me to live in spite of that. How can I? Were you ever married, Madam?" This last suddenly.

"You may regard it as true," said she slowly, after long hesitation. "Were you?"

"You may regard that also as true!" He set his jaw, and looked at her straight. Their eyes met, steadily, seeking, searching. They now again, opposed, stood on the firing lines as he had said.

"But you told me,—" she began.

"I told you nothing, if you will remember. I only said that, if you could feel as I did, I'd let the heavens fold as a scroll before I'd ask a word about your past. I'd begin all the world all over again, right here. So far as I am concerned, I wouldn't even care about the law. But you're not so lawless as I am. And somehow, I've got to thinking—a little—of your side of things."

"The law does not prevent me from doing as I like," she replied.
It was agony that showed on his face at this.

"That demands as much from me, if I play fair with you," he said slowly. "Suppose there was some sort of law that held me back?"

"I have not observed any vast restraint in you!"

"Not at first. Haven't you gained any better opinion?"

She was one of those able to meet a question with silence. He was obliged to continue.

"Suppose I should tell you that, all the time I was talking to you about what I felt, there was a wall, a great wall, for ever between us?"

"In that case, I should regret God had made a man so forgetful of honor. I should be glad Heaven had left me untouched by anything such a man could say. Suppose that?—Why, suppose I had cared, and that I had found after all that there was no hope? There comes in conscience, Sir, there comes in honor."

"Then, in such case—"

"In such case any woman would hate a man. Stress may win some women, but deceit never did."

"I have not deceived you."

"Do you wish to do so now?"

"No. It's just the contrary. Haven't I said you must go? But since you must go, and since I must pay, I'm willing, if you wish, to bare my life to the very bone, to the heart before you, now—right now."

She pondered for a moment. "Of course, I knew there