“There is a much better reason than that why you should not have come,” she said, bitterly.
The stranger was talking to her, but looking at me. He took a step toward me now, with a softened sparkle in his eyes and an outstretched hand. “This—this then is the boy, is it?” he asked.
With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me, and drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she lifted and almost brandished the cleaver.
“No, you don’t!” she cried. “You don’t touch him! He’s mine! I’ve worked for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying mother’s breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker ’n water after all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and I kissed her before she died. She gave the boy to me, and he’s mine! Mine, do you hear?—mine!”
“My dear Susan—” our visitor began. “Don’t ‘dear Susan’ me! I heard it once—once too often. Oh, never again! You left me to run away with her. I don’t speak of that. I forgave that when I forgave her. But that was the least of it. You left her to herself for months before she died. You’ve left the boy to himself ever since. You can’t begin now. I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for him—you can’t make me stop now.”
“I went to California,” he went on in a low voice, speaking with difficulty. “We didn’t get on together as smoothly as we might perhaps, but I had no earthly notion of deserting her. I was ill myself, lying in yellow-fever quarantine off Key West, at the very time she died. When I finally got back you and the child were both gone. I could not trace you. I went to the war. I had made money in California. It is trebled now. I rose to be Colonel—I have a Brigadier’s brevet in my pocket now. Yet I give you my word I never have desired anything so much, all the time, as to find you again—you and the boy.”
My Aunt nodded her head comprehendingly. I felt from the tremor of her hand that she was forcing herself against her own desires to be disagreeable.
“Yes, that war,” was what she said. “I know about that war! The honest men that go get killed. But you—you come back!”
The man frowned wearily, and gave a little groan of discouragement. “Then this is final, is it? You don’t wish to speak with me; you really desire to keep the boy—you are set against my ever seeing him—touching him. Why, then, of course—of course—excuse my—”
And then for the first time I saw a human being tumble in a dead swoon. My little brain, dazed and bewildered by the strange new things I was hearing, lagged behind my eyes in following the sudden pallor on the man’s face—lagged behind my ears in noting the tell-tale quaver and gasp in his voice. Before I comprehended what was toward—lo! there was no man standing in front of me at all.