“This looks worse than it is,” observed Dr. McGuire, laying the hero upon the lounge.
“Some hot water, please.”
Nevertheless, it took two hours to bring him round.
Every one spoke highly of the horse.
“He had more sense than the nigger,” said Gant, wetting his thumb.
But all this, as Eliza knew in her heart, was part of the plan of the Dark Sisters.
The entrails had been woven and read long since: the frail shell of skull which guarded life, and which might have been crushed as easily as a man breaks an egg, was kept intact.
But Eugene carried the mark of the centaur for many years, though the light had to fall properly to reveal it.
When he was older, he wondered sometimes if the Hilliards had issued from their high place when he had so impiously disturbed the order of the manor.
He never asked, but he thought not: he imagined them, at the most, as standing superbly by a drawn curtain, not quite certain what had happened, but feeling that it was something unpleasant, with blood in it.
Shortly after this, Mr. Hilliard had a “No–Trespassing” sign staked up in the lot.
5
Luke got well after cursing doctor, nurse, and family for several weeks: it was stubborn typhoid.
Gant was now head of a numerous family, which rose ladderwise from infancy to the adolescent Steve — who was eighteen — and the maidenly Daisy.
She was seventeen and in her last year at high school.
She was a timid, sensitive girl, looking like her name — Daisy-ish industrious and thorough in her studies: her teachers thought her one of the best students they had ever known.
She had very little fire, or denial in her; she responded dutifully to instructions; she gave back what had been given to her.
She played the piano without any passionate feeling for the music; but she rendered it honestly with a beautiful rippling touch.
And she practised hours at a time.
It was apparent, however, that Steve was lacking in scholarship.
When he was fourteen, he was summoned by the school principal to his little office, to take a thrashing for truancy and insubordination.
But the spirit of acquiescence was not in him: he snatched the rod from the man’s hand, broke it, smote him solidly in the eye, and dropped gleefully eighteen feet to the ground.
This was one of the best things he ever did: his conduct in other directions was less fortunate.
Very early, as his truancy mounted, and after he had been expelled, and as his life hardened rapidly in a defiant viciousness, the antagonism between the boy and Gant grew open and bitter.
Gant recognized perhaps most of his son’s vices as his own: there was little, however, of his redeeming quality. Steve had a piece of tough suet where his heart should have been.
Of them all, he had had very much the worst of it.
Since his childhood he had been the witness of his father’s wildest debauches.
He had not forgotten.
Also, as the oldest, he was left to shift for himself while Eliza’s attention focussed on her younger children.
She was feeding Eugene at her breast long after Steve had taken his first two dollars to the ladies of Eagle Crescent.
He was inwardly sore at the abuse Gant heaped on him; he was not insensitive to his faults, but to be called a “good-for-nothing bum,” “a worthless degenerate,” “a pool-room loafer,” hardened his outward manner of swagger defiance.
Cheaply and flashily dressed, with peg-top yellow shoes, flaring striped trousers, and a broad-brimmed straw hat with a colored band, he would walk down the avenue with a preposterous lurch, and a smile of strained assurance on his face, saluting with servile cordiality all who would notice him.
And if a man of property greeted him, his lacerated but overgrown vanity would seize the crumb, and he would boast pitifully at home:
“They all know Little Stevie!
He’s got the respect of all the big men in this town, all right, all right!
Every one has a good word for Little Stevie except his own people.
Do you know what J.
T.
Collins said to me today?”
“What say?
Who’s that?
Who’s that?” asked Eliza with comic rapidity, looking up from her darning.
“J.
T.
Collins — that’s who!
He’s only worth about two hundred thousand.
‘Steve,’ he said, just like that, ‘if I had your brains’"— He would continue in this way with moody self-satisfaction, painting a picture of future success when all who scorned him now would flock to his standard.
“Oh, yes,” said he, “they’ll all be mighty anxious then to shake Little Stevie’s hand.”
Gant, in a fury, gave him a hard beating when he had been expelled from school.
He had never forgotten.