And meantime the girl went home in deepest tribulation. She had never lied, and for a long time her sorrow centred in the thought that she had given a promise not possible to break. Once she stopped and turned back, suddenly fired to see her grandmother again and take back her oath. But she knew that would be vain. She had promised and there could be no escape save through falsehood. Auna believed a lie to be among the deepest of crimes; yet in half an hour she was pursuing trains of thought that did not embrace her own soul's safety, but only her parents. Her mind ran wholly on her father first, and then upon her mother. A human instinct inclined her to doubt whether the outlook in the next world was as dangerous as her grandmother declared.
She hated going home at all now. She dawdled, wandered by the river, felt her heart full of a great pity for her father that this most precious information must be denied him.
"But of course it's no good telling dear father what the devil said," she reflected; and then, pursuing this melancholy thought, another arose out of it and Auna sat by the stream and stayed her progress, quite weighed down by an arrestive idea.
If the devil could talk through her dear mother's lips, then, surely, nothing that anybody said was quite safe, for it followed that other people might also be subjected to his dreadful cunning and innocently voice his purpose. And if so, why not her grandmother as well as anybody else? Evidently natural goodness could be no safeguard, for she knew her mother to be as good as an angel in heaven. Her father had said so a thousand times. Perhaps, indeed, thought Auna, the devil delighted to make the most saintly people his mouthpiece. It was such an added infamy as she could understand might well gratify him. But, in that case, her grandmother was the least likely to escape these awful attentions; and if the Evil One had been whispering to Auna through her mother's lips, was it not possible, nay probable, that he had also been speaking with the voice of Mrs. Huxam? Then the human mind of her, quickened by love to deal in sophistry, reflected on another argument. She had promised her grandmother one thing; but not before she had promised her mother an opposite thing. She could not, therefore, escape a lie. Only a choice of lies awaited her in any case.
Auna rose and proceeded home. She suddenly remembered how Jacob was waiting impatiently for news, and the question of the promise sank into a minor matter before the immediate necessity to tell him her mother was very ill. More than that Auna did not intend to say. She was not going to speak of death, because she had a suspicion that her grandmother had exaggerated the danger to frighten her and extort her promise.
She told her father of the grave condition reported and he was deeply perturbed. On the following day he visited the doctor with results already chronicled, and Peter it was who during this morning went to the post-office for news of Margery. He returned with the information that she was about the same; and upon Auna asking him if she was still so very white, Peter answered that she was. But later, when she was alone with her brother in the evening, there came the tremendous secret information that finally sent Auna in the small hours of the next day to her father's room.
For Peter was no hand at secrets and confessed to Auna that he had not seen their mother at all. His grandfather had bade him keep the information to himself for the present; but none the less Peter told Auna, commanding profound silence from her. Their mother had left Brent.
"Grandmother's took her away for a change," explained Peter. "And grandfather was awful down about it and in a proper fret. He says that mother's soul have got to be saved, and he said now was the appointed time. But where mother's been took to, to save her soul, I don't know, and grandfather wouldn't tell me. And I swore I wouldn't let it out; but it's so interesting I had to tell somebody. You don't matter so long as father doesn't know; and if he did it's no odds, I reckon, for he couldn't find her."
"You've told a lie, then," mused Auna, and her brother, somewhat uneasy, began to argue the point; but she was not blaming him.
"Nothing ever happens that didn't ought, anyway," said Peter. "Grandmother's told us that a million times, and it gets you round a good few corners—lies included—to remember it."