They sat again in a deep silence.
“I’m sorry,” Peter continued after a long revery, “that he hadn’t married, and had no children. It’s hard on you, sir, you who are now the last of the Byes.”
“Yes,” said the old gentleman laconically, “it is. Now, suppose you tell me something about yourself.”
But first Peter told him about his father, Meriwether, glossing over the dead man’s faults and irresoluteness and dwelling on his ambition. “So you see, I had always had the idea of becoming a doctor before me. But I’m afraid I should never have realized it if it had not been for my wife, here.” He smiled gratefully at Joanna, who smiled back at him with a gratitude of another sort. He had uttered no word of complaint nor of the difficulties attendant on being a colored man in America. She was very proud of him. He was so charming, so handsome, growing daily in independence.
“You have a son,” said old Meriwether. “I believe you said you had a son, Meriwether? How would you like me to take him and educate him, bring him up away from all he’d have to go through in this country, let him spend his life in Paris and Vienna. Perhaps he would be a doctor, too. When he became a man he could do as he pleased. And probably, probably, I say, I should make him my heir.”
Neither Joanna nor Peter had ever thought of wealth. And while neither of them envisaged for a second the possibility of parting from little Meriwether, they were momentarily stunned at such prospects, Joanna especially.
“Why,” asked Peter, his old demon of dislike and suspicion flaring up in him, “should you at this late date show interest in a black Bye?”
“Because,” said Meriwether Bye, getting up and beginning to pace the floor, “because he is my heir. Because he is the last of the Byes. Because when my brave boy called out ‘this is the last of the Byes,’ he meant you, not himself. He had no way of knowing it, but he did know it. That queer sense in him which warned him he was going to die, probably told him.
“You’ve heard of your grandfather Isaiah, the boy that grew up with me?” Peter nodded. “Well, his father, black Joshua Bye, was my oldest brother; my father—he was Aaron Bye—was his father. Joshua was really his oldest child. His mother was Judy Bye, old Judy Bye, whom I’ve seen often sitting in Isaiah’s house, her eyes straining, straining into the future—perhaps she saw this, who knows?”
“My father,” said Peter in a dangerously level voice, “told me and told me often that much of Aaron Bye’s prosperity had been due to the loyalty and hard work of Joshua Bye. But he never told me that Aaron was his father. And you knew this, have known it—”
“Not while Isaiah and I were boys. Not for many, many years afterwards. My father,” the word seemed strange on this old man’s lips, “always meant, I think, to do something for his—his son in his will. But he put it off and finally just before his death he told my brother Elmer—his oldest son by his real wife you know—told him about it. But Elmer was all out of sympathy with the idea, and, although he did not tell my father so, had no notion of acquainting Joshua either with his real parentage or with the fact that he should have been one of Aaron Bye’s heirs. Elmer was one of those men with a sharp dislike, amounting to an obsession, almost, for Negroes, for all unfortunate people. I’m free from it personally.”
“Yet,” said Peter harshly, “your conduct has differed not one whit from his. How long have you known this?”
“Since the close of the Civil War. All my brothers had died but Elmer, and all his sons were killed in the war. When Elmer was himself about to die, he told me. He thought the loss of his sons was a curse upon him because he had failed to obey my father’s wishes. He left their carrying out to me. I was a young man still. I saw no reason for opening up old wounds. Besides, I did not know what had become of Isaiah’s son. Isaiah and Joshua were both dead. I could not see that my father had acted differently from other slaveholders—it was the custom of the country—and at least he did not do as many a white man had done, sell his son into deeper and more terrible slavery. … I can see now that whatever slavery may have done for other men it has thrown the lives of all the Byes into confusion. Think of the farce my father’s religion must have become to him … and I shall never forget Elmer. Sometimes I think the shadow of it fell across Meriwether’s life—I meant to tell him. I know he would have made restitution. Now I shall do it for him.”
He ceased speaking and looked at Peter curiously, wistfully. “I suppose you find it hard to forgive us. I’m afraid I had not thought until very recently what this might have meant to you—to
