May 14th. The Peon is the comfort of my life. I dreaded telling him about Caro, and behold, he knew all about it!
Cousin Chad had been in town and came out on the same train with him yesterday afternoon. He couldn’t refrain from crowing a little about Caro and his dear Jane—so capable and sensible, so equal to every emergency. And it was her doing, after all: I know she never intended for me to know it. But she met Caro in the road on her way back from Grace’s that day, and made the child go by home with her. Then she—to quote Cousin Chad—“was able to make her see the indelicacy of her establishing herself in the same house with a young man whom gossips were accusing her of trying to capture!” The Peon at this point expressed polite dissent from Cousin Chad’s approval of his wife’s tactful performance; and my pious relative waxed righteously indignant, and assumed the air of a protector of the defenceless orphan. Whereupon the Peon took refuge in his paper and Cousin Chad simmered in that condemnatory silence of his which always seemed to me worse than any possible swear-words.
But the Peon doesn’t feel at all upset about Caro and David; the only thing that troubles him is that I should be left alone again during the day. So far as David is concerned, the Peon thinks Caro would never have gone if she hadn’t cared for him, to some extent, at least, in the way Cousin Jane accused her of doing—which is certainly reasonable enough. And as to her loving David and yet treating him as I’m sure she did, the Peon begs me to remember some rather cold-blooded performances of my own in our courting days.
“Do you remember the night after Jessie Martin’s wedding?” he demanded. “After that night, and your marrying me six months later, I lost my faith in a girl’s ‘no.’ If I had it to go over again, I’d not lose a night’s sleep on account of it, my lady: and so I told David as he drove me home from the station.”
“Oh, you told him, then?”
“I did. And I told him to give Caro plenty of rope, and your Cousin Jane would soon hang herself with it.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much of anything. He seems to think Mrs. Grackle only furnished the occasion for Caro’s real feeling toward him to come to the front. He’s pretty sore, I imagine. But don’t you worry your dear head. Lovers would miss half the fun of the game if they couldn’t be drowned in misery now and then. Just let them alone and let them get all that’s coming to them. They’ll work through it somehow, and straighten it out to their perfect satisfaction when they get ready—and not before.”
“You didn’t let it alone,” I said reproachfully.