“I mean—Jonas—that I—just can’t—go back with you!”
Jonas at first could not speak. Then he said gravely:
“You’re only jokin’ and beatin’ about the bush, Marthy. It’s the way women folks have. But what’s the use of doin’ it with me? You can’t mean it. Didn’t ye always tell me that you liked me real well, and that when there was nothin’ to keep ye you’d come?”
Martha so far recovered her composure as to let her hands resume their customary position in her lap; but her cheeks and her voice betrayed the moral stress under which she laboured.
“I know I did, Jonas,” she said. “And I meant it. But somehow it seems different, now the time has come. I do like you real well, and I always did. But it seems like I couldn’t leave this old house where I was born and where all my people died, and go off among strangers. I just can’t, Jonas!”
With which deliverance she raised a neatly folded handkerchief to her eyes, and held it there. Poor Jonas looked on with the double helplessness of a man before a woman’s tears, and of a lover in the face of his mistress’s perversities. Of what all this could mean he had not the slightest idea. But he felt ill-used, although a great deference put him in a mood of concession.
“But you promised, Marthy,” he said gently. “And how can you live here all by yourself? Who will look out for you?”
“I know I promised, Jonas,” tearfully murmured Miss Waring; “and I just hate to go back on my word. But it comes over me now that I oughtn’t to have promised—that I never could have done it. You needn’t bother about my living alone, though, I’ve always looked out for people, instead of their looking out for me. I shouldn’t know what to do in a strange house, with everything done for me.”
For a moment Jonas looked lost. But then he burst out:
“Why, bless your heart, Marthy, that’s easy enough to fix! You needn’t go away and have people look out for you at all. You can stay right on here, and I’ll come and live with you, instead of taking you away, and then you’ll still have somebody to look out for!”