Now, as he stretched out his square, sunburned hand, with its misshapen nails, he laughed aloud at the absurdity of those blunted hopes.To-day he stood six feet three inches from the ground, with muscles hard as steel and a chest that rang sound as a bell, yet how much nearer his purpose had he been as a little child! He remembered the day that he had hidden in the bushes with his squirrel gun and waited with fluttering breath for the sound of Fletcher's footsteps along the road.On that day it had seemed to him that the hand of the Lord was in his own Godlike vengeance nerving his little wrist.He had meant to shoot--for that he had saved every stray penny from his sales of hogs and cider, of watermelons and chinkapins; for that he had bought the gun and rammed the powder home.Even when the thud of footsteps beat down the sunny road strewn with brown honeyshucks, he had felt neither fear nor hesitation as he crouched amid the underbrush.Rather there was a rare exhilaration, warm blood in his brain and a sharp taste in his mouth like that of unripe fruit--as if he had gorged himself upon the fallen honeyshucks.
It was the happiest moment of his life, he knew, the one moment when he seemed to measure himself inch by inch with fate; and like all such supreme instants, it fell suddenly flat among the passing hours.For even as the gun was lifted, at the very second that Fletcher's heavy body swung into view, he heard a crackling in the dead bushes at his back, and Uncle Boaz struck up his arm with a palsied hand.
"Gawd alive, honey, you don' wanter be tucken out an' hunged?"the old man cried in terror.
The boy rose in a passion and flung his useless gun aside."Oh, you've spoiled it! you've spoiled it!" he sobbed, and shed bitter tears upon the ground.
To this hour, lying on his father's grave, he knew that he regretted that wasted powder--that will to slay which had blazed up and died down so soon.Strangely enough, it soothed him now to remember how near to murder he had been, and as he drank the summer air in deep drafts he felt the old desire rekindle from its embers.While he lived it was still possible--the one chance that awaits the ready hand, the final answer of a sympathetic heaven that deals out justice.His god was a pagan god, terrible rather than tender, and there had always been within him the old pagan scorn of everlasting mercy.There were moods even when he felt the kinship with his savage forefathers working in his blood, and at such times he liked to fit heroic tortures to heroic crimes to imagine the lighted stake and his enemy amid the flames.Over him as he lay at full length the ancient cedars, touched here and there with a younger green, reared a dusky tent that screened him alike from the hot sunshine and the bright June sky.Somewhere in the deepest shadow the mocking-bird purled over its single note, and across the lettering on the marble slab beside him a small brown lizard was gliding back and forth.The clean, fresh smell of the cedars filled his nostrils like a balm.
For a moment the physical pleasure in his surroundings possessed his thoughts; then gradually, in a state between waking and sleeping, the curious boughs above took fantastic shapes and were interwoven before his eyes with his earlier memories.There was a great tester bed, with carved posts and curtains of silvery damask, that he had slept in as a child, and it was here that he had once had a terrible dream--a dream which he had remembered to this day because it was so like a story of Aunt Delisha's, in which the devil comes with a red-hot scuttle to carry off a little boy.On that night he had been the little boy, and he had seen the scuttle with its leaping flames so plainly that in his terror he had struggled up and screamed aloud.A moment later he had awakened fully, to find a lighted candle in his face and his father in a flowered dressing-gown sitting beside the bed and looking at him with his sad, bloodshot eyes."Is the devil gone, father, and did you drive him away?" he asked; and then the tall, white-haired old man, whose mind was fast decaying, did a strange and a pitiable thing, for he fell upon his knees beside the bed and cried out upon Christopher for forgiveness for the selfishness of his long life."You came too late, my son," he said; "you came twenty years too late.I had given you up long ago and grown hopeless.You came like Isaac to Abraham, but too late--too late!" The boy sat up in bed, huddling in the bedclothes, for the night was chilly.He grew suddenly afraid of his father, the big, beautiful old man in the flowered dressing-gown, and he wished that his mother would come in and take him away."But I came twins with Lila, father," he replied, trying to speak bravely.
"With Lila! Oh, my poor children! my poor children!" cried the old man, and, taking up his candle, tottered to the door.Then Christopher stopped his ears in the pillows, for he heard him moaning to himself as he went back along the hall.He felt all at once terribly frightened, and at last, slipping down the tall bed-steps, he stole on his bare feet to Cynthia's door and crept in beside her.After this, dim years went by when he did not see his father, and the great closed rooms on the north side of the house were as silent as if a corpse lay there awaiting burial.
