“That was enough for me. I stopped him.
“‘Don’t say any more, Charlie. All I wish to know about Mrs. Hawthorne is what she cares to tell me herself,’ and I insisted that the conversation should return to other things.
“When I got home I told mother, and she repeated to me what you, Aurora, confided to her when we first knew you. We told father, and when Doctor Bewick came that evening to say good-by we consulted, and here in this newspaper you have the result, put into Italian journalese by Carlo Guerra, whom we called in to aid us. He likes you so much, Aurora; did you know it? He met you at Antonia’s. So there you have the whole story. I’m bitterly ashamed of Charlie, my dear, and I’m sorry about him, too. One never looked upon him as a particularly fine fellow, still, one liked him. He had never done anything that disqualified him for a sort of liking, and we’ve all grown up together.” Leslie wrinkled her forehead in puzzlement. “It’s curious, somehow, to think of him, who, we have said so often, has no real inside, as being sufficiently under the dominion of a passion to care to please his lady by offering up you, who have, after all, been to him a source of a good many pleasures, with your open house, invitations to dinner, and so on. I don’t quite understand it.”
“Never mind about him!” Aurora flicked him aside. “I don’t care. And you say Tom helped. And he never 417told me, or wrote me a word about it. I had a letter from him this morning. Well, well. You certainly did make a good-sounding story of it, among you. And the main facts are true, far as they go; I can’t say they aren’t. But, oh, my dear Leslie, there was a lot more to it than that. I’ve got to tell you, so’s not to feel like a fraud. You’re so sharp; you know me pretty well by this time, and I guess you don’t suppose in me any of those awfully ‘fine feelin’s’ that could make a blighted flower of me because, while innocent as a babe unborn, I’d been dragged through the courts by wicked enemies. My enemies were pretty wicked; I stick to that. Cora Bewick, off living abroad studying some strange religion, while her kind old pa was dying at home, and she never once coming near him till he was under ground; Idell Friebus, never coming into his room except with her nose wrinkled up with disgust at the smell of disinfectants–or disgust at him, it was none too plain which. They made a fine pair of daughters. But when it came to fighting over the will, the lawyers on the Bewick side gave out just what it was that a perfectly noble woman would have done in my place of the old man’s nurse. And my lawyers would have it that everything that didn’t accord with that ideal simply must be kept dark, or public feeling would go against us. It’s that that made it so nasty–pretending, and avoiding this, and keeping off the other. It amounted to lying, no matter what they said. But they told me if I didn’t do as my counsel instructed me, the result would be the worst lie of all. I should be believed guilty of just that undue influence I was accused of, and lose the money into the bargain. So I had to hedge and shuffle and mislead.... And me under oath to tell the truth! You needn’t wonder 418 if I’m sick still at the thought of it, or wonder that I’d like to forget it. The truth was I did know beforehand the Judge meant to leave me one fourth of his money, and I was tickled to death. I gloried in it. I loved to imagine the rage it would throw his wicked daughters in, and his mean little miserable son-in-law. I was glad, besides, out and out, to think I should have the money. I plain wanted it, I did. Maybe a real noble woman wouldn’t have. Maybe it showed a degraded nature. Well, that’s the way it was. Sometimes I feel disposed to be ashamed of it, but mostly I don’t. For one thing, I felt then and I feel now, I deserved that money by a long sight more than those bad-hearted girls of his. I was a comfort to Judge Bewick. I won’t say I earned the money, it was too much: but there were some hours of my tending him, poor soul, when it did seem to me a nurse came pretty near earning anything the patient could afford to pay. All the same, I would have done what I did for the old boy if he hadn’t had a cent, I had so much respect for him, as much as for my own father, and I felt I owed so much to his son. Then about his son, the doctor. If Cora’s old nurse-girl, who was kept on in the house as a servant, though she was past her usefulness, lied in court when she said she saw Tom and me kissing at such an hour, in such a place, still, the truth was that I had at different times kissed Tom. You can’t tell why it seems all right to you to kiss one man when it would seem a very queer thing to do to kiss another. When Tom had been away for any length of time, I always kissed him when he came back; it seemed natural to both of us. But there in court I had to try to appear as if I never could have descended to committing such an immoral act, as well as to give the impression that if I’d 419 known the old man had any notion of making me co-heir with his own children I would have strained every nerve to stop it, called them all in to help me curb him if necessary. Pshaw! the humbug of it turns my stomach now. Leslie, my verdict is, you can’t come through a law-suit clean. I’d give a good deal to cut that page out of my life.”
Aurora’s eyes, filled with the shadows of the past, and her face, with the dimples expunged, were to Leslie almost unfamiliar. Aurora, oppressed in her moral nature, gave a glimpse of herself that would change and enlarge the composite of her aspects carried in Leslie’s mind.
“There, stop thinking of it!” said Estelle. “You always work yourself up so.”
“The point of my coming bright and early like this,” Leslie nimbly managed a diversion, “was, as you have guessed, to catch you before you could possibly go out. My mother desires you, dear ladies, to accompany me back to lunch–a triumphal lunch, Aurora, to grace which she has collected those special pillars of society whose countenance and support ought to make you scornful of any little weed-like growth of gossip that might sprout up from seed of Charlie’s sowing. You know them all more or less, having been associated with every one of them in some form of beneficence. I might more accurately describe it: having donated largely to each of their pet charities. It is not a very admirable world–” Leslie’s young face took that little air of knowing the world which sometimes amused old gentlemen so much, “it is a selfish society, not indisposed, or, I am afraid, altogether displeased, to believe evil of its neighbor, and not always disinclined to turn and rend its favorites. But it would be a pity, really, if you 420should have poured forth upon it as you have done, Aurora, money and smiles, bouquets and banquets and sunbeams, good-will and baby-socks and knitted afghans, and it did not rise up when you are attacked and say, ‘No. An exception has to be made in this case. We have all been bought!’”
Aurora, who had been listening with expanded, gathering-in eyes, cheeks flushing deeper and deeper, turned her head sharply away to try to keep from falling or being seen two unaccountable tears half blinding her.
The sight of her, by infection, moistened the eyes of the other women.
Estelle sought a quick way out of the emotional silence.