Mrs. Lathrop, believing that the situation being extraordinary, some extraordinary effort on her part was demanded, stirred herself to a prolonged speech.
"Don't tell me I'm looking—"
"No, I'm not a ghost, if that's what you mean. You are looking at Susan Clegg in the flesh—all the flesh that ain't been scared clean off her. But it's the greatest miracle as ever happened in this community that it's my body and not my spirit as is here to tell the tale. My house was broken into by a burglar, Mrs. Lathrop, and I was tied up and gagged in one of my own chairs."
Mrs. Lathrop just gasped. Susan drew herself up a little straighter, gaining courage from the sound of her own voice, and striking something like her old oral gait.
"I was gagged for five hours, Mrs. Lathrop, and knowing me as you do for all these years and years, maybe you can feel what being gagged for five hours and not able to say even 'boo' meant to a active person like me. Every one of those hours was like a eternity in a Spanish inferno of torture. And everything I possess in this world, from my bonnet and striped silk dress to Father's deeds at the mercy of that gagger. And all I've got to say is this: If I hadn't of been built over, it never in the wide creation would have happened. And if your son Jathrop thinks he can ever make up to me for being gagged by inviting me to a Christmas dinner, most of which I cooked with my own hands, and offering to give me strange pieces of furniture to take the place of pieces as is old friends and dearer than the apples of my two eyes, he'd better do some more thinking. There never was nothing about the house I was born in and my mother and father died in to make a burglar look at it twice. No burglar as had any respect for himself or his calling, Mrs. Lathrop, would have looked at it once or knowed as it was there. But built over it's as different as diamon's is from pebbles. It looks money from the tips of its lightning rods to its cellar windows and is as inviting to robbers as if it had a sign on the gatepost, reading: 'Walk in!' So, however you look at it, there's nobody responsible for my gagging and for whatever is missing but one man, and that man is Jathrop Lathrop. It's easy to be seen as he's no more fit to have money than a crow as steals gold trinkets that cost fortunes and goes and hides 'em in hollow trees. He was born poor, and the Lord meant him to stay poor, no matter what Mrs. Allen and her Persian religion has to say about things as happens being meant to happen. The Lord hadn't nothing to do with Jathrop going to the Klondike and getting rich, you can be certain about that. If he hadn't been fool enough to take a kicking cow for a perfectly good debt and then let it loose to ride over a peaceful and long-suffering community, he'd 'a' lived and died a pauper in this here very town. So's far as I can see it was the devil and not the Lord as guided Jathrop from the first, and everything as has happened since shows the devil is still guiding him. Everything he turns his mind to goes by contraries. I'm not saying anything against the goodness of Jathrop's intentions, mind you, Mrs. Lathrop, but no matter how good they are, evil and misery certainly seems sure to follow."
The tirade stirred Mrs. Lathrop to her feet, but she was not resentful. She knew that Susan Clegg's bitterness was confined to her tongue, and that even with that she could salve as well as sting.
"Can't I—?" she suggested.
"Indeed you can," answered Miss Clegg. "I never felt as I needed a cup of tea more, and if the doughnuts I brought you ain't all eat up, I'd relish four or five of 'em right now."
"You haven't—" began Mrs. Lathrop, taking down the teapot.
"No; but I'm coming to it. I begun with the cause, and the effect'll come trailing after like the tails of Mary's little lambs. Only the tails in this case was bigger than the sheep. It may have been hearing the noise Jathrop makes when he eats, or it may have been your turkey gravy or your biscuits, Mrs. Lathrop, or all of 'em put together. Not knowing which, I'm not foolish enough to blame one more'n the other. But it's a fact as is undeniable that I never slept poorer than last night. I was in bed by nine, but I never closed my eyes till eleven, and I certainly heard the clock strike midnight. I counted goats jumping over a stile, and I counted 'em backward as well as forward, but I heard one struck, and I heard two. And then I heard something as set my hair up on end and the gooseflesh sprouting all over me. It sounded like footsteps in the 'But. Pan.,' and they was too heavy for the cat's, I could tell that at once, though at two in the morning it's surprising how loud a cat's footsteps can sound, especially when it's reached the pouncing stage, and the rat ain't got no hole to run to. I'd forgot to put the turkey leg in the ice-box as I'd carried home with me, and all I could think of was that if it was the cat, there'd be nothing left on that bone by morning, unless I stopped things right then and immediately. You'd never believe how cold a house can be at two o'clock in the morning of the day after Christmas unless you'd got up in it as I did; and now to look back at it, I see how lucky it was as it was as cold as it was, for if it hadn't of been, I'd a gone down just as I was, and I was in no trim to meet a man burglar, I can tell you that. So I just slipped into this flannel wrapper and a old pair of slippers, which I've got on now under these arctics, and I picked up the candle as I'd lit, and down-stairs I went. Well, Mrs. Lathrop, I hope you may never in your born days in this world or the other have such a shock as met me there face to face in my own new, built-over kitchen. If there wasn't the biggest giant of a man I ever see coming out of the shadows between the cookstove and the cellar door. And he with his head all wrapped around in one of my best plaid roller towels, so that nothing of him was to be seen but two fierce, staring, bloodshot eyes as gleamed like a wild beast's. Oh, my soul and body, Mrs. Lathrop, that minute! How I ever kept my senses I don't pretend to say, more especially as he was on me with one jump. There was no such thing as holding on to the candle, you can see that. It dropped, and I never knew I dropped it. For, of course, I shut my eyes, and when your eyes is shut, there's no knowing whether there's a lighted candle about or whether there isn't."