“That would be about the only piece of foolishness you have n't committed already!” replied Louisa, with a biting satire that would have made any man let go of the trigger in case he had gone so far as to begin pulling it.
“Where is she?” John went on, without anger at her sarcasm. “Where is she, how is she, what is she living on, is she well, is she just as bitter as she was at first, does she ever speak of coming back? Tell me something, tell me anything. I will know something. I say I will!”
Louisa's calm demeanor began to show a little agitation, for she was not used to the sight of emotion. “I can't tell you where Susanna is, for I made her a solemn promise I would n't unless you or Jack were in danger of some kind; but I don't mind telling you this much, that she's well and in the safest kind of a shelter, for she's been living from the first in a Shaker Settlement.”
“Shaker Settlement!” cried John, starting up from his seat on the steps. “What's that? I know Shaker egg-beaters and garden-seeds and rocking-chairs and oh, yes, I remember their religion's against marriage. That's the worst thing you could have told me; that ends all hope; if they once get hold of a woman like Susanna, they'll never let go of her; if they don't believe in a woman's marrying a good man, they'd never let her go back to a bad one. Oh, if I had only known this before; if only you'd told me, Louisa, perhaps I could have done something. Maybe they take vows or sign contracts, and so I have lost her altogether.”
“I don't know much about their beliefs, and Susanna never explained them,” returned Louisa, nervously “but now that you've got something to offer her, why don't you write and ask her to come back to you? I'll send your letter to her.”
“I don't dare, Louisa, I don't dare,” groaned John, leaning his head against one of the pillars of the porch. “I can't tell you the fear I have of Susanna after the way I've neglected her this last year. If she should come in at the gate this minute, I could n't meet her eyes; if you'd read the letter she left me, you'd feel the same way. I deserved it, to the last word, but oh, it was like so many separate strokes of lightning, and every one of them burned. It was nothing but the truth, but it was cut in with a sharp sword. Unless she should come back to me of her own accord, and she never will, I have n't got the courage to ask her; just have n't got the courage, that's all there is to say about it.” And here John buried his head in his hands.
A very queer thing happened to Louisa Banks at this moment. A half-second before she would have murmured:
“This rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I!”
when all at once, and without warning, a strange something occurred in the organ which she had always regarded and her opinion had never yet been questioned as a good, tough, love-tight heart. First there was a flutter and a tremor running all along her spine; then her eyes filled; then a lump rose in her throat and choked her; then words trembled on her tongue and refused to be uttered; then something like a bird—could it have been the highly respectable good-as-new heart?—throbbed under her black silk Sunday waist; then she grew like wax from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet; then in a twinkling, and so unconsciously as to be unashamed of it, she became a sister.
You have seen a gray November morning melt into an Indian summer noon? Louisa Banks was like that, when, at the sight of a man in sore trouble, sympathy was born in her to soften the rockiness of her original makeup.