第51章 THE TEMPTATION(21)

Once in his room, he threw off his coat and sat down upon the side of his narrow bed, glancing contemptuously at his bare brown arms, which showed through the openings in his blue shirt sleeves.He was still smarting from the memory of the sudden selfconsciousness he had felt downstairs, and a pricking sensitiveness took possession of him, piercing like needles through the boorish indifference he had worn.All at once he realised that he was ashamed of himself--ashamed of his ignorance, his awkwardness, his brutality--and with the shame there awoke the slow anger of a sullen beast.Fate had driven him like a whipped hound to the kennel, but he could still snarl back his defiance from the shadow of his obscurity.The strong masculine beauty of his face--the beauty, as Cynthia had said, of the young David--confronted him in the little greenish mirror above the bureau, and in the dull misery of the eyes he read those higher possibilities, which even to-day he could not regard without a positive pang.What he might have been seemed forever struggling in his look with what he was, like the Scriptural wrestle between the angel of the Lord and the brute.The soul, distorted, bruised, defeated, still lived within him, and it was this that brought upon him those hours of mortal anguish which he had so vainly tried to drown in his glass.From the mirror his gaze passed to his red and knotted hand, with its blunted nails, and the straight furrow grew deeper between his eyebrows.He remembered suddenly that his earliest ambition--the ambition of his childhood--had been that of a gentlemanly scholar of the old order.He had meant to sit in a library and read Horace, or to complete the laborious translation of the "Iliad" which his father had left unfinished.Then his studies had ended abruptly with the Greek alphabet, and from the library he had passed out to the plough.In the years of severe physical labour which followed he had felt the spirit of the student go out of him forever, and after a few winter nights, when he fell asleep over his books, he had sunk slowly to the level of the small tobacco growers among whom he lived.With him also was the curse of apathy--that hereditary instinct to let the single throw decide the issue, so characteristic of the reckless Blakes.For more than two hundred years his people had been gay and careless livers on this very soil; among them all he knew of not one who had gone without the smallest of his desires, nor of one who had permitted his left hand to learn what his right one cast away.

Big, blithe, mettlesome, they passed before him in a long, comely line, flushed with the pleasant follies which had helped to sap the courage in their descendants' veins.

At first he had made a pitiable attempt to remain "within his class," but gradually, as time went on, this, too, had left him, and in the end he had grown to feel a certain pride in the ignorance he had formerly despised--a clownish scorn of anything above the rustic details of his daily life.There were days even when he took a positive pleasure in the degree of his abasement, when but for his blind mother he would have gone dirty, spoken in dialect, and eaten with the hounds.What he dreaded most now were the rare moments of illumination in which he beheld his degradation by a blaze of light--moments such as this when he seemed to stand alone upon the edge of the world, with the devil awaiting him when he should turn at last.Years ago he had escaped these periods by strong physical exertion, working sometimes in the fields until he dropped upon the earth and lay like a log for hours.Later, he had yielded to drink when the darkness closed over him, and upon several occasions he had sat all night with a bottle of whisky in Tom Spade's store.Both methods he felt now to be ineffectual; fatigue could not deaden nor could whisky drown the bitterness of his soul.One thing remained, and that was to glut his hatred until it should lie quiet like a gorged beast.

Steps sounded all at once upon the staircase, and after a moment the door opened and Cynthia entered.

"Did you see Fletcher's boy, Christopher?" she asked."His grandfather was over here looking for him.""Fletcher over here? Well, of all the impudence!""He was very uneasy, but he stopped long enough to ask me to persuade you to part with the farm.He'd give three thousand dollars down for it, he said."She dusted the bureau abstractedly with her checked apron and then stood looking wistfully into the mirror.

"Is that so? If he'd give me three million I wouldn't take it,"answered Christopher.

"It seems a mistake, dear," said Cynthia softly; "of course, I'd hate to oblige Fletcher, too, but we are so poor, and the money would mean so much to us.I used to feel as you do, but somehow Iseem all worn out now--soul as well as body.I haven't the strength left to hate.""Well, I have," returned Christopher shortly, "and I'll have it when I'm gasping over my last breath.You needn't bother about that business, Cynthia; I can keep up the family record on my own account.What's the proverb about us--'a Blake can hate twice as long as most men can love'--that's my way, you know.""You didn't finish it," said Cynthia, turning from the bureau;"it's all downstairs in the 'Life of Bolivar Blake'; you remember Colonel Byrd got it off in a toast at a wedding breakfast, and Great-grandfather Bolivar was so proud of it he had it carved above his library door.""High and mighty old chap, wasn't he? But what's the rest?""What he really said was: 'A Blake can hate twice as long as most men can love, and love twice as long as most men can live.'"Christopher looked down suddenly at his great bronzed hands."Oh, he needn't have stuck the tail of it on," he remarked carelessly;"but the first part has a bully sound."