Posey had been so repressed with Mrs. Hagood that when her long smoldering resentment leaped into wrathful words the latter stood for a moment in bewildered astonishment. It was only for a moment, however, a color so deep it was fairly purple mottled her face; glancing around her eye rested on a small wooden rod she had taken from a curtain, and seizing this she turned on Posey, “You vile little beggar. I’ll teach you to talk that way to me!”
With the first blow that fell Posey sprang forward and fastened her sharp white teeth in Mrs. Hagood’s hand. But the latter’s greater strength shook her off before anything more than a deep mark had been made, the pain of which, as well as the insult of it only adding to the storm of blows the hand rained. “There,” she exclaimed, as breathless with anger, excitement, and exertion, she gave Posey a final violent shake, and whirled her into her little bedroom with such force that she fell in a heap on the floor, “you’ll stay in here till to-morrow morning, and we’ll see then if you will talk in any such way, and fly at me like a wildcat. If you do you’ll get something that you’ll remember as long as you live, I can tell you.” And with this parting threat she shut the door with a bang.
Left alone, throbbing with a rage of resentful passion, into which the physical pain entered as a part, Posey threw herself on the bed and buried her head in the clothes with the old cry, “Mamma, my mamma,” and then as a gust of stormy sobs shook her frame. “Why can’t I die, too, oh, why can’t I?”
But her tears were not of penitence, far from it, and it was well that Mrs. Hagood had not demanded of her any expression of sorrow for her offense, or of submission for the future; for in Posey’s present mood she would have been beaten to death before she would either have confessed or yielded. As it was she sobbed as softly as she could, and kept her face well in the pillow that Mrs. Hagood might not have the pleasure of knowing that she was crying, and under her breath she repeated over and over, as though it gave her some relief, “I hate you, oh, I do hate you, you bad, cruel woman!”
CHAPTER VII
A DESPERATE RESOLVE
Very soon Posey heard dishes clattering sharply on the table, for in Mrs. Hagood’s state of mind she handled even the plates and cups as though they had been guilty of offense, and presently the little brass bell rang out with an energy that warned Mr. Hagood it would not be wise to linger in obeying its summons. A moment later and his steps sounded on the porch, he was wiping his hands on the towel that hung by the door, they were sitting down at the table, and then came his question, “Where’s Posey to-night?”
There was but a thin door between her room and the kitchen, and Posey had no need to strain her ears to hear Mrs. Hagood as with loud and forceful emphasis she poured forth the story of Posey’s misdoings, to which the kindly old man who had taken the friendless child to a tender place in his heart, listened sorrowfully. As Mrs. Hagood ended she also heard his mild tone, “Why, now, Almiry, I wouldn’t be too hard on Posey; if she is quick-tempered she’s soon over it, an’ she’s always ready an’ willin’. As for her bein’ disappointed about not goin’ to school, she oughtn’t to have did what she did, but I s’posed you did mean to send her part of the time; it don’t seem quite right not to, now really, Almiry, an’ there’s the law, you know.”
It was a good deal of a protest for Mr. Hagood to make on any subject—more than he would have uttered for himself, as Posey well knew; but the grim silence in which his wife had listened was only the hush before the storm which he had drawn on his own head. “Oh, yes, Elnathan Hagood,” with a biting sarcasm of tone, “that’s right and just what I might have expected of you; take up against your own wife and for a vile, impudent, little street-beggar. You needn’t think you two have been so hand in glove all summer without my seeing it, and this is the upshot, and you uphold her in it.”
“Oh, Almiry!”
“But then I’ve done nothing for you, nothing at all. I didn’t make you all you are, and earn for you all you have. I haven’t worked my fingers off day in and day out for you. Oh, no; but you don’t owe me anything for that, certainly not. Only I’d like to know where you’d be now if it hadn’t been for me, and where you’d go now if it wasn’t for me, wanting to give to every missionary and shiftless creature you can hear of, and to dress a pauper up in silk and make a lady of her! One thing I guess, you’d find the poor-house at the end, and that pretty soon. But then that’s all the thanks I get.”