“It is not enough that her father and grandmother should over-excite this child’s brain enough to make it burst, but you must go and give her such a cerebral commotion that it is enough to make her crazy.”
And as my mother, in excusing herself, began again to accuse me——
“Hold your tongue, and take care!” cried grandfather, in a threatening voice. “I thought until to-day that you resembled my poor mother, too passive and too ‘browsing.’ Don’t recall my father to me by your ferocious hard-heartedness! If you go on like this, I will make you kneel and ask your daughter’s pardon.”
“You are breaking my wrists,” she said, “let go of me. I have the right——”
I thought then that grandfather was going to beat her. His voice became so terrible that I saw my grandmother tremble.
“Do you repent of the wrong you have done to your daughter?”
“Yes!” she said, falling on a chair, overcome by her father, whom alone she feared, and who was never violent, never showed firmness except to her.
Poor mother! she suffered, herself, to such a degree from her morbid passion of jealousy that, when she was stricken with paralysis and confided her mental tortures to us, we heartily forgave her for those fits of anger.
