He had gone away tolerant, but with a warning: “A man isn’t going to stand too much!”
These words had been a challenge. There could be no more compromising. Pay-day had come for her and Larry.
But the letters!
At this thought Mary-Clare sat up rigidly. A squirrel, that had paused at her quiet feet, darted affrightedly across the cabin floor.
The letters! The letters in the box hid on the shelf of the closet in the upper chamber. Always those letters had driven her back from the light which experience shed upon her to the darkness of ignorance.
Larry had given the letters to her at the time when she questioned, after the doctor’s death, Larry’s right to hold her to her marriage vows. How frightened and full of despair she had been. She had felt that perhaps Larry had not understood. Why had the doctor never told her of his desire for her and Larry to marry? Then it was that Larry had gone away to bring proof. He had never meant to show it to her, but he must clear himself at the critical moment.
And so he brought the letters. Mary-Clare knew every word of them. They were burned into her soul: they had been the guides on the hard road she had travelled. The doctor had always wanted her and Larry to marry; believed that they would. But she must be left free; no word must 38 be spoken until she was old enough to choose. To prove his faith and love in his adopted child, Rivers had, so the letters to Larry revealed, left his all to her. In case she could not marry Larry, he confided in her justice to share with him.
The last dark hour had broken the old doctor’s self-control––he had voiced what heretofore he had kept secret. The letters stood as silent proof of this. And then the old, rigid code asserted its influence. A promise must be kept!
And so the payment began, but it was not, had never been, the real Mary-Clare who had paid. Something had retreated during the bleak years, that which remained fulfilled the daily tasks; kept its own council, laughed at length, and knew a great joy in the baby Noreen, seemed a proof that God was still with her while she held to what appeared to be right.
And then the last child came, looked at her with its deep accusing eyes and died!