“Then you admit that he did steal?” Mrs. Oakley had taken her up sharply.
“Oh, I didn’t say dat; I didn’t mean dat.”
“That will do, Fannie. I understand perfectly. You should have confessed that long ago.”
“But I ain’t confessin’! I ain’t! He didn’t—”
“You may go.”
The stricken woman reeled out of her mistress’s presence, and Mrs. Oakley told her husband that night, with tears in her eyes, how disappointed she was with Fannie—that the woman had known it all along, and had only just confessed. It was just one more link in the chain that was surely and not too slowly forging itself about Berry Hamilton.
Of all the family Joe was the only one who burned with a fierce indignation. He knew that his father was innocent, and his very helplessness made a fever in his soul. Dandy as he was, he was loyal, and when he saw his mother’s tears and his sister’s shame, something rose within him that had it been given play might have made a man of him, but, being crushed, died and rotted, and in the compost it made all the evil of his nature flourished. The looks and gibes of his fellow-employees at the barbershop forced him to leave his work there. Kit, bowed with shame and grief, dared not appear upon the streets, where the girls who had envied her now hooted at her. So the little family was shut in upon itself away from fellowship and sympathy.
Joe went seldom to see his father. He was not heartless; but the citadel of his long desired and much vaunted manhood trembled before the sight of his father’s abject misery. The lines came round his lips, and lines too must have come round his heart. Poor fellow, he was too young for this forcing process, and in the hothouse of pain he only grew an acrid, unripe cynic.
At the sitting of the Grand Jury Berry was indicted. His trial followed soon, and the town turned out to see it. Some came to laugh and scoff, but these, his enemies, were silenced by the spectacle of his grief. In vain the lawyer whom he had secured showed that the evidence against him proved nothing. In vain he produced proof of the slow accumulation of what the man had. In vain he pleaded the man’s former good name. The judge and the jury saw otherwise. Berry was convicted. He was given ten years at hard labour.
He hardly looked as if he could live out one as he heard his sentence. But Nature was kind and relieved him of the strain. With a cry as if his heart were bursting, he started up and fell forward on his face unconscious. Someone, a bit more brutal than the rest, said, “It’s five dollars’ fine every time a nigger faints,” but no one laughed. There was something too portentous, too tragic in the degradation of this man.
Maurice Oakley sat in the courtroom, grim and relentless. As soon as the trial was over, he sent for Fannie, who still kept the cottage in the yard.
“You must go,” he said. “You can’t stay here any longer. I want none of your breed about me.”
And Fannie bowed her head and went away from him in silence.
All the night long the women of the Hamilton household lay in bed and wept, clinging to each other in their grief. But Joe did not go to sleep. Against all their entreaties, he stayed up. He put out the light and sat staring into the gloom with hard, burning eyes.
VI
Outcasts
What particularly irritated Maurice Oakley was that Berry should to the very last keep up his claim of innocence. He reiterated it to the very moment that the train which was bearing him away pulled out of the station. There had seldom been seen such an example of criminal hardihood, and Oakley was hardened thereby to greater severity in dealing with the convict’s wife. He began to urge her more strongly to move, and she, dispirited and humiliated by what had come to her, looked vainly about for the way to satisfy his demands. With her natural protector gone, she felt more weak and helpless than she had thought it possible to feel. It was hard enough to face the world. But to have to ask something of it was almost more than she could bear.
With the conviction of her husband the last five hundred dollars had been confiscated as belonging to the stolen money, but their former deposit remained untouched. With this she had the means at her disposal to tide over their present days of misfortune. It was not money she lacked, but confidence. Some inkling of the world’s attitude towards her, guiltless though she was, reached her and made her afraid.
Her desperation, however, would not let her give way to fear, so she set forth to look for another house. Joe and Kit saw her go as if she were starting on an expedition into a strange country. In all their lives they had known no home save the little cottage in Oakley’s yard. Here they had toddled as babies and played as children and been happy and carefree. There had been times when they had complained and wanted a home off by themselves, like others whom they knew. They had not failed, either, to draw unpleasant comparisons between their mode of life and the old plantation quarters system. But now all this was forgotten, and there were only grief and anxiety that they must leave the place and in such a way.
Fannie went out with little hope in her heart, and a short while after she was gone Joe decided to follow her and make an attempt to get work.
“I’ll go an’ see what I kin do, anyway, Kit. ’Tain’t much use, I reckon, trying to get into a bahbah shop where they
