And for a moment he stared gauntly into the fading ranges of the west, and was silent. When he spoke again, his voice had grown old and weary, bitter with quiet fatality:
“Moral virtues—purity of character—piety—fine words—no profanity—yes! I suppose my father had them all,” said Uncle Mark wearily. “No liquor in the house—yes, that was true enough—and also it is true there was no food, no human decency, no privacy. Why, my dear boy,” he whispered suddenly, turning to the boy again with that birdlike tilt of the head and that abrupt and startling transition to a shamefaced intimacy of whispered revelation—“do you know that even after I had reached the age of twenty years and we had moved to Libya Hill, we all slept together—eight of us—in the same room where my mother and my father slept?—And for three days!” he cried suddenly and savagely—“Oh! for three damnable, never-to-be-forgotten days of shame and horror that left their scar upon the lives of all of us, the body of my grandfather. Bill Joyner, lay there in the house and rotted—rotted!” his voice broke in a sob, and he struck his gaunt fist blindly, savagely into the air, “rotted in Summer heat until the stench of him had got into our breath, our blood, our lives, into bedding and food and clothes, into the very walls that sheltered us—and the memory of him became for us a stench of shame and horror that nothing could wash away, that filled our hearts with hatred and loathing for our blood and kind—while my father, Lafayette Joyner, and that damned, thick-lipped, drawling, sanctimonious, lecher of a nigger-Baptist prophet—your great-uncle, Holy Rance!” he snarled savagely, “sat there smugly with that stench of rotting death and man’s corrupt mortality thick in their nostrils—calmly discussing, if you please, the lost art of embalming as it was practiced by the ancient Egyptians—which they, they alone, of course, of all men living,” he snarled bitterly, “had rediscovered—and were prepared to practice on that rotting and putrescent corpse!”
Then he was silent for a moment more. His face, gaunt and passionate, which in repose, after its grotesque contortions of scorn, rage, humor and disgust, was so strangely, nobly tranquil in its lonely dignity, burned with a stern and craggy impassivity in the red, wintry glow of the late sun.
“And yet there was some strangeness in us all,” he went on in a remote, quiet, husky tone that had in it the curious and haunting quality of the distance and passion which his voice could carry as no other the boy had ever heard, “something blind and wild as nature—a sense of our inevitable destiny. Oh! call it not conceit!” his uncle cried. “Conceit is such a small thing, after all! Conceit is only mountain-high, world-wide, or ocean-deep!—This thing we had in us could match its will against the universe, the rightness of its every act against the huge single voice and bitter judgment of the world, its moral judgments against God himself.—Was it murder? Why, then, the murder was not in ourselves, but in the very flesh and blood of those we murdered. Their murder rushed out of their sinful lives to beg for bloody execution at our hands. The transgressor assaulted the very blade of our knives with his offending throat. The wicked man did willfully attack the sharp point of our bayonet with his crime-calloused heart, the offender in the sight of God rushed on us, thrust his neck into our guiltless hands and fairly broke it, in spite of all that we could do!…