Part 17

His mother laid her hand on his knee. "No, Champney, it's not lost time; it's one of your assets as a gentleman."

He looked up at her, his blue eyes smiling into her dark ones.

"I can be a gentleman all right without that asset; you said father didn't go."

"No, but the man for whom you are named went, and he told me once a college education was a 'gentleman's asset.' That expression was his."

"Well, I don't see that the asset did him much good. It didn't seem to discount his liabilities in other ways. Queer, how Uncle Louis went to seed--I mean, didn't amount to anything along any business or professional line. Only last spring I met the father of a second-year man who remembers Uncle Louis well, said he was a classmate of his. He told me he was banner man every time and no end popular; the others didn't have a show with him."

His mother was silent. Champney, apparently unheeding her unresponsiveness, rose quickly, shook himself together, and suddenly burst into a mighty laughter that is best comparable to the inextinguishable species of the blessed gods. He laughed in arpeggios, peal on peal, crescendo and diminuendo, until, finally, he flung himself down on the short turf and in his merriment rolled over and over. He brought himself right side up at last, tears in his eyes and a sigh of satisfying exhaustion on his lips. To his mother's laughing query:

"What is it now, Champney?" He shook his head as if words failed him; then he said huskily:

"It's Aunt Meda's protegee. Oh, Great Scott! She'll be the death by shock of some of the Champo people if she stays another three months. I hear Aunt Meda has had her Waterloo. Tavy buttonholed me out in the carriage house yesterday, and told me the whole thing--oh, but it's rich!" He chuckled again. "He got me to feel his vest; says he can lap it three inches already and she has only been here two weeks; and as for Romanzo, he's neither to have nor to hold when the girl's in sight--wits topsy-turvy, actually, oh, Lord!"--he rolled over again on the grass--"what do you think, mother! She got Roman to scour down Jim--you know, the white cart-horse, the Percheron--with Hannah's cleaning powder, and the girl helped him, and together they got one side done and then waited for it to dry to see how it worked. Result: Tave dead ashamed to drive him in the cart for fear some one will see the yellow-white calico-circus horse, that the two rapscallions have left on his hands, and doesn't want Aunt Meda to know it for fear she'll turn down Roman. He says he's going to put Jim out to grass in the Colonel's back sheep pasture, and when Aunt Meda comes home lie about sudden spavin or something. And the joke of it is Roman takes it all as a part of the play, and has owned up to Tave that, by mistake, he blacked Aunt Meda's walking boots, before she went to Hallsport, with axle grease, while the girl was 'telling novels' to him! Tave said Roman told him she knew a lot of the nobility, marchionesses and 'sich'; and now Roman struts around cocksure, high and mighty as if he'd just been made K.C.B., and there's no getting any steady work out of him. You should have seen Tave's face when he was telling me!"

His mother laughed. "I can imagine it; he's worried over this new move of Almeda's. I confess it puzzles me."

"Well, I'm off to see some of the fun--and the girl. Tave said he didn't expect Aunt Meda before to-morrow night, and it's a good time for me to rubber round the old place a little on my own hook;--and, mother,"--he stooped to her; Aurora Googe raised her still beautiful eyes to the frank if somewhat hard blue ones that looked down into hers; a fine color mounted into her cheeks,--"take the priest for his meals, for all me. It's an invasion, but, of course, I recognize that we're responsible for it on account of the quarry business. I suppose we shall have to make some concessions to all classes till we get away from here for good and all--then we'll have our fling, won't we, mother?"

He was off without waiting for a reply. Aurora Googe watched him out of sight, then turned to her work, the flush still upon her cheeks.

Champney leaned on the gate of the paddock at Champ-au-Haut and looked about him. The estate at The Bow had been familiar to him throughout his childhood and boyhood. He had been over every foot of it, and at all seasons, with his Uncle Louis. He was realizing that it had never seemed more beautiful to him than now, seen in the warm light of a July sunset. In the garden pleasance, that sloped to the lake, the roses and lilies planted there a generation ago still bloomed and flourished, and in the elm-shaded paddock, on the gate of which he was leaning, filly and foal could trace their pedigree to the sixth and seventh generation of deep-chested, clean-flanked ancestors.

The young man comprehended in part only, the reason of his mother's extreme bitterness towards Almeda Champney. His uncle had loved him; had kept him with him much of the time, encouraging him in his boyish aims and ambitions which his mother fostered--and Louis Champney was childless, the last in direct descent of a long line of fine ancestors--.

Here his thought was checked; those ancestors were his, only in a generation far removed; the Champney blood was in his mother's veins. But his father was Almeda Champney's only brother--why then, should not his mother count on the estate being his in the end? He knew this to have been her hope, although she had never expressed it. He had gained an indefinite knowledge of it through old Joel Quimber and Elmer Wiggins and Mrs. Milton Caukins, a distant relative of his father's. To be sure, Louis Champney might have left him his hunting-piece, which as a boy he had coveted, just for the sake of his name--

He stopped short in his speculations for he heard voices in the lane. The cows were entering it and coming up to the milking shed. The lane led up from the low-lying lake meadows, knee deep with timothy and clover, and was fenced on both sides from the apple orchards which arched and overshadowed its entire length. The sturdy over-reaching boughs hung heavy with myriads of green balls. Now and then one dropped noiselessly on the thick turf in the lane, and a noble Holstein mother, ebony banded with ivory white, her swollen cream-colored bag and dark-blotched teats flushed through and through by the delicate rose of a perfectly healthy skin, lowered her meek head and, snuffing largely, caught sideways as she passed at the enticing green round.

At the end of this lane there swung into view a tall loose-jointed figure which the low strong July sunshine threw into bold relief. It was Romanzo Caukins, one of the Colonel's numerous family, a boy of sixteen who had been bound out recently to the mistress of Champ-au-Haut upon agreement of bed, board, clothes, three terms of "schooling" yearly, and the addition of thirty dollars to be paid annually to the Colonel.

The payment of this amount, by express stipulation, was to be made at the end of each year until Romanzo should come into his majority. By this arrangement, Mrs. Champney assured to herself the interest on the aforesaid thirty dollars, and congratulated herself on the fact that such increment might be credited to Milton Caukins as a minus quantity.

Champney leaped the bars and went down the lane to meet him.

"Hello, Roman, how are you?"

The boy's honest blue eyes, that seemed always to be looking forward in a chronic state of expectancy for the unexpected, beamed with goodness and goodwill. He wiped his hands on his overalls and clasped Champney's.

"Hullo, Champ, when'd you come?"

"Only yesterday. I didn't see you about when I was here in the afternoon. How do you like your job?"

The youth made an uncouth but expressive sign towards the milk shed. "Sh--Tave'll hear you. He and I ain't been just on good terms lately; but 'tain't my fault," he added doggedly.

At that moment a clear childish voice called from somewhere below the lane:

"Romanzo--Romanzo!"

The boy started guiltily. "I've got to go, Champ; she wants me."

Champney seized him with a strong hand by the suspenders. "Here, hold on! Who, you gump?"

"The girl--le' me go." But Champney gripped him fast.