“No use,” Granny croaked once more. The tears streamed unheeded down her cheeks.
It was the tears that made him understand—Mistress Estill was no weeping female. He backed from her until he reached a table, and leaned on it heavily, as if he could no longer stand erect.
“You are trying to tell me—that they did not take Polly—alive?”
Granny had found her voice at last. She told her lie with pride.
“Take Polly alive? How should they take her alive—my granddaughter! You think she would not hold herself too dear for that? Your wife, the mother of your son? She might well have gone with them unharmed; some women do, more shame to them! But not her. She fought them off, fought them like any wildcat. ‘Take your foul hands from me,’ she said, ‘for I belong to the one man only—my husband! Dead you may take me if you can, but living no other man shall have me—never!’”
The man’s head slowly lifted. A strange look came over his ravaged face, a look almost of relief.
“She said that, did she? My Polly! My brave, loving, loyal little mate! I might have known⸺”
The old woman, closely watching him, lied with growing confidence.
“And so, seeing they could not get her otherwise, they killed her, son; killed her clean and swift as a body would want to die, not lingering on after the heart has gone out of her, beyond her time—but fighting to the last, like any man, for the things she holds dearer than life, her home, her child, her—her love⸺”
Ezra burst into a terrible sobbing, and the old woman, rising with infinite difficulty, managed to hobble over to him by the aid of stools and table, and held his head against her breast. She was whispering under her breath, “God forgive me, God forgive me!”