I was silent a minute. I wanted to know why she said this, and what George and his wife had been doing to make the village comment, but I would not go on gossiping about them, and I dropped the subject altogether. I made a remark about the Willeyville Fair. Aunt Naomi chuckled audibly, but she did not persist in talking about the Westons.
September 22. Rosa is once more in a state of excitement, and the household is correspondingly stirred. Hannah goes about with her head in the air and an expression of the most lofty scorn on her face; Rosa naturally resents this attitude, both of mind and of body; so I have to act as a sort of buffer between the two.
The fuss is about Ranny again. I begin to feel that I should be justified in having him kidnapped and carried off to some far country, but I hardly see my way clear to measures so extreme. I am astonished to find that Aunt Naomi did not know all the facts about the illness of Ranny's wife; or perhaps she was too much occupied with the affairs of the Westons to tell the whole. Ranny seems this time to have got into real difficulty, and apparently as the result of his latest escapade is likely to pay a visit to the county jail. It seems that while he was pretty far gone in liquor ex-Mrs. Ranny came to plead with him to take her back and marry her over again. She having had the greatest difficulty in getting divorced from him in the first place, one would think she might be content to let well enough alone; but she is evidently madly fond of Gargan, who must be a good deal of an Adonis in his own world, so completely does he sway the hearts of the women, even though they know him to be brutal, drunken, disreputable, and generally worthless. On this occasion Ranny behaved worse than usual, and met his former wife's petition by giving her a severe beating with the first thing which came to hand, the thing unluckily being an axe-handle. The poor woman is helpless in her bed, and Ranny has been taken possession of by the constable.
Rosa refuses to see anything in the incident which is in the least to the discredit of Ranny. I was in the garden this morning, and overheard her defending her lover against Hannah's severe censures upon him and upon Rosa for siding with him.
"Why shouldn't he beat his own wife when she deserved it," Rosa demanded, "and she nothing but a hateful, sharp-nosed pig?"
"She isn't his wife," Hannah retorted, apparently not prepared to protest against a doctrine so well established as that a man might beat his spouse.
"Well, she was, anyhow," persisted Rosa; "and that's the same thing. You can't put a man and his wife apart just by going to law. Father O'Rafferty said so."
"Oh, you can't, can't you?" Hannah said with scornful deliberation. "Then you're a nice girl to be talking about marrying Ranny Gargan, if he's got one wife alive already."
This blow struck too near home, I fear, for Rosa's voice was pretty shrill when she retorted.
"What do you know about marrying anyhow, Hannah Elsmore? Nobody wants to marry you, I'll be bound."