His wife was constrained to rise and he stood aside with a bow to let her pass first down the restricted space between the tables and the wall. They were out on the guards when she lifted her eyes to his and laid her hand on his arm.
“Why did you never tell me that the property which has lately come to you really belongs to the Ducies?”
He stared down at her, too astonished to be angry.
“Why? Because it is a lie. The Ducies have not a vestige of a right to it.”
“Oh, no, no. The Ducies would never seek to maintain a lie. Only they can’t substantiate their claim on account of the disastrous chances of war.”
She put her hands before her face and shook her head. When she looked up again there were vague blue circles beneath her eyes. The nervous stress of the incident and some unformulated association with the idea were obviously bearing on her heavily.
“It seems to me that we ought not to keep it,” she faltered.
“Keep it!” he thundered. “Why, we, that is our predecessors, have owned it for the last forty years, without a question. Why, Paula, are you crazy? The whole affair went through the courts forty years ago. ‘_Ought not to keep it!_’ The Ducie heir, this man’s father, who was then a minor, had not a scrap of paper nor one material witness, only the general understanding in the country that as Carroll Carriton happened to be in Mississippi at the time, and George Blewitt Ducie had a lot of specie from running his cotton through the blockade to England, he paid off the mortgage in gold. But that was mere hearsay, chiefly rumor of the gabble of the men who, it was claimed, had witnessed the execution of the quit-claim, and who took occasion to die immediately thereafter.”
“There is some inherent coercive evidence, to my mind, of the truth of those circumstances,” she declared. “It is too hard that the Ducies should have paid the money owed on the mortgage and then lose the place by foreclosure, and, oh, for less than the amount of the original debt.”
“But, Paula, can’t you see there is not a grain of proof that they ever paid the money? How, when, where? We held the promissory notes and the registered deed of trust and the court did not even take the matter under advisement.”