"In that case," pursued Carraway, feeling as if he were dashing his head against a wall, "I shall address myself to you in the briefest terms.The place, I suppose, as it stands, is not worth much to-day.Even good land is cheap, and this is poor."Again Christopher nodded, intent upon his whittling."I reckon it wouldn't bring more than nine hundred," he responded coolly.
"Then my position is easy, for I am sure you will consider favourably the chance to sell at treble its actual value.I am authorised to offer you three thousand dollars for the farm."For a moment Christopher stared at him in silence, then, "What in the devil do you want with it?" he demanded.
"I am not acting for myself in the matter," returned the lawyer, after a short hesitation."The offer is made through me by another.That it is to your advantage to accept it is my honest conviction."Christopher tossed the bit of wood at a bedraggled drake that waddled off, quacking angrily.
"Then it's Fletcher behind you," he said in the same cool tones.
"It seems to me that is neither here nor there.Naturally Mr.
Fletcher is very anxious to secure the land.As it stands, it is a serious inconvenience to him, of course."Laughing, Christopher snapped the blade of his knife.
"Well, you may tell him from me," he retorted, "that just as long as it is 'a serious inconvenience to him' it shall stand as it is.Why, man, if Fletcher wanted that broken wheelbarrow enough to offer me three thousand dollars for it, I wouldn't let him have it.The only thing I'd leave him free to take, if I could help it, is the straight road to damnation!"His voice, for all the laughter, sounded brutal, and Carraway, gazing at him in wonder, saw his face grow suddenly lustful like that of an evil deity.The beauty was still there, blackened and distorted, a beauty that he felt to be more sinister than ugliness.The lawyer was in the presence of a great naked passion, and involuntarily he lowered his eyes.
"I don't think he understands your attitude," he said quietly;"it seems to him--and to me also, I honestly affirm--that you would reap an advantage as decided as his own.""Nothing is to my advantage, I tell you, that isn't harm to him.
He knows it if he isn't as big a fool as he is a rascal.""Then I may presume that you are entirely convinced in your own mind that you have a just cause for the stand you take?""Cause!" the word rapped out like an oath."He stole my home, Itell you; he stole every inch of land I owned, and every penny.
Where did he get the money to buy the place--he a slave-overseer?
Where did he get it, I ask, unless he had been stealing for twenty years?""It looks ugly, I confess," admitted Carraway; "but were there no books--no accounts kept?""Oh, he settled that, of course.When my father died, and we asked for the books, where were they?
Burned, he said--burned in the old office that the Yankees fired.
He's a scoundrel, I tell you, sir, and I know him to the core.
He's a rotten scoundrel!"
Carraway caught his breath quickly and drew back as if he had touched unwittingly a throbbing canker.To his oversensitive nature these primal emotions had a crudeness that was vulgar in its unrestraint.He beheld it all--the old wrong and the new hatred--in a horrid glare of light, a disgraceful blaze of trumpets.Here there was no cultured evasion of the conspicuous vice--none of the refinements even of the Christian ethics--it was all raw and palpitating humanity.
"Then my mission is quite useless," he confessed."I can only add that I am sorrier than I can say sorry for the whole thing, too.
If my services could be of any use to you I should not hesitate to offer them, but so far as I see there is absolutely nothing to be done.An old crime, as you know, very often conforms to an appearance of virtue."He held out his hand, Christopher shook it, and then the lawyer went back into the house to bid good-by to Mrs.Blake.When he came out a few moments later, and passed through the whitewashed gate into the sunken road, he saw that Christopher was still standing where he had left him, the golden afternoon around him, and the bedraggled ducks paddling at his feet.
