“But I’ll tell you something about him, W. O.,” he continued after a moment, with calm but boding judiciousness. “He let his wife die a natural death in her own bed. He didn’t try to kill her.”
“No, by God!” Gant rejoined. “He let her starve to death. If the old woman ever got a square meal in her life she got it under my roof. There’s one thing sure: she could have gone to Hell and back, twice over, before she got it from old Tom Pentland, or any of his sons.”
Will Pentland closed his blunt knife and put it in his pocket.
“Old Major Pentland never did an honest day’s work in his life,” Gant yelled, as a happy afterthought.
“Come now, Mr. Gant!” said Duncan reproachfully.
“Hush! Hush!” whispered the girl fiercely, coming before him closely with the soup. She thrust a smoking ladle at his mouth, but he turned his head away to hurl another insult. She slapped him sharply across the mouth.
“You DRINK this!” she whispered. And grinning meekly as his eyes rested upon her, he began to swallow soup.
Will Pentland looked at the girl attentively for a moment, then glanced at Duncan and Jannadeau with a nod and wink. Without saying another word, he left the room, and mounted the stairs. His sister lay quietly extended on her back.
“How do you feel, Eliza?” The room was heavy with the rich odor of mellowing pears; an unaccustomed fire of pine sticks burned in the grate: he took up his place before it, and began to pare his nails.
“Nobody knows—nobody knows,” she began, bursting quickly into a rapid flow of tears, “what I’ve been through.” She wiped her eyes in a moment on a corner of the coverlid: her broad powerful nose, founded redly on her white face, was like flame.
“What you got good to eat?” he said, winking at her with a comic gluttony.
“There are some pears in there on the shelf, Will. I put them there last week to mellow.”
He went into the big closet and returned in a moment with a large yellow pear; he came back to the hearth and opened the smaller blade of his knife.
