CHAPTER II.The Owner of Blake Hall As they followed the descending road between flowering chestnuts, Blake Hall rose gradually into fuller view, its great oaks browned by the approaching twilight and the fading after-glow reflected in a single visible pane.Seen close at hand, the house presented a cheerful spaciousness of front--a surety of light and air--produced in part by the clean white, Doric columns of the portico and in part by the ample slope of shaven lawn studded with reds of brightly blooming flowers.From the smoking chimneys presiding over the ancient roof to the hospitable steps leading from the box-bordered walk below, the outward form of the dwelling spoke to the imaginative mind of that inner spirit which had moulded it into a lasting expression of a racial sentiment, as if the Virginia creeper covering the old brick walls had wreathed them in memories as tenacious as itself.
For more than two hundred years Blake Hall had stood as the one great house in the county--a manifestation in brick and mortar of the hereditary greatness of the Blakes.To Carraway, impersonal as his interest was, the acknowledgment brought a sudden vague resentment, and for an instant he bit his lip and hung irresolute, as if more than half-inclined to retrace his steps.Aslight thing decided him--the gaiety of a boy's laugh that floated from one of the lower rooms and swinging his stick briskly to add weight to his determination, he ascended the broad steps and lifted the old brass knocker.A moment later the door was opened by a large mulatto woman, in a soiled apron, who took his small hand-bag from him and, when he asked for Mr.Fletcher, led him across the great hall into the unused drawing-room.
The shutters were closed, and as she flung them back on their rusty hinges the pale June twilight entered with the breath of mycrophylla roses.In the scented dusk Carraway stared about the desolate, crudely furnished room, which gave back to his troubled fancy the face of a pitiable, dishonoured corpse.The soul of it was gone forever--that peculiar spirit of place which makes every old house the guardian of an inner life--the keeper of a family's ghost.What remained was but the outer husk, the disfigured frame, upon which the newer imprint seemed only a passing insult.
On the high wainscoted walls he could still trace the vacant dust-marked squares where the Blake portraits had once hung--lines that the successive scrubbings of fifteen years had not utterly effaced.A massive mahogany sofa, carved to represent a horn of plenty, had been purchased, perhaps at a general sale of the old furniture, with several quaint rosewood chairs and a rare cabinet of inlaid woods.For the rest, the later additions were uniformly cheap and ill-chosen--a blue plush "set," bought, possibly, at a village store, a walnut table with a sallow marble top, and several hard engravings of historic subjects.
When the lawyer turned from a curious inspection of these works of art, he saw that only a curtain of flimsy chintz, stretched between a pair of fluted columns, separated him from the adjoining room, where a lamp, with lowered wick, was burning under a bright red shade.After a moment's hesitation he drew the curtain aside and entered what he took at once to be the common living-room of the Fletcher family.
Here the effect was less depressing, though equally uninteresting--a paper novel or two on the big Bible upon the table combined, indeed, with a costly piano in one corner, to strike a note that was entirely modern.The white crocheted tidies on the chair-backs, elaborated with endless patience out of innumerable spools of darning cotton, lent a feminine touch to the furniture, which for an instant distracted Carraway's mental vision from the impending personality of Fletcher himself.He remembered now that there was a sister whom he had heard vaguely described by the women of his family as "quite too hopeless," and a granddaughter of whom he knew merely that she had for years attended an expensive school somewhere in the North.The grandson he recalled, after a moment, more distinctly, as a pretty, undeveloped boy in white pinafores, who had once accompanied Fletcher upon a hurried visit to the town.The gay laugh had awakened the incident in his mind, and he saw again the little cleanly clad figure perched upon his desk, nibbling bakers' buns, while he transacted a tedious piece of business with the vulgar grandfather.
He was toying impatiently with these recollections when his attention was momentarily attracted by the sound of Fletcher's burly tones on the rear porch just beyond the open window.
"I tell you, you've set all the niggers agin me, and I can't get hands to work the crops.""That's your lookout, of course," replied a voice, which he associated at once with young Blake."I told you I'd work three days because I wanted the ready money; I've got it, and my time is my own again.""But I say my tobacco's got to get into the ground this week--it's too big for the plant-bed a'ready, and with three days of this sun the earth'll be dried as hard as a rock.""There's no doubt of it, I think."
"And it's all your blamed fault," burst out the other angrily;"you've gone and turned them all agin me--white and black alike.
Why, it's as much as I can do to get a stroke of honest labour in this nigger-ridden country."Christopher laughed shortly.
"There is no use blaming the Negroes," he said, and his pronunciation of the single word would have stamped him in Virginia as of a different class from Fletcher; "they're usually ready enough to work if you treat them decently.""Treat them!" began Fletcher, and Carraway was about to fling open the shutters, when light steps passed quickly along the hall and he heard the rustle of a woman's silk dress against the wainscoting.
