“As for Annie, I don’t know how much she has grown to care for him; I’m afraid she’s known about our talks, and lotted on ’em, though if anything has passed between them she would have told me. For she’s a good girl—a good girl—and she’ll stand by me, never fear, and say as I say now, that it’s good riddance! D’ye mind? Good riddance to bad rubbish—to your whole miserable, conniving, underhanded family! There ain’t an honest hair in your head, Lemuel Fairchild, and there never was. And you can go back to them that sent you, to your old catamaran of a sister and your young sneak of a son, and tell ’em what I think of them, and you, and the whole caboodle of you, that ruined and killed my Jane, and made me a broken old woman before my time, and now tries to break my grand-daughter’s heart! And the longest day you Jive, don’t ever let me lay eyes on you again. That’s all!”
Lemuel groped his way out again through the dark hall, to the front door. The groaning discords from upstairs rose to a triumphant babel of sound as he knocked against the hat-rack, and fumbled for the latch, as if to emphasize and gloat over his discomfiture. The cold evening air, after the sweltering heat of the sick-room, was a physical relief, but it brought no moral comfort.
Old Lemuel was much pained, and even more confused, by the hard words to which he had had to listen. They presented a portrait of himself which he felt to be in no way a likeness, yet he could not say wherein a single line should be altered. He knew that he was not a bad man; he felt conscious of having done no special wrong, intentionally, to anybody; he had always tried to be fair and square and easy-going with everybody: yet the mischief of it was that all these evil things which the witchlike M’tildy had piled at his door were of indubitable substance, and he could not prove, even to himself, much less to her, that they did not belong there. It was a part of the consistently vile luck of his life that all these malignant happenings should be charged up against him, and used to demonstrate his wickedness. He had not enough mental skill or alertness to sift the unfair from the true in the indictment she had drawn, or to put himself logically in her place, and thus trace her mistakes. He only realized that all these events which she enumerated had served to convince Mrs. Warren that he was a villain. The idea was a new one to him, and it both surprised and troubled him to find that, as he thought the matter over he could not see where she was particularly wrong. Yet a villain he had certainly never intended to be—never for a moment. Was this not cruelly hard luck?
And then there was this business about Seth. He had meant it all in the friendliest spirit, all with the best of motives. And how she had snapped him up before he had a chance to explain, and called him a scoundrel and his boy a sneak, and driven him from the house! Here was a muddle for one—and Sabrina had said he would make a muddle of it, as he had of everything else, all through his life. The lonely, puzzled, discouraged old man felt wofully like shedding tears, as he approached his own gate—or no, it was Albert’s gate now—and passed the young people chatting there, and realized what a feeble old fool they all must think him.
CHAPTER X.—THE FISHING PARTY.
The young people were arranging, as Lemuel slunk past them in the dark, a fishing party for the following day. The proposal had been Isabel’s—she had a fertile mind for pleasure planning—and Annie and Seth were delighted with it. They would take a basket of food, and make the tea over a fire in the woods, and the two women could take turns in playing at fishing with a little rod which Seth had made for himself as a boy. It would be an ideal way of bidding good-bye to Seth, said his pretty sister-in-law, and Annie, feeling more deeply both the significance of saying good-bye and the charm of having a whole day to herself along the river and in his company, had assented eagerly.
As for Seth, this sudden accession of feminine interest in, and concern for, him was extremely pleasant and grateful. The very suggestion of the trip, in his honor, was like a sweet taken in advance from the honeyed future which he was so soon to realize. Long that night, after he had walked over to the Warren gate with Annie, and returned to the unlathed attic where Milton lay already snoring, he thought fondly of the morrow’s treat.
The morning came, warm but overcast, with a soft tendency of air from the west. “It couldn’t have been better if it had been made to order,” Seth said enthusiastically, when Isabel made her appearance before breakfast. “It will be good fishing and good walking, not too hot and not wet.”