“More and more they’ll get the feeling they work for Roscoe Elk, answer to Roscoe Elk. In time they may very well come to think they do us a favor to work the fields of Beulah Land, that it is time taken from—the ‘Elk Place.’”

“You are talking foolishness.”

“You will see.”

“I don’t think you know how galling it is to hear you playing at Overseer yourself and assuming that you know more about running Beulah Land than does anyone else. Every day you grow more like my mother!”

“Leon—where are you going?”

“Where I will not be treated as a child!” he exclaimed, having decided to go only when she asked him. “Where I may be allowed to sit and take my ease—and yes, my pleasure—and not be sent galloping about on errands for the ‘mistress!’”

“Leon! Leon?”

If she had not followed him through the house and breezeway to the back door, he might have stayed. He might have walked about, dissipating his bad temper in movement, and joined her again at supper, in however taciturn a mood. But in her guilty feeling at badgering him—maybe he was right that she was over touchy about Roscoe Elk—she followed, and so he had to get back on his horse and go where he did not really want to go, not at just that time, anyway—to the house behind the hedge beyond Highboro where the Bixby sisters, Florabel, Annette, and Pansy, waited to console and entertain the lusty, the lonely, and the misunderstood.

13

Roman had gone far beyond the self-dramatizing despair that is common enough among those his age. His self-pity was not sweet and consoling, but bitter. Having little to do, he had therefore done too much. Keeping the school was his only work, but it was not kept in summer and harvest time. His lovings may have been fanciful, but his rejections had been real. His love for Leon had been, was, real. His rejection by Leon, after the briefest hope of acceptance, had been brutal.

Roman did not approach Leon directly, but he watched him, hidden or from a distance. When one day Roman could stand his limbo-purgatory no longer, he put himself directly in Leon’s way, and privately too, so that there could be no excuse to himself later of “Well, he couldn’t because others were there.” Roman plotted the meeting; he came around a corner directly in Leon’s path and stood wordless, however much his eyes and attitude pled for acknowledgment. When Leon stared at him, his face going red and registering nothing more than pity and contempt—why then, right then, Roman might have killed him. But after he stepped aside, head bowed in humiliation and anger, he decided to kill himself instead.