But it was, he knew, the end.
Far-forested, the horn-note wound.
He was wild with the hunger for release: the vast champaign of earth stretched out for him its limitless seduction.
It was the end, the end.
It was the beginning of the voyage, the quest of new lands.
Gant was dead.
Gant was living, death-inlife.
In his big back room at Eliza’s he waited death, lost and broken in a semi-life of petulant memory.
He hung to life by a decayed filament, a corpse lit by infrequent flares of consciousness.
The sudden death whose menace they had faced so long that it had lost its meaning, had never come to him.
It had come where they had least expected it — to Ben.
And the conviction which Eugene had had at Ben’s death, more than a year and a half before, was now a materialized certainty.
The great wild pattern of the family had been broken forever.
The partial discipline that had held them together had been destroyed by the death of their brother: the nightmare of waste and loss had destroyed their hope.
With an insane fatalism they had surrendered to the savage chaos of life.
Except for Eliza.
She was sixty, sound of body and mind, triumphantly healthy.
She still ran Dixieland, but she had given up the boarders for roomers, and most of the duties of management she intrusted to an old maid who lived in the house.
Eliza devoted most of her time to real estate.
She had, during the past year, got final control of Gant’s property. She had begun to sell it immediately and ruthlessly, over his indifferent mutter of protest.
She had sold the old house on Woodson Street for $7,000 — a good enough price, she had said, considering the neighborhood.
But, stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its girdling vines, annex now to a quack’s sanitarium for “nervous diseases,” the rich labor of their life was gone.
In this, more than in anything else, Eugene saw the final disintegration of his family.
Eliza had also sold a wild tract of mountain farmland for $6,000, fifty acres on the Reynoldsville road for $15,000, and several smaller pieces.
Finally she had sold Gant’s shop upon the Square for $25,000 to a syndicate of real estate people who were going to erect on the site the town’s first “skyscraper.”
With this money as capital, she began to “trade,” buying, selling, laying down options, in an intricate and bewildering web.
“Dixieland” itself had become enormously valuable.
The street which she had foreseen years before had been cut through behind her boundaries: she lacked thirty feet of meeting the golden highway, but she had bought the intervening strip, paying without complaint a stiff price.
Since then she had refused, with a puckered smile, an offer of $100,000 for her property.
She was obsessed.
She talked real estate unendingly.
She spent half her time talking to real estate men; they hovered about the house like flesh-flies.
She drove off with them several times a day to look at property.
As her land investments grew in amount and number, she became insanely niggardly in personal expenditure.
She would fret loudly if a light was kept burning in the house, saying that ruin and poverty faced her.
She seldom ate unless the food was given to her; she went about the house holding a cup of weak coffee and a crust of bread.
A stingy careless breakfast was the only meal to which Luke and Eugene could look forward with any certainty: with angry guffaw and chortle, they ate, wedged in the little pantry — the dining-room had been turned over to the roomers.
Gant was fed and cared for by Helen.
She moved back and forth in ceaseless fret between Eliza’s house and Hugh Barton’s, in constant rhythms of wild energy and depletion, anger, hysteria, weariness and indifference.
She had had no children and, it seemed, would have none.
For this reason, she had long periods of brooding morbidity, during which she drugged herself with nibbling potations of patent tonics, medicines with a high alcoholic content, home-made wines, and corn whiskey.
Her large eyes grew lustreless and dull, her big mouth had a strain of hysteria about it, she would pluck at her long chin and burst suddenly into tears.
She talked restlessly, fretfully, incessantly, wasting and losing herself in a net of snarled nerves, in endless gossip, incoherent garrulity about the townsfolk, the neighbors, disease, doctors, hospitals, death.
The deliberate calm of Hugh Barton sometimes goaded her to a frenzy.
He would sit at night, oblivious of her tirade, gravely chewing his long cigar, absorbed in his charts, or in a late issue of System or of The American Magazine.
This power of losing himself in solitary absorption would madden her.
She did not know what she wanted, but his silence before her exasperated indictment of life drove her to frenzy.
She would rush at him with a sob of rage, knock the magazine from his hands, and seize his thinning hair in the grip of her long fingers.
“You answer when I speak!” she cried, panting with hysteria.
“I’m not going to sit here, night after night, while you sit buried in a story.