The grandmother never took those light, searching eyes off her visitor’s face. He felt himself turning uncomfortably red under their malevolent gaze, I and wished she would speak. But she said nothing. At last he explained, deferentially:
“I thought it’d only be right to tell yeh. I know Sissly ’n’ you use to talk abaout th’ thing. Th’ way she use to talk, speshly jis’ ’fore she died, it ’peared ‘s if you tew hed it all settled. But Albert’s goin’ to take th’ farm, it seems, ’n’ Seth, he’s fig’rin’ on goin’ away to be a neditor, ’n’ it looks to me’s if th’ hull plan’d fell threw.”
Still no reply from the bed. He added, helplessly “Don’t it kind o’ seem so to you, M’tildy?”
The wretched discords from the chamber above mocked him. The witch-like eyes from the shadows of the recess began to burn him. It was growing into the dusk, but the eyes had a light of their own, a cold, steely, fierce light. Would she never speak? How he regretted having come!
“I’ll tell you what seems to me, Lemuel Fairchild,” she said at last, not speaking so rapidly now, and putting a sharp, finishing edge on each of her words. “It seems to me that there’s never been but one decent, honorable, likely human bein’ in your whole family an’ she came into it by the mistake of marrying you. I blame myself for not remembering the blood that was in you all, an’ for thinking that this youngest son of yours was different from the rest. I forgot that he was a Fairchild like the others, an’ I forgot what I owed that family of men, so mean and cowardly and selfish that they have to watch each other like so many hyenas. An’ so you’ve come to tell me that Seth has turned out like his father, like his uncle, like all of his name, eh? The more fool I, to need to be told it!”
Lemuel’s impulse was to rise from his chair, and bear himself with offended dignity, but the glitter in the old woman’s eyes warned him that the attempt would be a failure. He scowled, put his hat on the other knee, crossed his legs, pretended to be interested in the antics of a kitten which was working havoc with a ball of yarn at his feet. Finally he said:
“You ain’t fair to Seth. He’s a good boy. He ain’t said nothin’ nor done nothin’ fer yeh to git mad at. Fer that matter, you never was fair to any of us, ’cept Sissly.”
“Fair! Fair!” came the answer promptly, and in a swifter measure. “Hear the man! Why, Lemuel Fairchild, you know that you cheated your own brother out of the share in that farm that was his by all rights as much as yours. You know that your father intended you both to share alike, that he died too suddenly to make a new will and that you grabbed everything under a will made when your brother William was thought to be too sickly to ever raise. You know that you let him grow up an idle, worthless coot of a fellow, an’ then encouraged him—yes, don’t deny it, encouraged him I say—to make a fool of my daughter, and run away with her.
“You knew I wouldn’t look at him as a suitor for Jenny; but you thought I would be soft enough, once they were married, to give him my farm, an’ you counted on getting it away from him afterwards, just as your father got the Kennard farm before you. You egged him on into the trouble, an’ you let him die in it, without help. Oh I know you, Lemuel Fairchild—I know your breed!
“Your wife was a good woman—a million times better than you deserved. She knew the wrongs that had been done me, an’ Annie, an’ her poor ne’er-do-well of a father before her; she was anxious to make them good, not I. It was she who talked, year after year, when she ran over here on the sly to visit me, of squaring everything by the young folk’s marriage. For a long time I didn’t like it. I distrusted the family, as, God knows, I had reason to. But all that I heard of Seth was in his favor. He was hardworking, patient, even-tempered, so everyone said. What little I saw of him I liked. An’ I felt sorry for him, too, knowing how dear he was to his mother, and yet how helpless she was to give him advantages, an’ make something besides a farm-drudge out of him. So little by little, I gave in to the idea, an’ finally it became mine almost as much as Cecily’s.