“I never thought,” she began after a long pause, her mouth tremulous with a bitter hurt smile, “that I should live to hear such talk from a son of mine.
You had better watch out,” she hinted darkly, “a day of reckoning cometh.
As sure as you live, as sure as you live.
You will be repaid threefold for your unnatural,” her voice sank to a tearful whisper, “your UNNATURAL conduct!”
She wept easily.
“Oh, my God,” answered Ben, turning his lean, gray, bitter, bumpy face up toward his listening angel.
“Listen to that, won’t you?”
11
Eliza saw Altamont not as so many hills, buildings, people: she saw it in the pattern of a gigantic blueprint.
She knew the history of every piece of valuable property — who bought it, who sold it, who owned it in 1893, and what it was now worth.
She watched the tides of traffic cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of people passed in a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every growing-pain of the young town, gauging from year to year its growth in any direction, and deducing the probable direction of its future expansion.
She judged distances critically, saw at once where the beaten route to an important centre was stupidly circuitous, and looking in a straight line through houses and lots, she said:
“There’ll be a street through here some day.”
Her vision of land and population was clear, crude, focal — there was nothing technical about it: it was extraordinary for its direct intensity.
Her instinct was to buy cheaply where people would come; to keep out of pockets and culs de sac, to buy on a street that moved toward a centre, and that could be given extension.
Thus, she began to think of Dixieland.
It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small homes and boarding-houses.
Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow.
It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet, a frontage of one hundred and twenty.
And Eliza, looking toward the town, said:
“They’ll put a street behind there some day.”
In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting brick.
Its big rooms were heated by a small furnace which sent up, when charged with fire, a hot dry enervation to the rooms of the first floor, and a gaseous but chill radiation to those upstairs.
The place was for sale.
Its owner was a middle-aged horse-faced gentleman whose name was the Reverend Wellington Hodge: he had begun life favorably in Altamont as a Methodist minister, but had run foul of trouble when he began to do double service to the Lord God of Hosts and John Barleycorn — his evangelical career came to an abrupt ending one winter’s night when the streets were dumb with falling snow.
Wellington, clad only in his winter heavies, made a wild sortie from Dixieland at two in the morning, announcing the kingdom of God and the banishment of the devil, in a mad marathon through the streets that landed him panting but victorious in front of the Post Office.
Since then, with the assistance of his wife, he had eked out a hard living at the boarding-house.
Now, he was spent, disgraced, and weary of the town.
Besides, the sheltering walls of Dixieland inspired him with horror — he felt that the malign influence of the house had governed his own disintegration.
He was a sensitive man, and his promenades about his estate were checked by inhibited places: the cornice of the long girdling porch where a lodger had hanged himself one day at dawn, the spot in the hall where the consumptive had collapsed in a hemorrhage, the room where the old man cut his throat.
He wanted to return to his home, a land of fast horses, wind-bent grass, and good whisky — Kentucky.
He was ready to sell Dixieland.
Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, went to town by way of Spring Street more and more often.
“That’s going to be a good piece of property some day,” she said to Gant.
He made no complaint.
He felt suddenly the futility of opposing an implacable, an inexorable desire.
“Do you want it?” he said.
She pursed her lips several times:
“It’s a good buy,” she said.
“You’ll never regret it as long as you live, W.
O.,” said Dick Gudger, the agent.
“It’s her house, Dick,” said Gant wearily.
“Make out the papers in her name.”
She looked at him.
“I never want to own another piece of property as long as I live,” said Gant.
“It’s a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets all you have in the end.”
Eliza pursed her lips and nodded.
She bought the place for seventy-five hundred dollars.
She had enough money to make the first payment of fifteen hundred. The balance was to be paid in installments of fifteen hundred dollars a year.
This she knew she had to pay chiefly from the earnings of the house.