Peter ignored this. “If you made my son your heir,” he questioned, avoiding Joanna’s startled look, “would you be willing to publish to the world that you were doing it because little Meriwether was your blood relation—no matter how distant—or would this be the gift of an eccentric philanthropist?”
The old man’s face grew a dull red. “Surely it would not be necessary—think of my father. What good would it do the boy to know that Aaron Bye’s blood flowed in his veins?”
“None,” said Peter triumphantly. He turned to Joanna. “See, dear, there is the source of all I used to be. My ingratitude, my inability to adopt responsibility, my very irresoluteness come from that strain of white Bye blood. But I understand it now, I can fight against it. I’m free, Joanna, free.”
He walked over to Meriwether Bye, and the two tall straight men—so alike, so different, one young, one very old—gazed for a long time at each other.
“I don’t want your gifts,” said Peter gently, “nor does my son want them—neither your money nor the acknowledgment of your blood. They come too late.” He turned to his wife after Meriwether had left the house. “Thank God, Joanna, they have come too late. Perhaps I might have been like that.”
Afterwards the memory of the little black testament returned to him. He found it and showed it to Joanna. “I’ll bet that old codger Ceazer knew that Joshua wasn’t his son and that’s why he scratched his own name out of the book. He would have been an ancestor worth having.”
Joanna looked at him proudly. “Peter, you are wonderful! Such a man, a great man!”
He sighed a little wistfully. “There spoke the real Joanna. Greatness, even in daily living, will always be your creed, I suppose.”
“No,” said Joanna, a shameless apostate, “my creed calls for nothing but happiness.”
Colophon
There Is Confusion
was published in by
Jessie Redmon Fauset.
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Girl in Pink Dress,
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