“You’re always picking on me,” she quavered wretchedly, her voice indistinct with the wetness that bubbled into it from her tears. “You do—you always pick on me! You’ve always done it—always—ever since you were a little boy! Whenever anything goes wrong with you, you take it out on me! You do! You always—”
George flung to heaven a gesture of despair; it seemed to him the last straw that Fanny should have chosen this particular time to come and sob in his room over his mistreatment of her!
“Oh, my Lord!” he whispered; then, with a great effort, addressed her in a reasonable tone: “Look here, Aunt Fanny; I don’t see what you’re making all this fuss about. Of course I know I’ve teased you sometimes, but—”
“‘Teased’ me?” she wailed. “‘Teased’ me! Oh, it does seem too hard, sometimes—this mean old life of mine does seem too hard! I don’t think I can stand it! Honestly, I don’t think I can! I came in here just to show you I sympathized with you—just to say something pleasant to you, and you treat me as if I were—oh, no, you wouldn’t treat a servant the way you treat me! You wouldn’t treat anybody in the world like this except old Fanny! ‘Old Fanny’ you say. ‘It’s nobody but old Fanny, so I’ll kick her—nobody will resent it. I’ll kick her all I want to!’ You do! That’s how you think of me—I know it! And you’re right: I haven’t got anything in the world, since my brother died—nobody—nothing—nothing!”
“Oh my Lord!” George groaned.
Fanny spread out her small, soaked handkerchief, and shook it in the air to dry it a little, crying as damply and as wretchedly during this operation as before—a sight which gave George a curious shock to add to his other agitations, it seemed so strange. “I ought not to have come,” she went on, “because I might have known it would only give you an excuse to pick on me again! I’m sorry enough I came, I can tell you! I didn’t mean to speak of it again to you, at all; and I wouldn’t have, but I saw how you treated them, and I guess I got excited about it, and couldn’t help following the impulse—but I’ll know better next time, I can tell you! I’ll keep my mouth shut as I meant to, and as I would have, if I hadn’t got excited and if I hadn’t felt sorry for you. But what does it matter to anybody if I’m sorry for them? I’m only old Fanny!”
“Oh, good gracious! How can it matter to me who’s sorry for me when I don’t know what they’re sorry about!”
“You’re so proud,” she quavered, “and so hard! I tell you I didn’t mean to speak of it to you, and I never, never in the world would have told you about it, nor have made the faintest reference to it, if I hadn’t seen that somebody else had told you, or you’d found out for yourself some way. I—”
In despair of her intelligence, and in some doubt of his own, George struck the palms of his hands together. “Somebody else had told me what? I’d found what out for myself?”
“How people are talking about your mother.”