“Whatever it is, if it concerns us we shall be told in due time; and if it doesn’t—Hmm,” answered Helena.
“Stand corrected, Miss Montaigne; but bet a cookie you’re as curious as all the rest of us.”
“Well, yes, I am; though I never bet—even cookies. Now let’s talk of something else till they come back. I know they’ll not be long.”
Nor were they; for down in the summer-house, with Elisabeth Calvert’s compelling gaze upon him, the visitor told his tale.
“Thee can look upon me, lady, as the worm that turned. I am a poor relation of Oliver Sands and he felt he owned me.”
“That man? Are we never to hear the end of Oliver Sands? He’s the ‘Old Man of the Mountain’, in truth, for his name is on everyone’s lips,” cried Mistress Betty, crisply, yet resigning herself to the chair Dorothy pushed her way.
“Thee never said truer. He is the biggest man up-mounting in more ways’n one. I’ve not wasted more love on him than many another but I hadn’t no call to break his heart. Hark, thee. I’ll be as short as I can.
“When Oliver’s mother died he was a boy and I was. She——”
“Beg pardon, please; but this afternoon I really have no time to learn the family history of my neighbor.”
“But I have to tell thee part, to make thee understand. When his mother died, a widow, she left them two children, Oliver and Leah. He was a big boy, smart and trustable, and Leah was almost a baby. Her mother knew then that the child wasn’t like others, she’d talked it with me, I bein’ older’n him; but he didn’t know it and from the time she was born he’d just about worshiped that baby. When she was dying Mehitabel made him promise, and a Friend’s promise is as good as another man’s oath, ’t he’d always take care of little Leah and love her better’n anybody in the world. That nobody, even if he should grow up and marry and have children of his own, should ever come betwixt her and him. Well, ’twas a good spell before he found out ’t he was brother to a fool. That’s plain speech but I’m a Quaker. When he did find out, ’twas a’most more’n he could bear. He give out to anybody that asked, how ’t she was sickly and had to be kept private.