"Of course not," said her husband, who, it appears, saw farther than Gerty had given him credit for.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
"OVER IN THE JONES DISTRICT."
THE days passed on into weeks, and still Gerty stayed on at the valley.
Mr. Van Alstine utterly refused to agree to the change of plans which Asahel, or rather Gerty, had so greatly desired, but to soften his refusal as much as possible, he had voluntarily proposed to put the house in which Asahel lived in better order, and especially to paint it inside and out. Mrs. Van Alstine invited Gerty to stay while this work was going on, and Gerty accepted the invitation and remained two weeks at the valley, Asahel going back and forth and coming home for Sunday.
Gerty certainly did not make the house any pleasanter by her presence. It was not that she did anything so very much out of the way, beyond a little meddling, which Eileen overlooked and Maggy treated with by no means silent contempt. But her tongue was a perpetual annoyance. She had the most exquisite knack of saying little disagreeable things, of enlarging upon disagreeable subjects, of running against people's tenderest feelings and strongest prepossessions, and then wondering how they could be so weak as to be hurt.
For instance, she entertained Mrs. Van Alstine and Marion a whole morning with reading an account of one who fancied himself a poet and made himself ridiculous thereby. She enlarged on the uselessness of foreign missions and the idle, self-indulgent lives led by missionaries, for the benefit of Mrs. Andrews, who, however, silenced her by an array of facts and figures which she was not at all prepared to answer. She knew that all three of the ladies at the valley hated gossip, and she regaled them with all the scandals of Rock Bottom and Coaltown collectively. All this was not done inadvertently.
All her life long, Gerty's tongue had been the dread of friends and enemies alike. She was well aware of her powers, and took as much pleasure in exercising them as other women do in needlework or music. Nothing was sacred from her attacks, not a weakness of old or young among her acquaintances escaped notice or comment. There was no enthusiasm which she could not and would not turn into ridicule, no cause she could not decry, no self-sacrifice or self-devotion for which she could not find some unworthy motive or in which she did not see some folly.
And yet Gerty was not without her good qualities. She was always ready to visit the poor and sick, she was an admirable and economical manager, and she denied herself many personal luxuries that she might have money to give to some poor cousins. But her tongue, that unruly evil, poisoned all.
Marion, who had begun by thinking Gerty an abused angel, was thoroughly disenchanted before the term of Gerty's visit was ended, and that although Gerty was more civil to her than to any other member of the family. Indeed, a change was coming over Marion which she could not explain, but which made her very unhappy. It was nothing new for her to be discontented with those around her and to wish herself anywhere but where she was, but now the dissatisfaction seemed to be transferred to herself. She began to have doubts of her own superiority to all about her. She saw how far she was behind her brothers in attainments. She began to see how much she was inferior to them in real goodness. When she turned for comfort to her religious exercises, she found they had no comfort to give. Her prayers were unreal and utterly lifeless, and she could not keep her attention fixed upon them. It scared her to discover how often she went on with a form of good words, even composing sentence after sentence of prayer, while her heart was far away among the vanities in which she had lived so long. She tried to betake herself to her old reveries, but they gave her no pleasure even while she indulged in them. Hungry and thirsty, her soul fainted in her, yet she would not cry unto the Lord in her trouble that she might be delivered from her distress, but strove vainly—and oh, how vainly!—to find her way out by herself.