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For God's sake, don't take the chance from me!" "Major Fetridge," she said resolutely, but with a strange quaver in her voice, "I love David Cabarreux. I never can marry you. If there is anything else that I can do " "No, there is nothing you can do," he cried vehemently. "It would have been better you had thought me a drunken brute like the others, and had not recognized me.
"I thought you meant that," she said under her breath. "It is not drunken Sam Fetridge that loves you. I have culture, intelligence, energy. I am a better man at bottom than Dave Cabarreux, and one nearer akin to yourself." "I love him: I do not love you." She said it mechanically, her eyes fixed on his with a frightened, curious look of recognition.
Then she spoke coolly, precisely as if they had met on the street in Sevier: "How did you come here, Mr. Cabarreux? I thought there was nobody but myself in this valley." Young Cabarreux stood leaning over her, his hat in his hand: "The truth is, I was asleep by the branch thar.
The major's red head and lean little legs moved unsteadily over the square. "Sam Fetridge hes hed enough a'ready," said the squire. "He'll follow the jedge, and that hot foot, ef he don't pull up. D'ye think Dave Cabarreux will come in for all the Scroope proputty, doc?" "I don't know. I don't know," pulling his beard meditatively. "It'll be left in a lump: that much the jedge told me himself.
Dave Cabarreux had never done an honest stroke of work in his life. Nothing but planning. He remembered that in this imminent moment, and laughed. "Miss Isabel, I've been a good-for-nothing dog: that's the truth. Everybody knows it: you know it. But there's a woman that I love who could put a new soul into my body. If she would."
"There is somethin' I've wished to say to you for a long time," he began in his leisurely drawl. She stood up pale and fluttering. If she were the man! If she could speak! She would compel love, she would force confession by sheer strength of words. But Cabarreux stood deferential, indolent. "I must go home: it is late," she said, hurrying across the field. "One moment, Miss Isabel.
He says he is going to bring the man up soon. Well, it's all up with poor Cabarreux. I'm sorry for them. Bel is a good girl: she ought to have been a happy wife." The men went home to bed, leaving the major on the bench. He lay there for an hour or more. The village had gone to sleep for the night.
'I'll not part the proputty, he says, 'but I'll leave it whar it'll keep up the standin' of the family. The old man always hed his sheer of pride in the Scroopes, you know." "Dave Cabarreux is his cousin once removed," interrupted Bright the landlord, who had sauntered back with the major, and engineered that unsteady worthy to a place on the trough.
Cabarreux did not press the question: he followed her, moving the branches aside with patient courtesy. He was a sincere man, and he loved the girl with all his strength. Did she care for him? He would know now. He stopped, clearing the dead leaves from a mossy log. "Will you sit down?" he said with a certain stately grace which even his baggy, homespun clothes and torn hat did not make absurd.
I'm going out of town a bit," he replied, nodding shortly; and without another word of farewell he turned his back on Sevier for ever. There is no couple better beloved in all that mountain-region than David Cabarreux and his wife. They live on the farm.
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