When she came to her residence with Madam Atheldena Sharpe, his tone changed to one of horrified protest. “Kate’s baby in the hands of a travelling clairvoyant; exhibited like a Punch and Judy Show; who ever heard of such a thing!” As she told of the exposure, and her desertion by Madam Sharpe, the bitterness and misery of which she had never forgotten, he bristled with indignation. “Kate’s baby with nowhere to go and nothing to eat; alone, afraid, and hungry! Could it be possible!”
All excited as she was, and stimulated still more by his interest, Rose gave to her story a certain dramatic force. Her keen sense of the ludicrous gave some humorous touches even to her description of Mrs. Hagood. When it came to her trouble with that lady she hesitated a moment, and then gave a most dramatic account of the closing scene, as well as of her flight, her encounter with Ben Pancost, and the help he had given her.
“True Jarvis spirit!” cried Great-Uncle Samuel, rubbing his hands. “Kate’s baby climbed out of the window in the night; tramped off all alone. Just think of it! And that boy, I’d like to meet him!”
But when she came to tell of her appearance at the Blossom home, and the kindness which she had there received, he insisted on shaking hands with the whole family in turn. “Bless me,” he exclaimed, “to think you have done all this for Kate’s baby. Who ever heard anything like it?”
Her stay at the Fifields’, including as it did the accusation made against her there, was a subject so fresh and painful to Rose, and seemed to her from the fact of the suspicion to involve her in such a disgrace that when she came to it she flushed, hesitated, and Mrs. Blossom, seeing her embarrassment, came to the rescue and related the circumstances that had led to the bringing out of the locket, and the accidental discovery of the marriage certificate inside it.
To Rose’s great surprise Great-Uncle Samuel did not seem to regard the fact that she had been charged with theft as anything particularly shameful; indeed he treated it with decided indifference. “They need not have worried,” with a lofty tone, “as to her being a low-bred child, the Jarvises are as good blood as you will often find. And to think,” sadly, “that the locket I gave Kate should have served a purpose neither of us ever dreamed of.”
“And why was it you didn’t know anything about my mother?” asked Rose.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Blossom, “that is a question I was just going to ask.”
“As I said before, when she ran away with Jim Shannon she cut herself off from all her friends. Poor Kate, how much suffering she brought on herself by her wilfulness! And yet I don’t think the blame was all hers. If her father had lived I’m certain it would never have happened; but her mother was a woman who wanted to bend every one and everything to her will. And Kate was an uncommonly high-spirited girl, impulsive and a trifle headstrong, but generous, affectionate, and everybody’s favorite; a girl that it needed some tact to manage, and her mother hadn’t a particle of tact. So when Kate fell in love with Jim Shannon she made a bad matter worse instead of better. Enough was said to Kate but she wouldn’t believe a word of it. I told her myself that he drank like a fish, and she only held up her head and said that he might have been a trifle wild, as any number of other young men had been, but that he was going to be entirely different. Well, it was the old story, marry him she would and did. And when she wrote to her mother asking if she could come home, Mary sent word back that she might, but her husband could never cross her threshold. Of course that made Jim mad, and Kate wrote at once that whoever received her must receive her husband also. Her mother sent that letter back to her, and there it all ended. In less than a week they were on their way West, and Kate never wrote a word home again.
“Some of her girl friends had a few letters from her, very bright at first, and telling how happy she was in her new home, but these soon stopped. I don’t deny that I was a good deal put out with her at first, but I understood her silence only too well. If life had gone smoothly with her she would have written, but as it was, she knew that whatever she had to endure she had brought it on herself, and she would bear it alone.