As Mrs. Disney expressed it, old Mrs. Holder "took it most terrible hard": therefore the village matrons contracted a habit of running in at all hours to the little hop-clad house and condoling with Mrs. Holder, and with her speculating as to the identity of the child's father.
Now and then these zealous comforters rather overdid the matter, notably when Mrs. Weaver, with a view of exonerating Mrs. Holder from all blame and relieving her of all responsibility for Myron's behavior, remarked that "It did seem as if bad was born in some people."
Old Mrs. Holder rose at that, and speedily made Mrs. Weaver aware that Myron's badness was purely sporadic, and that heredity had nothing to do with it. She did not express herself in this way, but conveyed the same idea much more forcibly.
It is possible that, being Myron's grandmother, she felt a slight reflection from Mrs. Weaver's well-meant suggestion that Myron had inherited vice as her birthright; be that as it may, she speedily made Mrs. Weaver aware that if there was any truth in such an idea, she herself must be in a perilous state: the old Englishwoman had managed to glean pretty accurate data about the Jamestown people, and she knew that Mrs. Weaver's mother had "tript in her time." Mrs. Weaver called no more upon Mrs. Holder, but the others showed no abatement of their zeal.
These good Jamestown women had a pleasant habit of sitting with Mrs. Holder until Myron's form appeared at noon or night. They gazed at her while she opened the gate, trod the little path past the front door, and until she turned the corner: when Vice in the person of Myron entered the back door, Virtue embodied in one or more of Jamestown's matrons fled from the front door, hearing, ere the gate was reached, the first measures of the jeremiad with which her grandmother greeted her. There was little wonder that Myron Holder grew morbidly nervous and supersensitive. She would scarce have been responsible for any deed, however evil.
All the morning the anticipated agony of the ordeal of walking up the path, under these scathing eyes, oppressed and tortured her. No martyr ever contemplated with greater dread the red-hot ploughshares than Myron Holder did those few yards of red trodden earth, bordered by fox grass and burdock leaves.
Through the long hours of the slow afternoons she braced herself for the return home at night, but she did not try to elude any of the humiliations of her position. The garden gate was terrible to her as the surgeon's knife to the sufferer—for the hasp was loosened and twisted, the gate had to be lifted before it could be opened, and sometimes she was kept fumbling with the fastening until the blood swam before her eyes in a red mist.
Doubtless she should have considered all these painful contingencies and walked more heedfully, but the thought, which the Jamestown matrons often quoted, did not, as they seemed to think it should, dull the pain of the thousand stings she received daily—it only pressed them home. There are many
"Dainty themes of grief
In sadness to outlast the morn;"
but the tale of Myron Holder's expiation is not one of them—it is a sordid theme, yet, being human, not too sordid to be writ out. It is a painful relation; but when one woman lived it, we may not shrink from contemplating it, nor hesitate to view step by step the way one woman trod.