The Deliverance | Page 8

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. A slight 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