Remembering the Borgias, I should have been loath to taste it; but Augusta bit into it with immediate Christian forgiveness. Yet late that afternoon the wind had shifted again into the old quarter. Happening to go into the woodshed, I found Augusta there crying.
"What in the world is the matter, Augusta?" I asked.
"I'm crying," she said, anticipating Shaw and Androcles, "because I'm a Christian and I can't strike her!"
She raised her old bloodshot eyes, not to me, but to heaven. I have seen the same look in the eyes of an old dog teased by a pert mongrel, and crippled and rendered helpless by rheumatism as was Augusta by her Christianity.
It was Margaret herself at last, who announced that she would be obliged to leave me. She spoke with a dignity which she had held over, I suppose, from regal years submerged but not forgotten.
"It's I will have to be goin'; I've stayed as long as I can. I've stood a great deal,—for ye'll stand a terrible lot for them ye're fond of,—and I've been terrible fond of you, more than of me own—and am to this day. But I can't honest say it's of your deserving! There's a sayin' that we love best them that mistreat us most, and I'm for thinkin' it may be true. I'd have stayed to help you, but I must be havin' some thought of meself! Though you've treated me as I wouldn't treat me own,"—this tellingly,—"and asked me to live under the roof with one of them the Lord has abandoned, yet I've a kindly feelin' in me heart still for ye, and if ye were in need and ye'd come to me, maybe I wouldn't say ye nay—I don't know. I'm a forgivin' disposition, more than is for me own good, God knows! I've hated yer enemies and doomed them to desthruction!"
I patted her hand good-bye between two perfectly well-balanced desires to laugh and to cry. She was so funny, so incredible, so bent, since the foundation of the world, on proving herself right and everybody else wrong. She was not Margaret, merely, whom chance and trouble had brought into my path—she was a very piece of humanity, decked out in unaccustomed bonnet and unlikely feather, best petticoat and a grand pair of black kid gloves—humanity, the ancient, the amusing, the faulty, the incredible, the pathetic, the endeared. And it was as that that she rode away in the funny old jolting farm wagon, her chin in the air, her eyes glancing around haughtily, scanning the old place she had loved and clung to, but scanning it scornfully now, as if she had never laid eyes on it before, and were saying, "Ye puir thing!—with yer air of delapidation! Who—God save us—are you?"
I went back into the kitchen and caught Augusta wiping her eyes with her apron, and was not altogether gay myself—while Margaret jolted away fiercely, our two scalps at her belt.
"You mustn't worry too much about her, ma'am," said Augusta soothingly; "the Lord is her friend, and He'll take care of her."
From incontrovertible precedent I felt sure that He would, with a sureness I had never had as to my own less considerable destiny.