第21章 THE INHERITANCE(21)

VIII.Treats of a Passion that is Not Love Over a distant meadow fluted the silver whistle of a partridge, and Christopher, lifting his head, noted involuntarily the direction of the sound.A covey was hatching down by the meadow brook, he knew--for not a summer mating nor a hidden nest had escaped his eyes--and he wondered vaguely if the young birds were roaming into Fletcher's wheatfield.Then, with a single vigorous movement as if he were settling his thoughts upon him, he crossed the yard, leaped the fence by the barnyard, and started briskly along the edge of a little cattle pasture, where a strange bull bellowed in the shadow of a walnut-tree.At the bottom of the pasture a crumbling rail fence divided his land from Fletcher's, and as he looked over the festoons of poisonous ivy he saw Fletcher himself overseeing the last planting of his tobacco.For a time Christopher watched them as through a mist--watched the white and the black labourers, the brown furrows in which the small holes were bored, the wilted plants thrown carelessly in place and planted with two quick pressures of a bare, earth-begrimed foot.He smelled the keen odours released by the sunshine from the broken soil; he saw the standing beads of sweat on the faces of the planters--Negroes with swollen lips and pleasant eyes like those of kindly animals--and he heard the coarse, hectoring voice of Fletcher, who stood midway of the naked ground.To regard the man as a mere usurper of his land had been an article in the religious creed the child had learned, and as he watched him now, bearded, noisy, assured of his possessions, the sight lashed him like the strokes of a whip on bleeding flesh.In the twenty-five years of his life he had grown fairly gluttonous of hate--had tended it with a passion that was like that of love.Now he felt that he had never really had enough of it--had never feasted on the fruit of it till he was satisfied--had never known the delight of wallowing in it until to-day.Deep-rooted like an instinct as the feeling was, he knew now that there had been hours when, for very weakness of his nature, he had almost forgotten that he meant to pay back Fletcher in the end, when it seemed, after all, easier merely to endure and forget and have it done.Still keeping upon his own land, he turned presently and followed a little brook that crossed a meadow where mixed wild flowers were strewn loosely in the grass.The bull still bellowed in the shadow of the walnut-tree, and he found himself listening with pure delight to the savage cries.Reaching at last a point where the brook turned westward at the foot of a low green hill, he threw himself over the dividing rail fence, and came, at the end of a minute's hurried walk, to the old Blake graveyard, midway of one of Fletcher's fallow fields.The gate was bricked up, after the superstitious custom of many country burial places, but he climbed the old moss-grown wall, where poisonous ivy grew rank and venomous, and landing deep in the periwinkle that carpeted the ground, made his way rapidly to the flat oblong slab beneath which his father lay.The marble was discoloured by long rains and stained with bruised periwinkle, and the shallow lettering was hidden under a fall of dried needles from a little stunted fir-tree; but, leaning over, he carefully swept the dust away and loosened the imprisoned name which seemed to hover like a spiritual presence upon the air.

"HERE LIES ALL THAT IS MORTAL OF CHRISTOPHER BLAKE, WHO DIED INTHE HOPE OF A JOYFUL RESURRECTION, APRIL 12, 1786, AGED 70 YEARS.

INTO THY HANDS, O LORD, I COMMIT MY SPIRIT."Around him there were other graves--graves of all dead Blakes for two hundred years, and the flat tombstones were crowded so thickly together that it seemed as if the dead must lie beneath them row on row.It was all in deep shadow, fallen slabs, rank periwinkle, dust and mould--no cheerful sunshine had ever penetrated through the spreading cedars overhead.Life was here, but it was the shy life of wild creatures, approaching man only when he had returned to earth.A mocking-bird purled a love note in the twilight of a great black cedar, a lizard glided like a gray shadow along one of the overturned slabs, and at his entrance a rabbit had started from the ivy on his father's grave.

To climb the overgrown wall and lie upon the periwinkle was like entering, for a time, the world of shades--a world far removed from the sunny meadow and the low green hill.

With his head pillowed upon his father's grave, Christopher stretched himself at full length on the ground and stared straight upward at the darkbrowed cedars.It was such an hour as he allowed himself at long intervals when his inheritance was heavy upon him and his disordered mind needed to retreat into a city of refuge.As a child he had often come to this same spot to dream hopefully of the future, unboylike dreams in which the spirit of revenge wore the face of happiness.Then, with the inconsequence of childhood, he had pictured Fletcher gasping beneath his feet--trampled out like a worm, when he was big enough to take his vengeance and come again into his own.Mere physical strength seemed to him at that age the sole thing needed--he wanted then only the brawny arm and the heart bound by triple brass.