“Now, Almiry, you know better,” expostulated Mr. Hagood.
“But I’ll tell you one thing,” she continued cutting him short, “it won’t be healthy for you to be a-settin’ her up against me, and I’ll see that you don’t have much chance to do it. And I’ll tell you another thing you may both depend on, she shall never go to school now, not a single day. I taught once, I can teach her, and I’ll begin to-morrow. And one thing more, as long as I have my health and strength I don’t propose to be run over in my own house by any miserable little upstart, as she’ll find out to her sorrow if she ever tries it again.”
Mrs. Hagood had raised her voice with the intention that the words should reach Posey’s ears, who in return shook her small clenched fist towards the closed door, and was only restrained from calling out the words which rose to her lips by the lesson she had recently and painfully gained, that in a contest of strength she was no match for Mrs. Hagood, and was sure to be the sufferer.
Mr. Hagood sighed as he rose from his almost untasted meal and went out about his evening chores. And as Posey’s gust of passion ebbed away she sighed also, not only for the supper she had been deprived of, whose savory whiffs had intensified her always healthy appetite, but from the realization, of which this going supperless was an evidence, how mortally she had angered Mrs. Hagood. For, as she well knew, the battle between them was not over; instead it was just begun; that dominant will would not rest till it had crushed and broken the will which had dared to oppose it, and Posey aching and smarting, but rebellious and unyielding, lay and looked at the ceiling and felt that it was indeed a painful way on which she must enter with the morrow, and in which her one friend, however innocent, must also suffer.
These gloomy forebodings of the future grew as the darkness thickened in her little room; then a slight sound at her window attracted her attention, and softly raising the sash she found on the sill outside, a long row of juicy harvest apples. Tears filled her eyes, but they were such as she had not shed before that day, and she kissed the red-cheeked apples and with a rush of love and gratitude for the unspoken kindness they expressed.
Poor, hasty, undisciplined Posey! That she had not been blameless she well knew. “But Mrs. Hagood was so mean,” so she justified herself, “or I’d never have done so, and I don’t believe anybody else would have stood it either. O dear!” and she sighed very deeply as she munched an apple, “how I wish Mr. Hagood and I could go away somewhere and live all by ourselves; I’m sure with him I’d never get angry and ugly, and feel like fighting.”
For most of all it was love and tenderness that her lonely little heart longed for, and having these she thought to be good would be easy. “Oh, mamma,” was the whispered plaint that rose to her lips, “if you had only lived I might have been good, but how can I now? You told me that God would love me, but I don’t think He can for nobody else does.” The wind was rising, and as Posey leaned against the frame of the still open window and listened to it rushing and murmuring through the tall trees around the house, and watched the dim, shadowy motion of the waving branches, to her excited fancy the one seemed to urge, “Come away, come away,” and the other like inviting hands to beckon, “Come, come.” And as she looked and listened an impulse, a sudden resolve sprang in her heart, and setting her teeth firmly she murmured as if in answer, “I will come, I will!”
Posey did not undress when she lay down again, though first she knelt down by the bed and repeated her,
“Now I lay me down to sleep,”
as usual. But to-night she felt that this was not enough, that she needed something to give fuller expression to the tumult of feeling within her. At the Refuge she had been taught the Lord’s prayer, but instinctively she shrank from that clause of forgiveness of others, for she well knew that the spirit throbbing so hotly in her heart was anything but a forgiving one, so for want of something better she added a petition of her own, “O Lord, I haven’t anybody in the world, unless it is you. Take care of me; show me what to do; help me, please do! Amen.”