“I tell you ’twas vanity—vanity that tempted her to sell her home—vanity that tempted her to marry—vanity that tempted her first to listen to a suitor—a woman of her age! But I do think women are the most incorrigible—the most provoking—the most hopeless—and of all women, middle-aged widows are the most desperate fools!”
“Uncle Billy, I suppose, as an old bachelor, you have a license to rail at women in general, and, as an elder brother, you have liberty to be unjust to your sister. My mother was a handsome woman, in her prime, and it appears to me not unnatural that she should have married. But if you thought otherwise, you should have told her so.”
“For what good? A cat may release a mouse from its claws; a rattle-snake a charmed bird from its jaws; the grave give up its victim; but never cat held mouse, or snake bird, or grave victim with such a death-grip as a middle-aged widow holds her last lover!”
“Just now you told me that Dr. Wells tempted my mother into this marriage—now, you lay the responsibility upon her. That is like you, old, impartial justice, Mr. ‘Bothsides.’”
“All true. They tempted each other—she, him, with her handsome property! he, her, with his handsome person! He was bent on having her plantation!—she, on having him. And so they soldered an engagement that Satan himself, with his sledge hammer, could not have shivered. I’ll tell you all about it, Mark! I kept a sharp look-out on that chap when he first came prowling about Silentshades. I was tempted to shoot him by mistake, for a catamount. But I twigged him! Very little of that palavering courtship, that I didn’t hear! Sure as ever they’d be on the piazza, I’d be in the parlour under the window, listening.”
“But what did you think of yourself, Mr. Bolling, for your eavesdropping?”
“Thought I was doing my duty by my sister, to circumvent a gay deceiver!”
Mark frowned.
“Oh, now you don’t know how old pill-box and blister-plaster could court! You should have heard him talk about that ‘regal brow’—‘that, that face!’ (as if there was no word good enough to describe it)—and ‘those holy eyes’—and ‘my darling, oh, my darling’—and ‘my lovely Helen’—and ‘it is too much, too much to crave of Heaven’ (her love you know he meant)—and ‘oh, my dearest’—and ‘this little hand’—and all the rest of the lying balderdash, which I suppose was mighty sweet to a woman who had not heard such words for twenty years.”
“And how do you know it was not perfectly sincere?” exclaimed Mark, indignantly rising and walking away.