IN WHICH KEZIAH BREAKS THE NEWS
It was nearly five o'clock, gray dawn of what was to be a clear, beautiful summer morning, when Keziah softly lifted the latch and entered the parsonage. All night she had been busy at the Hammond tavern. Busy with the doctor and the undertaker, who had been called from his bed by young Higgins; busy with Grace, soothing her, comforting her as best she could, and petting her as a mother might pet a stricken child. The poor girl was on the verge of prostration, and from hysterical spasms of sobs and weeping passed to stretches of silent, dry-eyed agony which were harder to witness and much more to be feared.
“It is all my fault,” she repeated over and over again. “All my fault! I killed him! I killed him, Aunt Keziah! What shall I do? Oh, why couldn't I have died instead? It would have been so much better, better for everybody.”
“Ss-sh! ss-sh! deary,” murmured the older woman. “Don't talk so; you mustn't talk so. Your uncle was ready to go. He's been ready for ever so long, and those of us who knew how feeble he was expected it any time. 'Twa'n't your fault at all and he'd say so if he was here now.”
“No, he wouldn't. He'd say just as I do, that I was to blame. You don't know, Aunt Keziah. Nobody knows but me.”
“Maybe I do, Gracie, dear; maybe I do. Maybe I understand better'n you think I do. And it's all been for the best. You'll think so, too, one of these days. It seems hard now; it is awful hard, you poor thing, but it's all for the best, I'm sure. Best for everyone. It's a mercy he went sudden and rational, same as he did. The doctor says that, if he hadn't, he'd have been helpless and bedridden and, maybe, out of his head for another year. He couldn't have lived longer'n that, at the most.”
“But you DON'T know, Aunt Keziah! You don't know what I—I AM to blame. I'll never forgive myself. And I'll never be happy again.”
“Yes, you will. You'll come, some day, to think it was best and right, for you and—and for others. I know you think you'll never get over it, but you will. Somehow or other you will, same as the rest of us have had to do. The Lord tries us mighty hard sometimes, but He gives us the strength to bear it. There! there! don't, deary, don't.”
Dr. Parker was very anxious.
“She must rest,” he told Mrs. Coffin. “She must, or her brain will give way. I'm going to give her something to make her sleep and you must get her to take it.”