There was an increased attention in his face as he demanded, “Think differently about what?”
He had an imperative eye, an insistent voice. It did not occur to her that his interest was strange. And indeed he was not a man to be questioned.
She paused for a moment, her eyes full of a dreamy retrospection. She was not looking at him, but at the boughs of pink blossoms above his horse’s head, and then she absently glanced at a black butterfly, bespangled with orange and blue, flying across the road to the ferns about the spring. As the fluttering wings disappeared she seemed to start from her reverie.
“Jedge,” she said, in a piteous deprecation, “things seem right ter me, an’ other folks thinks ’em wrong. An’ I feel obleeged ter do what I ’low air right, an’ it all turns out wrong. An’ then I’m besides myself with blame! I reckon ye wouldn’t b’lieve it, but it’s all my fault ’bout’n this trouble o’ Reuben Lorey’s. Ef it hedn’t been fur me, he wouldn’t hev gone down ter Shaftesville ter gin up all he hed ter old man Griff—like I tole him ter do ez soon ez I hed hearn ’bout bustin’ the mill down. I tole him ter do it, an’ he done it. An’ look,—look!” She lifted her hand as if she drew a veil from the disastrous sequences. Her voice choked, her eyes were full of tears. “An’ then I told that thar moonshiner ez I wouldn’t promise ter keep his secret, an’ they runned away fur fear o’ me, ’kase Tad went thar arter he got out o’ the ruver. I seen Sam Marvin arterward, an’ he ’lowed ter me they s’posed he war a spy, an’ beat him, an’—an’—I dunno what else they done ter him. None o’ that would hev happened ef I hed promised ter hold my tongue. But it didn’t ’pear right ter me.”
“Then you were right not to promise,” he said, reassuringly. “No one can do more than what seems right; that is,”—it behooves a man of his profession to modify and qualify,—“within the limits of the law.”
She looked up at him a little wonderingly. Her latent faculties for speculation were timorously developing in the first realization of intelligent sympathy that had ever fallen to her lot. How strange that such as he—and somehow she subtly appreciated in him that unification of mental force, education, civilization, natural endowment, and moral training, of the existence of which she was otherwise unconscious—should tolerate her doctrine; nay, should revere and accept it as a creed!
“A heap o’ harm an’ wrong hev kem of it,” she said, submitting the logic of Wild-Cat Hollow.
“That is not our lookout. The moral law is to do what seems right, no matter what happens.”
A vague smile broke upon his face; his eyes were illumined with a new light; he seemed suddenly young and very gentle.
“You need never be afraid of doing any harm; you may rely on it, you know what is right.”