[CHAPTER VI—AUNT KATHARINE—CONTINUED]
After supper that evening, as Ruel Saxon sat in his room in the twilight, Esther came softly in and sat down beside him.
“Grandfather,” she said, “what made Aunt Katharine so bitter against the men?”
She had been turning the question wonderingly in her thoughts ever since the interview of the afternoon. There was something in the lonely old woman, crabbed of manner and sharp of tongue as she was, which had appealed to her strongly. That she was a unique personality, unlike any one she had seen before, was no doubt a part of it, for Esther loved the striking and picturesque; but there was more than this. She, too, had felt some touch of revolt against the limitations with which custom had hedged the ordinary life of woman, and Aunt Katharine’s fierce, uncaring challenge of it all had not been wholly unpleasing to her.
“What made Katharine so bitter against the men?” repeated her grandfather. He had started at the question, as one does sometimes when called upon suddenly to account for a familiar fact which everyday acquaintance has robbed of all its wonder. “Well, that’s a long story, and I don’t s’pose anybody but Katharine herself could tell the whole of it; but there were some things all of us knew, and she did have her grievances—there’s no doubt but what she had her grievances.”
He jerked off his spectacles, through which he had been trying to read a chapter of Proverbs, settled himself in his chair, dropped his chin in his hand, and began:—
“It started just about the time that Nancy came home with her children; Nancy was our sister, you know. There were three of us: Nancy and Katharine and me. Katharine was the youngest, and she was going to be married that spring to Levi Dodge. He was a likely young fellow, as everybody thought, and they’d been keeping company for upward of a year. But when Nancy came home it changed everything. There were those six children to be done for, and Nancy herself all wore out with work ’n’ worry, and your grandmother—for I was married then, you know—had her hands more ’n full with the housework and her own children, and it looked to Katharine as if she’d or’ to put off getting married a while and help things along here at home.”
“We didn’t ask her to, and we didn’t so much as know she was thinking of it, till she’d got her mind all made up; but I tell you we were awful glad, and I never shall forget how Nancy and your grandmother cried and hugged her, when she told ’em what she was going to do, right here in this room where you ’n’ I be to-night.”
He paused, and it seemed to Esther as if the shadows in the dusky room took momentary shape of those three women, young, loving, and in trouble together, who had met there so long ago. Perhaps the old man felt their presence too, for there was a peculiar softness in his voice as he went on:—
“We wouldn’t ’a’ let her do it, if we’d known how things were coming out, but you see we thought Nancy’d be in a home of her own again inside a year, and then the way’d be open for Katharine ’n’ Levi, and of course we thought he’d be reasonable about it. But bless your heart, when she came to talk it over with him he wouldn’t give in an inch. He said she’d giv’ her promise to him, and she couldn’t go back on it; he had more claim on her than John Proctor’s family had. Well, of course, I don’t know what passed between ’em,—Katharine never talked it over much,—but she was always high strung, and I guess she gave it to him pretty straight that if he couldn’t wait for her a little while under such circumstances he needn’t count on having her at all. Anyhow, the upshot of it was he went away mad, and we were dreadful sorry, but we thought he’d get over it in a day or two. He didn’t, though. In less ’n a week he was courting Sally Fry, and they two were married on the very day that was set for Katharine’s wedding.”