She shook her head, but she was frightened; some nameless fear knocking at her heart. “I turned to you from no one, Anthony. I’ve had only one ‘admirer’ as you call it in New York and I had long, long since ceased thinking of him. No, Anthony, I came to you because I needed you; you of all men in New York. I think in the world. And I thought you needed me.”
They sat in silence on the terrible sofa. He seized her hand and covered it with kisses; started to take her in his arms, then let them fall in a hopeless gesture.
“It’s no good, Angel; there’s no use trying to buck fate. Life has caught us again. What you’re talking about is absolutely impossible.”
“What do you mean, impossible?” The little mute fear that had lain within her for a long time as a result of an earlier confidence of his bestirred itself, spoke.
“Anthony, those men, those enemies that killed your father—did you kill one of them?” She had her arms about him. “You know it’s nothing to me. Don’t even tell me about it. Your past belongs to you; it’s your future I’m interested in, that I want.”
He pushed her from him, finally, even roughly. “No, I’ve never killed a man. Though I’ve wanted to. But I was a little boy when it all happened and afterwards I wouldn’t go back because of my mother.” He went over to a drawer and took out a revolver. “I’ve half a mind to kill myself now, now before I go mad thinking how I’ve broken my promise, broken it after all these years.” He looked at her wistfully, yet implacably. “I wish that I had died long before it was given to me to see that beautiful, loving look on your face change into one of hatred and dread and anger.”
She thought he must be raving; she tried to sooth him. “Never mind, Anthony; I don’t care a rap about what you’ve done. Only tell me why do you say everything’s impossible for us? Why can’t we mean everything to each other, be married—”
“Because I’m coloured.” In her bewildered relief she fell away from him.
“Yes, that’s right, you damned American! I’m not fit for you to touch now, am I? It was all right as long as you thought I was a murderer, a card sharp, a criminal, but the black blood in me is a bit too much, isn’t it?” Beside himself he rushed to the windows, looked on the placid Sunday groups festooning the front steps of the brownstone houses. “What are you going to do, alarm the neighbourhood? Well, let me tell you, my girl, before they can get up here I’ll be dead.” His glance strayed to the revolver. “They’ll never catch me as they did my father.”
It was on the point of her tongue to tell him her great secret. Her heart within her bubbled with laughter to think how quickly she could put an end to this hysteria, how she could calm this black madness which so seethed within him, poisoning the very spring of his life. But his last words turned her thoughts to something else, to another need. How he must have suffered, loving a girl who he felt sure would betray him; yet scorning to keep up the subterfuge.
She said to him gently: “Anthony, did you think I would do that?”
His answer revealed the unspeakable depths of his acquaintance with prejudice; his incurable cynicism. “You’re a white American. I know there’s nothing too dastardly for them to attempt where colour is involved.”
A fantastic notion seized her. Of course she would tell him that she was coloured, that she was willing to live with coloured people. And if he needed assurance of her love, how much more fully would he believe in her when he realized that not even for the sake of the conveniences to be had by passing would she keep her association with white people secret from him. But first she must try to restore his faith in human goodness. She said to him gently: “Tell me about it, Anthony.”
And sitting there in the ugly, tidy room in the sunshot duskiness of the early summer evening, the half-subdued noises of the street mounting up to them, he told her his story. An old story it was, but in its new setting, coupled with the fact that Angela for years had closed her mind to the penalty which men sometimes pay for being “different,” it sounded like some unbelievable tale from the Inquisition.
His father, John Hall, of Georgia, had been a sailor and rover, but John’s father was a well-known and capable farmer who had stayed in his little town and slowly amassed what seemed a fortune to the poor and mostly ignorant whites by whom he was surrounded. In the course of John’s wanderings he had landed at Rio de Janeiro and he had met Maria Cruz, a Brazilian with the blood of many races in her veins. She herself was apparently white, but she looked with favour on the brown, stalwart sailor, thinking nothing of his colour, which was very much the same as that of her own father. The two married and went to many countries. But finally John, wearying of his aimless life, returned to his father, arriving a month before it was time to receive the old man’s blessing and his property. Thence all his troubles. Certain white men in the neighbourhood had had their eyes turned greedily on old Anthony Hall’s possessions. His son had been a wanderer for many years; doubtless he was dead. Certainly it was not
