Bricks Without Straw Part 47

"Yet I should have known better. I should have trusted you more,"

said she, sobbing.

"Well, do not mind it," he said, soothingly. "But if my explanation is thus far sufficient, will you allow me to sit down while I tell you the rest? The story is a somewhat long one."

"Oh, pray do, Mr. Le Moyne. Excuse my rudeness as well as my anger.

Please be seated and let me take your hat."

She took the hat and laid it on a table at the side of the room, and then returned and listened to his story. He told her all that he had told his mother the night before, explaining such things as he thought she might not fully understand. Then he showed her the pocket-book and the will, which he had brought with him for that purpose.

At first she listened to what he said with a constrained and embarra.s.sed air. He had not proceeded far, however, before she began to manifest a lively interest in his words. She leaned forward and gazed into his face with an absorbed earnestness that awakened his surprise. Two or three times she reached out her hand, and her lips moved, as though she would interrupt him. He stopped; but, without speaking, she nodded for him to go on. When he handed her the pocket-book and the will, she took them with a trembling hand and examined them with the utmost care. The student-lamp had been lighted before his story was ended. Her face was in the soft light which came through the porcelain shade, but her hands were in the circle of bright light that escaped beneath it. He noticed that they trembled so that they could scarcely hold the paper she was trying to read. He asked if he should not read it for her. She handed him the will, but kept the pocketbook tightly clasped in both hands, with the rude scrawl,

MARBLEHEAD, Ma.s.s.,

in full view. She listened nervously to the reading, never once looking up. When he had finished, she said,

"And you say the land mentioned there is the plantation you now occupy?"

"It embraces my mother's plantation and much more. Indeed, this very plantation of Red Wing, except the little tract around the house here, is a part of it. The Red Wing Ordinary tract is mentioned as one of those which adjoins it upon the west. This is the west line, and the house at Mulberry Hill is very near the eastern edge.

It is a narrow tract, running down on this side the river until it comes to the big bend near the ford, which it crosses, and keeps on to the eastward.

"It is a large belt, though I do not suppose it was then of any great value--perhaps not worth more than a s.h.i.+lling an acre. It is almost impossible to realize how cheap land was in this region at that time. A man of moderate wealth might have secured almost a county. Especially was that the case with men who bought up what was termed "Land Scrip" at depreciated rates, and then entered lands and paid for them with it at par."

"Was that the way this was bought?" she asked.

"I cannot tell," he replied. "I immediately employed Mr. Pardee to look the matter up, and it seems from the records that an entry had been made some time before, by one Paul Cresson, which was by him a.s.signed to James Richards. I am inclined to think that it was a part of the Crown grant to Lord Granville, which had not been alienated before the Revolution, and of which the State claimed the fee afterward by reason of his adhesion to the Crown. The question of the right of such alien enemies to hold under Crown grants was not then determined, and I suppose the lands were rated very low by reason of this uncertainty in the t.i.tle."

"Do you think--that--that this will is genuine?" she asked, with her white fingers knotted about the brown old pocket-book.

"I have no doubt about its proving to be genuine. That is evident upon its face. I hope there may be something to show that my grandfather did not act dishonorably," he replied.

"But suppose--suppose there should not be; what would be the effect?"

"Legally, Mr. Pardee says, there is little chance that any valid claim can be set up under it. The probabilities are, he says, that the lapse of time will bar any such claim. He also says that it is quite possible that the devisee may have died before coming of age to take under the will, and the widow, also, before that time; in which case, under the terms of the will, it would have fallen to my grandfather."

"You are not likely to lose by it then, in any event?"

"If it should prove that there are living heirs whose claims are not barred by time, then, of course, they will hold, not only our plantation, but also the whole tract. In that case, I shall make it the business of my life to acquire enough to reimburse those who have purchased of my grandfather, and who will lose by this discovery."

"But you are not bound to do that?" she asked, in surprise.

"Not legally. Neither are we bound to give up the plantation if the heir is legally estopped. But I think, and my mother agrees with me, that if heirs are found who cannot recover the land by reason of the lapse of time, even then, honor requires the surrender of what we hold."

"And you would give up your home?"

"I should gladly do so, if I might thereby right a wrong committed by an ancestor."

"But your mother, Hesden, what of her?"

"She would rather die than do a dishonorable thing."

"Yes--yes; but--you know--"

"Yes, I know that she is old and an invalid, and that I am young and--and unfortunate; but I will find a way to maintain her without keeping what we had never any right to hold."

"You have never known the hards.h.i.+p of self-support!" she said.

"I shall soon learn," he answered, with a shrug.

She sprang up and walked quickly across the room. Her hands were clasped in front of her, the backs upward and the nails digging into the white flesh. Hesden wondered a little at her excitement.

"Thank G.o.d! thank G.o.d!" she exclaimed at last, as she sank again into her chair, and pressed her clasped hands over her eyes.

"Why do you say that?" he asked, curiously.

"Because you--because I--I hardly know," she stammered.

She looked at him a moment, her face flus.h.i.+ng and paling by turns, and stretching out her hand to him suddenly across the table, she said, looking him squarely in the face:

"Hesden Le Moyne, you are a brave man!"

He took the hand in his own and pressed it to his lips, which trembled as they touched it.

"Miss Mollie," he said, tenderly, "will you forgive my not coming before?"

"If you will pardon my lack of faith in you."

"You see," he said, "that my duty for the present is to my mother and the name I bear.

"And mine," she answered, "is to the poor people whose wrongs I have witnessed."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I mean that I will give myself to the task of finding a refuge for those who have suffered such terrible evils as we have witnessed here at Red Wing."

"You will leave here, then?"

"In a day or two."

"To return--when?"

"Never."

Their hands were still clasped across the narrow table. He looked into her eyes, and saw only calm, unflinching resolution. It piqued his self-love that she should be so unmoved. Warmly as he really loved her, self-sacrificing as he felt himself to be in giving her up, he could not yet rid himself of the thought of her Northern birth, and felt annoyed that she should excel him in the gentle quality of self control. He had no idea that he would ever meet her again. He had made up his mind to leave her out of his life forever, though he could not cast her out of his heart. And yet, although he had no right to expect it, he somehow felt disappointed that she showed no more regret. He had not quite looked for her to be so calm, and he was almost annoyed by it; so dropping her hand, he said, weakly,

"Shall I never see you again?"

"Perhaps"--quietly.