“Donald Maxwell’s salary is goin’ to be paid him in full within the next two weeks or––”
Mrs. Burke came to a sudden silence, and after a moment or two Bascom turned around and inquired sarcastically:
“Or what?”
Hepsey continued to knit in silence for a while, her face working in her effort to gain control of herself and speak calmly.
“Now see here, Sylvester Bascom: I didn’t come here to have a scene with you, and if I knit like I was fussed, you must excuse me.”
Her needles had been flashing lightning, and truth to tell, Bascom, for all he dreaded Hepsey’s sharp tongue as nothing else in Durford, had been unable to keep his eyes off those angry bits of sparkling steel. Suddenly they stopped—dead. The knitting fell into Hepsey’s lap, and she sat forward—a pair of kindly, moist eyes searching the depths of Bascom’s, as he looked up at her. Her voice dropped to a lower tone as she continued:
“There’s been just one person, and one person only, 277 that’s ever been able to keep the best of you on top—and she was my best friend, your wife. She kept you human, and turned even the worst side of you to some account. If you did scrape and grub, ’most night and day, to make your pile, and was hard on those that crossed your path while doin’ of it, it was she that showed you there was pleasure in usin’ it for others as well as for yourself, and while she lived you did it. But since she’s been gone,”—the old man tried to keep his face firm and his glance steady, but in vain—he winced,—“since she’s been gone, the human in you’s dried up like a sun-baked apple. And it’s you, Sylvester Bascom, that’s been made the most miserable, ’spite of all the little carks you’ve put on many another.”
His face hardened again, and Hepsey paused.
“What has all this to do with Mr. Maxwell, may I ask?”
“I’m comin’ to that,” continued Hepsey, patiently. “If Mary Bascom were alive to-day, would the rector of Durford be livin’ in a tent instead of in the rectory—the house she thought she had given over, without mortgage or anything else, to the church? And would you be holdin’ back your subscription to the church, and seein’ that others held back too? I never thought you’d have done, when she was dead, what’d 278 have broken her heart if she’d been livin’. The church was her one great interest in life, after her husband and her daughter; and it was her good work that brought the parish to make you Senior Warden. After you’d made money and moved to your new house, just before she died, she gave the old house, that was hers from her father, to the church, and you were to make the legal transfer of it. Then she died suddenly, and you delayed and delayed—claiming the house as yours, and at last sold it to us subject to the mortgage.”