“Was that what ailed him?” inquired a newcomer in the neighborhood. “I remember he was buried a year ago last winter, just after we moved here. But I never heard he was a drinking man.”
“None of us suspicioned it for quite a spell,” explained the first speaker volubly. “Donald Preston was too awful stylish and uppity to go to the tavern an’ get drunk like common folks; he used to sen’ for his liquor f’om out of town. The best of brandy, so they say; then he’d drink, an’ drink till he was dead to the world, shut up in his room. He kind of lost his mind ’long toward the last, they say. He lived more’n two years that way ’fore he finally died.”
“She didn’t take care of him like that, did she?”
“Yes, she did. Her an’ the hired man; an’ I guess they had their hands full part the time. He used to cry an’ holler nights like a baby towards the last. Me an’ Mr. Robinson heard him once when we was comin’ home f’om a revival meetin’ over to the Corners. Seth, he was for stoppin’ an’ seein’ if there was anythin’ we could do, but I says, ‘No, I don’t want to mix up in it,’ I says. Afterwards I was kind of sorry; I’d like to have seen the upstairs rooms in that house.”
The subject of these manifold revelations and censures was walking rapidly down the village street, her mind a maze of unhappy reflections. She stopped short at the end of the sidewalk, as Jimmy had done the day before.
“I don’t suppose there’s any use,” she thought, her eyes fixed on the imposing front which the Jarvis residence presented to the public gaze. “But I’ll try, anyway. If he’d give me a year—or even six months longer, I’m sure I could get the interest paid up.”
Without waiting for her elusive courage to vanish into thin air the girl pushed open the front gate, which clanged decisively shut behind her. The harsh metallic sound appeared to pursue her relentlessly up the long gravelled walk, past the stiff figures of the cast-iron deer, past the blossoming shrubs and the glittering blue glass globes—quite up to the pillared entrance. A sour-faced woman opened the door.
Mr. Jarvis was at home, she informed Barbara. “But he’s busy,” she added importantly. “The’ can’t nobody see him this mornin’, an’ he’s goin’ away to-morrow.”
“Then I must see him,” Barbara said firmly. “Tell Mr. Jarvis that Miss Preston would like to see him—on—on business.”