And thus it was that his home had fallen to decay; his barns and fences rotted; his gin was broken and patched and deteriorated in common with all his farm machinery; his hedges of Cherokee rose, widened, unpruned and untended, becoming veritable land grabbers, rather than boundaries, and yearly more and more of his acres must needs be rented for lack of funds to pay a force of laborers. Colonel Kenwynton lived on in his mortgaged home and “scuffled up the money,” as he phrased the process, to meet the interest year by year, and kept but sorry cheer by a bleak and lonely fireside. Nevertheless, he twirled up the ends of his white mustachios jauntily and faced the world with a bold front.
From his own account it seemed wonderful that he had any income at all, and as if much business tact must be requisite to hold his mortgages together in such shape that they should assume all the enlightened functions of a fortune. The age of some of these obligations was a source of special pride with him, although sometimes with an air of important dismay he would compute the amount of interest he had paid in the course of years on their several renewals aggregating more than the property would sell for in the present collapsed condition of such real estate values. When he came to speak of the interest he had promised to pay, he would pause with an imperative shake of the head, as if to abash the futurity which was fast bringing about the maturity of these notes.
“Why, Colonel, this is not good business,--you have practically bought your own property twice over,” Treherne attempted to argue with him one day when his mood waxed confidential. “You should have given up the fight long ago and let them foreclose.”
“Foreclose on my home place, sir,--the remnant of my father’s plantation?” he replied in amaze. “Why, what would the snail do without the shell he was born with? I shall need a narrower one before that day comes, I humbly trust in Providence.”
Colonel Kenwynton could scarcely imagine existence without a mortgage. A deed of trust seemed as natural and essential an incident of a holding in fee simple as the title papers.
Treherne discovered as time went on opportunities for betterment in the Colonel’s affairs, small it is true, pitiful in comparison with the ideals of the old gentleman, who lifted his brows in compassionate surprise when the subject was broached, and, but that he could not contravene the common sense of the proposition, he might have thought it an insane impulse, manifesting itself in schemes of domestic economy on a minute scale.