Happily Miss Sally thought more of her present mission than of the
past errors of her people. The faster she walked the more vividly she
pictured the possible complications of this meeting. She knew the dull,
mean nature of her aunt, and the utter hopelessness of all appeal to
anything but her selfish cupidity, and saw in this fatuous essay of
Corbin only an aggravation of her worst instincts. Even the dead body
of her son would not only whet her appetite for pecuniary vengeance,
but give it plausibility in the eyes of their emotional but ignorant
neighbors. She had still less to hope from Julia Jeffcourt's more honest
and human indignation but equally bigoted and prejudiced intelligence.
It is true they were only women, and she ought to have no fear of that
physical revenge which Julia had spoken of, but she reflected that Miss
Jeffcourt's unmistakable beauty, and what was believed to be a “truly
Southern spirit,” had gained her many admirers who might easily take
her wrongs upon their shoulders. If her father had only given her that
letter before, she might have stopped Corbin's coming at all; she might
even have met him in time to hurry him and her cousin's provocative
remains out of the country. In the midst of these reflections she had
to pass the little hillside cemetery. It was a spot of great natural
beauty, cypress-shadowed and luxuriant. It was justly celebrated in
Pineville, and, but for its pretentious tombstones, might have been
peaceful and suggestive. Here she recognized a figure just turning from
its gate. It was Julia Jeffcourt.
Her first instinct--that she was too late and that her cousin had come
to the cemetery to make some arrangements for the impending burial--was,
however, quickly dissipated by the young girl's manner.
“Well, Sally Dows, YOU here! who'd have thought of seeing you to-day?
Why, Chet Brooks allowed that you danced every set last night and
didn't get home till daylight. And you--you that are going to show up
at another party to-night too! Well, I reckon I haven't got that much
ambition these times. And out with your new bonnet too.”
There was a slight curl of her handsome lip as she looked at her cousin.
She was certainly a more beautiful girl than Miss Sally; very tall, dark
and luminous of eye, with a brunette pallor of complexion, suggesting,
it was said, that remote mixture of blood which was one of the unproven
counts of Miss Miranda's indictment against her family. Miss Sally
smiled sweetly behind her big bow. “If you reckon to tie to everything
that Chet Brooks says, you'll want lots of string, and you won't be safe
then. You ought to have heard him run on about this one, and that one,
and that other one, not an hour ago in our parlor. I had to pack him
off, saying he was even making Judy's niggers tired.” She stopped and
added with polite languor, “I suppose there's no news up at yo' house
either? Everything's going on as usual--and--you get yo' California
draft regularly?”
A good deal of the white of Julia's beautiful eyes showed as she turned
indignantly on the speaker. “I wish, cousin Sally, you'd just let up
talking to me about that money. You know as well as I do that I allowed
to maw I wouldn't take a cent of it from the first! I might have had all
the gowns and bonnets”--with a look at Miss Sally's bows--“I wanted from
her; she even offered to take me to St. Louis for a rig-out--if I'd been
willing to take blood money. But I'd rather stick to this old sleazy
mou'nin' for Tom”--she gave a dramatic pluck at her faded black
skirt--“than flaunt round in white muslins and China silks at ten
dollars a yard, paid for by his murderer.”
“You know black's yo' color always,--taking in your height and
complexion, Jule,” said Miss Sally demurely, yet not without a feminine
consciousness that it really did set off her cousin's graceful figure to
perfection. “But you can't keep up this gait always. You know some day
you might come upon this Mr. Corbin.”
“He'd better not cross my path,” she said passionately.
“I've heard girls talk like that about a man and then get just green
and yellow after him,” said Miss Sally critically. “But goodness me!
speaking of meeting people reminds me I clean forgot to stop at the
stage office and see about bringing over the new overseer. Lucky I met
you, Jule! Good-by, dear. Come in to-night, and we'll all go to the
party together.” And with a little nod she ran off before her
indignant cousin could frame a suitably crushing reply to her Parthian
insinuation.
But at the stage office Miss Sally only wrote a few lines on a card, put
it in an envelope, which she addressed to Mr. Joseph Corbin, and then
seating herself with easy carelessness on a long packing-box, languidly
summoned the proprietor.
“You're always on hand yourself at Kirby station when the kyars come in
to bring passengers to Pineville, Mr. Sledge?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“Yo' haven't brought any strangers over lately?”
“Well, last week Squire Farnham of Green Ridge--if he kin be called a
stranger--as used to live in the very house yo father”--
“Yes, I know,” said Miss Sally, impatiently, “but if an ENTIRE stranger
comes to take a seat for Pineville, you ask him if that's his name,”
handing the letter, “and give it to him if it is. And--Mr. Sledge--it's
nobody's business but--yours and mine.”
“I understand, Miss Sally,” with a slow, paternal, tolerating wink.
“He'll get it, and nobody else, sure.”
“Thank you; I hope Mrs. Sledge is getting round again.”
“Pow'fully, Miss Sally.”
Having thus, as she hoped, stopped the arrival of the unhappy Corbin,
Miss Sally returned home to consider the best means of finally disposing
of him. She had insisted upon his stopping at Kirby and holding no
communication with the Jeffcourts until he heard from her, and had
strongly pointed out the hopeless infelicity of his plan. She dare
not tell her Aunt Miranda, knowing that she would be too happy to
precipitate an interview that would terminate disastrously to both
the Jeffcourts and Corbin. She might have to take her father into her
confidence,--a dreadful contingency.
She was dressed for the evening party, which was provincially early;
indeed, it was scarcely past nine o'clock when she had finished her
toilet, when there came a rap at her door. It was one of Mammy Judy's
children.
“Dey is a gemplum, Miss Sally.”
“Yes, yes,” said Miss Sally, impatiently, thinking only of her escort.
“I'll be there in a minute. Run away. He can wait.”
“And he said I was to guv yo' dis yer,” continued the little negro with
portentous gravity, presenting a card.
Miss Sally took it with a smile. It was a plain card on which was
written with a pencil in a hand she hurriedly recognized, “Joseph
Corbin.”
Miss Sally's smile became hysterically rigid, and pushing the boy aside
with a little cry, she darted along the veranda and entered the parlor
from a side door and vestibule. To her momentary relief she saw that her
friends had not yet arrived: a single figure--a stranger's--rose as she
entered.
Even in her consternation she had time to feel the added shock of
disappointment. She had always present in her mind an ideal picture of
this man whom she had never seen or even heard described. Joseph
Corbin had been tall, dark, with flowing hair and long mustache. He
had flashing fiery eyes which were capable of being subdued by a
single glance of gentleness--her own. He was tempestuous, quick, and
passionate, but in quarrel would be led by a smile. He was a combination
of an Italian brigand and a poker player whom she had once met on a
Mississippi steamboat. He would wear a broad-brimmed soft hat, a red
shirt, showing his massive throat and neck--and high boots! Alas! the
man before her was of medium height, with light close-cut hair, hollow
cheeks that seemed to have been lately scraped with a razor, and
light gray troubled eyes. A suit of cheap black, ill fitting, hastily
acquired, and provincial even for Pineville, painfully set off these
imperfections, to which a white cravat in a hopelessly tied bow
was superadded. A terrible idea that this combination of a country
undertaker and an ill-paid circuit preacher on probation was his best
holiday tribute to her, and not a funeral offering to Mr. Jeffcourt,
took possession of her. And when, with feminine quickness, she saw his
eyes wander over her own fine clothes and festal figure, and sink again
upon the floor in a kind of hopeless disappointment equal to her
own, she felt ready to cry. But the more terrible sound of laughter
approaching the house from the garden recalled her. Her friends were
coming.
“For Heaven's sake,” she broke out desperately, “didn't you get my note
at the station telling you not to come?”
His face grew darker, and then took up its look of hopeless resignation,
as if this last misfortune was only an accepted part of his greater
trouble, as he sat down again, and to Miss Sally's horror, listlessly
swung his hat to and fro under his chair.
“No,” he said, gloomily, “I didn't go to no station. I walked here all
the way from Shelbyville. I thought it might seem more like the square
thing to her for me to do. I sent HIM by express ahead in the box. It's
been at the stage office all day.”
With a sickening conviction that she had been sitting on her cousin's
body while she wrote that ill-fated card, the young girl managed to gasp
out impatiently: “But you must go--yes--go now, at once! Don't talk now,
but go.”
“I didn't come here,” he said, rising with a kind of slow dignity, “to
interfere with things I didn't kalkilate to see,” glancing again at her
dress, as the voices came nearer, “and that I ain't in touch with,--but
to know if you think I'd better bring him--or”--
He did not finish the sentence, for the door had opened suddenly, and
a half-dozen laughing girls and their escorts burst into the room.
But among them, a little haughty and still irritated from her last
interview, was her cousin Julia Jeffcourt, erect and beautiful in a
sombre silk.
“Go,” repeated Miss Sally, in an agonized whisper. “You must not be
known here.”
But the attention of Julia had been arrested by her cousin's agitation,
and her eye fell on Corbin, where it was fixed with some fatal
fascination that seemed in turn to enthrall and possess him also. To
Miss Sally's infinite dismay the others fell back and allowed these two
black figures to stand out, then to move towards each other with the
same terrible magnetism. They were so near she could not repeat her
warning to him without the others hearing it. And all hope died when
Corbin, turning deliberately towards her with a grave gesture in the
direction of Julia, said quietly:--
“Interduce me.”
Miss Sally hesitated, and then gasped hastily, “Miss Jeffcourt.”
“Yer don't say MY name. Tell her I'm Joseph Corbin of 'Frisco,
California, who killed her brother.” He stopped and turned towards her.
“I came here to try and fix things again--and I've brought HIM.”
In the wondering silence that ensued the others smiled vacantly,
breathlessly, and expectantly, until Corbin advanced and held out his
hand, when Julia Jeffcourt, drawing hers back to her bosom with the
palms outward, uttered an inarticulate cry and--and spat in his face!
With that act she found tongue--reviling him, the house that harbored
him, the insolence that presented him, the insult that had been put upon
her! “Are you men!” she added passionately, “who stand here with the
man before you that killed my brother, and see him offer me his filthy
villainous hand--and dare not strike him down!”
And they dared not. Violently, blindly, stupidly moved though all their
instincts, though they gathered hysterically around him, there was
something in his dull self-containment that was unassailable and awful.
For he wiped his face and breast with his handkerchief without a tremor,
and turned to them with even a suggestion of relief.
“She's right, gentlemen,” he said gravely. “She's right. It might have
been otherwise. I might have allowed that it might be otherwise,--but
she's right. I'm a Soth'n man myself, gentlemen, and I reckon to
understand what she has done. I killed the only man that had a right to
stand up for her, and she has now to stand up for herself. But if she
wants--and you see she allows she wants--to pass that on to some of you,
or all of you, I'm willing. As many as you like, and in what way
you like--I waive any chyce of weapon--I'm ready, gentlemen. I came
here--with HIM--for that purpose.”
Perhaps it may have been his fateful resignation; perhaps it may have
been his exceeding readiness,--but there was no response. He sat down
again, and again swung his hat slowly and gloomily to and fro under his
chair.
“I've got him in a box at the stage office,” he went on, apparently to
the carpet. “I had him dug up that I might bring him here, and mebbe
bury some of the trouble and difference along with his friends. It
might be,” he added, with a slightly glowering upward glance, as to an
overruling, but occasionally misdirecting Providence,--“it might be
from the way things are piling up on me that some one might have rung in
another corpse instead o' HIM, but so far as I can judge, allowin' for
the space of time and nat'ral wear and tear--it's HIM!”
He rose slowly and moved towards the door in a silence that was as much
the result of some conviction that any violent demonstration against him
would be as grotesque and monstrous as the situation, as of anything
he had said. Even the flashing indignation of Julia Jeffcourt seemed
to become suddenly as unnatural and incongruous as her brother's chief
mourner himself, and although she shrank from his passing figure she
uttered no word. Chester Brooks's youthful emotions, following the
expression of Miss Sally's face, lost themselves in a vague hysteric
smile, and the other gentlemen looked sheepish. Joseph Corbin halted at
the door.
“Whatever,” he said, turning to the company, “ye make up your mind to
do about me, I reckon ye'd better do it AFTER the funeral. I'M always
ready. But HE, what with being in a box and changing climate, had better
go FIRST.” He paused, and with a suggestion of delicacy in the momentary
dropping of his eyelids, added,--“for REASONS.”
He passed out through the door, on to the portico and thence into the
garden. It was noticed at the time that the half-dozen hounds lingering
there rushed after him with their usual noisy demonstrations, but that
they as suddenly stopped, retreated violently to the security of the
basement, and there gave relief to their feelings in a succession of
prolonged howls.