“I won’t consider that at all. You couldn’t be so unfair as that—so ungenerous.”
“Unfair! Ungenerous!” Isabel rose to her full height, and frowned down at her brother-in-law, without a trace of tears in her eyes. “Fine fairness, distinguished generosity, have been shown to me, haven’t they! There has been so much delicacy in regarding my feelings! I ought to leap at the opportunity of smoothing over matters between Mr. Seth and his lady-love. My husband’s awful death, my position here, alone in the world, the shock and suffering of it all—these are mere trifles compared with the importance of seeing that their love affairs are uninterrupted! Perhaps I might get a chance at the funeral to have them kiss and make up—or would you prefer me to leave my dead now and go——”
“Your dead!”
The brother had risen also, and taken his hat. The exclamation carried in its tone all the bitterness with which his mind had stored itself on his walk back to the farm. Pity for the woman, perhaps something too of innate susceptibility to beauty and grace, had restrained and covered up this bitterness, so that he had supposed it gone. It flamed forth now, in wrathful satire.
As she put her handkerchief up again to her eyes, as a token of more tears, he went on, in a cold kind of excitement:
“You talk very cleverly—more so than any other woman I ever knew. But you should pick your strong phrases with more discrimination. For instance, when you want to produce a really striking effect upon me, it is unwise to use an expression which recalls to me at once things that you would rather I didn’t think about. I wouldn’t say ‘my dead ’ if I were you, especially when you are talking to his brother. It may do for outsiders, but here in the family it is a bad waste of words.”
Her only answer was a gust of sobs. They failed to move him and he went on:
“I don’t know that I have any means of forcing you to do anything, or say anything, against your will. If you take that position, perhaps it won’t be necessary. The wicked, ridiculous thing you thought, or pretended to think, and said to that poor girl, can be straightened out very easily. We can’t prevent the pain it has already caused, but we can stop its causing more. But if you lisp it to another human being—well, I don’t know what to threaten you with. It isn’t easy to guess what considerations will weigh with a woman who has your ideas of wifely duty, and of her responsibilities towards young and foolish members of her husband’s family, and——”
“How can you be so cruel, so mean, John? What right have you to talk to me like that? Everybody attacks me like an enemy. You never have been decent to me since I was married. Your whole family has treated me like an outsider, almost a criminal, since I came here. Your old cat of an aunt never looked at me except to wish me evil. Your brother—yes, if he could hear me now, from where he lies, I would say it!—never was fond of me, never tried to make a companion of me, never treated me as a wife should be treated, or even as his intellectual equal. You avoided me as if I were poison. The neighborhood disliked me, gossiped about me, and I hated them. Only one there was of you all who was pleasant with me, and good to me—and now that you have turned him against me, too, you come and insult me because I was pleased and grateful for his friendship. That is manly isn’t it?”
John had listened to the beginning of this impassioned speech with a callous heart. But he was a just man, and he had in almost unmeted degree that habit of mind which welcomes statements of both sides of a controversy. He might have been a wealthier man, and the owner of a more thriving paper, if he had had more of the partisan spirit. But to be strictly fair was the rule of his being. He would not criticise political opponents for doing things which in his heart he approved, and, on the same principle he would not condemn unheard even this woman, if she had any justification. As she went on, he began to feel that there was considerable force in her argument. She certainly had been most disagreeably situated, connubially and socially, and her definition of the Seth episode was plausible, if that were all there was of it. He softened perceptibly in tone as he answered: