"You're welcome to have every skulking hound in the county on me," Christopher replied, loosening Sam Murray's restraining grasp."If I can settle you I reckon I can settle them; but the day you open your lying mouth to me again I'll shoot you down as I would a mad dog--and wash my hands clean afterward!"He looked round for his harvest hat, picked it up from the floor where it had fallen, and walked slowly out of the room.
In the broad noon outside he staggered an instant, dazzled by the glare.
"Had a drop too much, ain't you, Mr.Christopher?" a voice inquired at his side, and, looking down, he saw Sol Peterkin sitting on a big wooden box just outside the store.
"Not too much to mind my own business," was his curt reply.
"Oh, no harm's meant, suh, an' I hope none's taken," responded the little man good-naturedly."I saw you walk kinder crooked, that was all, an'it came to me that you might be needin' an arm toward home.Young gentlemen will be gentlemen, that's the truth, suh, an' in my day I reckon I've steadied the legs of mo' young beaux than you could count on your ten fingers.Good Lord, when it comes to thinkin' of those Christmas Eve frolics that we had befo' the war! Why, they use to say that you couldn't get to the Hall unless you swam your way through apple toddy.Jest to think!
an' here I've been settin' an' countin' the bundles goin' up thar now--""I'm looking for a box, Tom," said a clear voice at Christopher's back, "a big paper hat-box that ought to have come by express--"He turned quickly and saw Maria Fletcher in a little cart in the road, with a strange young man holding the reins.As Christopher swung round, she nodded pleasantly, but with a cool stare he passed down the steps and out into the road, carrying with him a distasteful impression of the strange young man.Yet from that first hurried glimpse he had brought away only the picture of a brown mustache.
"By George, I'd like to see that fellow in the prize ring," he heard the stranger remark as he went by."Do they have knock-outs around here, I wonder?""Oh, I dare say he'd oblige you with one if you took the trouble to tread on his preserves," was the girl's laughing rejoinder.
A massive repulsion swept over Christopher, pervading his entire body--repulsion that was but a recoil from his exhausted rage.In this new emotion there were both weariness and self-pity, and to his mental vision there showed clearly, with an impersonal detachment, his own figure in relation to the scenes among which he moved."That is I yonder," he might have said had he been able to disentangle thought from sensation, "plodding along there through the red mud in the road.Look at the coarse clothes, smelling of axle-grease, the hands knotted by toil and stained with tobacco juice, the face soiled with sweat and clay.That is I, who was born with the love of ease and the weakness to temptation in my blood, with the love, too, of delicate food, of rare wines, and of beautiful women.Once I craved these things;now the thought of them troubles me no longer, for I work in the sun all day and go home to enjoy my coarse food.Is it because Ihave been broken to this life as a young horse is broken to the plough, or have all the desires I have known been swallowed up in a single hatred--a hatred as jealous and as strong as love?"It was his nightly habit, lying upon his narrow bed in the little loft, to yield some moments before sleeping to his idle dreams of vengeance--to plan exquisite punishments and impossible retaliations.In imagination he had so often seen Fletcher drop dead before him, had so often struck the man down with his own hand, that there were hours when he almost believed the deed to have been done--when something like madness gripped him, and his hallucinations took the shape and colour of life itself.At such times he was conscious of the exhilaration that comes in the instants of swift action, when events move quickly, and one rises beyond the ordinary level of experience.When the real moment came--the supreme chance--he wondered if he would meet it as triumphantly as he met his dreams? Now, plodding along the rocky road, he went over again all the old schemes for the great revenge.
The small cart whirled past him, scattering dried mud drops in his face, and he caught the sound of bright girlish laughter.
Looking after it, he saw the flutter of cherry-coloured ribbons coiling outward in the wind, and he remembered, watching the gay streamers, that the only woman he had ever kissed was eating cherries at the moment.Trivial as the recollection was, it started other associations, and he followed the escaping memory of that boyish romance, blithe and short-lived, which was killed at last by a single yielded kiss.At sixteen it had seemed to him that when he caught the girl of the cherries in his arms he should hold veritable happiness; and yet afterward there was only a great heaviness and something of the repulsion that he felt to-day.Happiness was not to be found on a woman's lips he had learned this in his boyhood; and then even as the knowledge returned to him he found himself savagely regretting that he had not kissed Maria Fletcher the day he found her on his land--a kiss of anger, not of love, which she would have loathed all her life--and have remembered! To have her utterly forget him--pass on serenely into her marriage, hardly remembering that he hated her--this was the bitterest thing he had to face; but with the brutal wish, he softened in recalling the tremor of her lip as she turned away--the indignant quiver of her eyelashes.Again came the thought: "I know in spite of everything I might have loved her, and yet I know still better that it is not love, but hate I now feel." Her fragrance, floating in the sunshine, filled his nostrils, and involuntarily he glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to find a dropped handkerchief in the road.None was there--only a scattered swarm of butterflies drifting like yellow rose-leaves on the wind.
