They were a life unto themselves — how lonely they were they did not know, but they were known to every one and friended by almost no one.
Their status was singular — if they could have been distinguished by caste, they would probably have been called middle-class, but the Duncans, the Tarkintons, all their neighbors, and all their acquaintances throughout the town, never drew in to them, never came into the strange rich color of their lives, because they had twisted the design of all orderly life, because there was in them a mad, original, disturbing quality which they did not suspect.
And companionship with the elect — those like the Hilliards — was equally impossible, even if they had had the gift or the desire for it.
But they hadn’t.
Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because singularity does not hold life in unyielding devotion to it.
As he stormed through the house, unleashing his gathered bolts, the children followed him joyously, shrieking exultantly as he told Eliza he had first seen her “wriggling around the corner like a snake on her belly,” or, as coming in from freezing weather he had charged her and all the Pentlands with malevolent domination of the elements.
“We will freeze,” he yelled, “we will freeze in this hellish, damnable, cruel and God-forsaken climate.
Does Brother Will care?
Does Brother Jim care?
Did the Old Hog, your miserable old father, care?
Merciful God!
I have fallen into the hands of fiends incarnate, more savage, more cruel, more abominable than the beasts of the field.
Hellhounds that they are, they will sit by and gloat at my agony until I am done to death.”
He paced rapidly about the adjacent wash-room for a moment, muttering to himself, while grinning Luke stood watchfully near.
“But they can eat!” he shouted, plunging suddenly at the kitchen door.
“They can eat — when some one else will feed them.
I shall never forget the Old Hog as long as I live.
Cr-unch, Cr-unch, Cr-unch,”— they were all exploded with laughter as his face assumed an expression of insane gluttony, and as he continued, in a slow, whining voice intended to represent the speech of the late Major: “‘Eliza, if you don’t mind I’ll have some more of that chicken,’ when the old scoundrel had shovelled it down his throat so fast we had to carry him away from the table.”
As his denunciation reached some high extravagance the boys would squeal with laughter, and Gant, inwardly tickled, would glance around slyly with a faint grin bending the corners of his thin mouth.
Eliza herself would laugh shortly, and then exclaim roughly:
“Get out of here!
I’ve had enough of your goings-on for one night.”
Sometimes, on these occasions, his good humor grew so victorious that he would attempt clumsily to fondle her, putting one arm stiffly around her waist, while she bridled, became confused, and half-attempted to escape, saying:
“Get away!
Get away from me!
It’s too late for that now.”
Her white embarrassed smile was at once painful and comic: tears pressed closely behind it.
At these rare, unnatural exhibitions of affection, the children laughed with constraint, fidgeted restlessly, and said:
“Aw, papa, don’t.”
Eugene, when he first noticed an occurrence of this sort, was getting on to his fifth year: shame gathered in him in tangled clots, aching in his throat; he twisted his neck about convulsively, smiling desperately as he did later when he saw poor buffoons or mawkish scenes in the theatre.
And he was never after able to see them touch each other with affection, without the same inchoate and choking humiliation: they were so used to the curse, the clamor, and the roughness, that any variation into tenderness came as a cruel affectation.
But as the slow months, gummed with sorrow, dropped more clearly, the powerful germinal instinct for property and freedom began to reawaken in Eliza, and the ancient submerged struggle between their natures began again.
The children were growing up — Eugene had found playmates — Harry Tarkinton and Max Isaacs.
Her sex was a fading coal.
Season by season, there began again the old strife of ownership and taxes.
Returning home, with the tax-collector’s report in his hand, Gant would be genuinely frantic with rage.
“In the name of God, Woman, what are we coming to?
Before another year we’ll all go to the poorhouse.
Ah, Lord!
I see very well where it will all end.
I’ll go to the wall, every penny we’ve got will go into the pockets of those accursed swindlers, and the rest will come under the sheriff’s hammer.
I curse the day I was ever fool enough to buy the first stick.
Mark my words, we’ll be living in soup-kitchens before this fearful, this awful, this hellish and damnable winter is finished.”
She would purse her lips thoughtfully as she went over the list, while he looked at her with a face of strained agony.
“Yes, it does look pretty bad,” she would remark. And then:
“It’s a pity you didn’t listen to me last summer, Mr. Gant, when we had a chance of trading in that worthless old Owenby place for those two houses on Carter Street.
We could have been getting forty dollars a month rent on them ever since.”
“I never want to own another foot of land as long as I live,” he yelled.
“It’s kept me a poor man all my life, and when I die they’ll have to give me six feet of earth in Pauper’s Field.”
And he would grow broodingly philosophic, speaking of the vanity of human effort, the last resting-place in earth of rich and poor, the significant fact that we could “take none of it with us,” ending perhaps with