CHAPTER VIII.How Christopher Comes Into His Revenge "So this was Maria's trick all along," he repeated, as he lurched out into the road."This was what she had schemed for from the beginning--this was what her palavering and her protestations meant.Oh, it had been a deep game from the first, only he had been too much of a blind fool to see the truth." A hundred facts arose to drive in the discovery; a hundred trivial details now bristled with importance.Why had she been so willing--so eager, even--to give away her little property, unless she intended to divert him with the crumbs while she reached for the whole loaf?
Why, again, had she shrunk so from mentioning him to his grandfather? And why, still further, had she always fearfully postponed a meeting between the two? He remembered suddenly that she had once drawn Molly behind the trees when the old man passed along the road.Poor, defrauded Molly! Forgetting his bitter quarrel with her, he was ready to fall upon her neck in maudlin sympathy.
Yes, it was all plain now--as clear as day.He saw one by one each devilish move that she had made, and he meant to pay her back for all before the night was over.He would tell her what he thought of her, freely, fully, in words that she would never forget.The names that he would use, the curses he would utter, spun deliriously in his head, and as he went on he found himself speaking his phrases aloud to the darkness, trying upon the silence the effect of each blighting sentence.
The lights of the Hall twinkled presently among the trees, and, crossing the lawn, he crept into the little area under the back steps.If Maria was not in the kitchen, the servant would be, he argued, and he would send up a peremptory summons which would bring her down upon the instant.It was not late enough for her to be in bed, at least, and he chuckled over the thought of the sleepless night which she would spend.
Pushing back the door cautiously on its old, rusty hinges, he entered on tip-toe and glanced suspiciously around.The room was empty, but a lamp with a smoked chimney burned upon the table, and there were the glimmering embers of a wood fire in the stove.
It was just as he had left it the evening before, and this aroused in him a feeling of surprise, so long a stretch appeared to cover the last twenty-four hours.The same basket of chicken feathers was in the sagging split-bottomed chair, the same pile of black walnuts lay on the hearth, and the rusted hammer was still lying where he had dropped it upon the bricks.Even the smell was the same--a mixture of baked bread and burned feathers.
Going to the door that led into the house, he opened it and looked up the dark staircase; then a sound reached him from the dining-room, and with nervous shiver he turned away and came back to the stove.A dread paralysed him lest the meeting with Maria should be delayed until his courage oozed out of him, and to nerve himself for the encounter he summoned to mind all the evidence, which gathered in a cloud of witnesses, to prove her treachery.Once it occurred to him that after a few minutes of waiting he might tighten the screw upon his nerves and so pluck up the audacity, if not the resolution, to ascend the stair boldly and denounce her in the presence of his grandfather.But the memory of Fletcher's face wagged before him, and, quaking with terror, he huddled with open palms above the stove.Then, pacing slowly up and down the room, he set to work frantically to lash himself into the drunken bravado which he miscalled courage.
Of a sudden his hunger assailed him, violent, convulsive, and, going over to the tin safe, he rummaged among the cold scraps he found there, devouring greedily the food which lead been set by for the hounds.A bottle of Miss Saidie's raspberry vinegar was hidden in one corner, and he tore the paper label from the cork and drank like a man who perishes from thirst.His energy, which had evaporated from fatigue and hunger, surged back in spasms of anger, and as he turned away, invigorated, from the safe, he realised as he had never done before the full measure of his rage against Maria.At the moment, had she come in upon him, he felt that he could have struck her in the face.
But she did not come, and the slow minutes fretted him in their passage.A flame shot up in the stove, and, catching a knot of resinous pine, burned steadily, licking patiently about the fading embers.The air became charged again with the odour of burned feathers, and he saw that a handful, with the dried blood of the fowl still adhering to them, had been scattered upon the ashes.As he idly noted the colours of red and black, he remembered with bitterness that he had raised game-cocks once when he was a boy at the Hall, and that Maria had smashed a nestful of his eggs in a fit of passion.The incident swelled to enormous proportions in his thoughts, and he determined that he would remind her of it in the interview that was before them.
The door into the house creaked suddenly behind him; he wheeled about nervously, and then stood with hanging jaws staring into the face of Fletcher.
"So it is you, is it?" said the old man, raising the stick he carried."So it is you, as I suspected--you darn rascal!"But the power of speech had departed from Will in the presence that he dreaded, and he stood clutching tightly to his harvest hat, and shaking his head as if to deny the obvious fact of his own identity.
"I thought it was you," pursued Fletcher, licking his dry lips.
"I heard a noise, and I picked up my stick, thinking it was you.
I'll have no thieving beggars on my place, I tell you, so the quicker you git off the better.When were you here last, I'd like to know?""Yesterday," answered Will, speaking the truth from sheer physical inability to frame a lie."I came to see Maria.She's cheated me--she's cheated me all along.""Then she lied," said Fletcher softly."Then she lied and Ididn't know it."
