had every chance to prove it, Mara,” Major Tillyard said wearily. “I admire your loyalty, my dear—but it’s badly out of keeping with the facts. We gave—”
Irene put a delicate white hand on his arm.
“Please don’t go into that again! Mara’s just a silly child. She’s hardly likely to marry a penniless boy. She can’t even wash out her own stockings.—Sit down, Mara.”
Mara stood a moment, choked and irresolute, turned with a stifled sob and groped blindly toward the door.
“Come back to the table, Mara,” Irene said—quietly, but the velvet glove sort of thing if I ever heard it.
“Oh, let the kid go, Mother,” Dan put in abruptly.
Rick Winthrop leaned forward.
“It’s all right with you if she marries a thief, I suppose? You’ll always get yours, in spite of jailbirds and . . . fortune hunters.”
He looked at Sidney Tillyard, his eyes sullen, his face flushed.
“Now you’re being offensive, Rick!” Irene said sharply.
Dan looked at me, his lips twisted in a bitter smile. He got up.
“The council of war doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere,” he said. “Good night, Mother. I’ll . . . see you in the morning.—What about a stroll in the rain, Grace?”
Irene nodded to me, and I went out with him. He opened the big front door with its smooth rubbed pine panels between fluted pilasters, with their carved acanthus capitals and we stepped outside onto the porch. The wind still rocked the branches of the old tulip poplars beyond the lawns, and shivered down the box alleys. The broad waters of the Potomac were dark except for the lights of a single river boat moving slowly on its way to the Chesapeake. The rain came in sharp gusts, wetting our faces. But the air was clean again, not sultry and leaden, as it had been in Georgetown . . . or charged with bitterness as it had been inside those lovely old mauve brick walls.
Neither of us spoke. There seemed after all so pitifully little to say. Dan lighted a cigarette. As he tossed the match on the gravel path he raised his head, listening. I heard a faint sound coming from the dining room end of the house. It stopped then, as abruptly as it had begun, and the figure of a man, dressed in work overalls, a battered gray hat pulled down to keep the rain from his face, came out of the shadows. He was walking on the grass, not moving stealthily, but walking so that his feet were noiseless on the sodden lawn.
He stopped when he saw us, and hesitated. Then he recognized Dan and touched his hat.
“Mr. Dan—certainly mighty glad to see you back.”
“Oh hello, Mr. Keane.”
Dan strode across the porch and shook hands with the man who had been the tenant farmer of Romney since Dan’s father had bought it, when he was still quite a small boy.
“You remember Mr. Keane, don’t you, Grace?—This is Mrs. Latham.”
“Howdy, Miz’ Latham. Ain’t seen you down this way for a long time.”
Mr. Keane wiped his hand on the seat of his overalls and held it out to me. It was wet, hard and rough, but it was a good hand, with a strong sure grip that had held many a plough to a straight deep furrow. And I don’t know why, during all that conversation at the table—even with Mara’s outburst over Romney and its tenant farmer—I had never thought of Alan Keane as being Mr. Keane’s son. Mr. Keane was as much a part of Romney as the white pillared portico and the boxwood alleys and the pineapples on the gate posts. And Alan had gradually stopped being a part of it, since he’d gone to high school and to college—I’d subscribed to a magazine I’d never heard of, and never got, because Irene was helping him out—and then to the bank in Port Tobacco, and after that to prison.
Mr. Keane glanced uneasily at the dining room windows.
“Is Miz’ Winthrop through her supper?” he asked.
“Just about,” Dan said. “Anything I could do for you?”
Mr. Keane fumbled with the stumpy pipe in his hands.
“I jus’ wanted to see Miz’ Winthrop about a little matter, is all. I jus’ thought I’d like to see her, if she wasn’t too busy.”
“You’d better wait till morning, unless it’s pretty important,” Dan said. “She’s just been having a run-in with Rick.”
Mr. Keane hesitated. “That ain’t hard to do, these days,” he said slowly. Then he added, almost painfully, it seemed to me, “I’d mighty like to see Miz’ Winthrop, if she ain’t too busy.”
“O. K.” Dan turned and strode across the verandah and inside.
Suddenly out of the wet night came that ghastly eerie shriek again . . . and again. The gooseflesh rose on my arms.
“What is that, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Keane?” I demanded.
“That’s them fancy buzzards of Miz’ Winthrop,” he said in his slow drawl. “They make a heap of racket, about this time.”
He lapsed into silence, and we stood there, I rather uneasily, because he kept looking so anxiously at the door. Finally I asked him how his tobacco was, and if he thought the storm had hurt it; but before he could answer Irene Winthrop’s voice came, high-pitched and clear as a bell, from the drawing room. A window must have blown open in the wind, and the heavy gold damask curtains had been drawn, so they wouldn’t, I supposed, know it was open. And for the first time a sharp torn edge was audible under the gentle imperviousness of that lovely lilting voice.
“Tell Mr. Keane I don’t care to see him. The matter’s settled, and very liberally, I do think.”
Dan’s voice was charged with incredulity, and anger.
“You mean you’re kicking Mr. Keane off the place, after he’s been here half of his life?”
“The matter’s quite settled, Dan. Mr. Keane has been taken very good care of . . .”
Irene’s voice was suave, and final. Then I could hear Major Tillyard.
“You’re making a big mistake, Irene. Keane’s the best farmer in Southern Maryland. He’s made Romney pay when every other farm in the county is in the red, and the land’s better today than it was ten years ago. You’ll never get another tenant that touches him.”
“Money, money!” Irene moaned plaintively. “That’s all any of you think of! What about Mara! Oh, Rick’s perfectly right—if I’d sent Mr. Keane off the place four years ago, Alan would never have come back here, and we’d never have had any of this nonsense of Mara’s marrying a . . . a criminal!”
I stared helplessly at the farmer standing there by me, his heavy boots clogged with sand from the tobacco fields, his gnarled hands making futile helpless gestures, his face under his dripping tattered hat numb and stupid with pain.
And we just stood there for an instant, until he said, very simply, “I reckon she don’t want to see me,” and turned back the
