“Now be still, Susan; I don’t want no idle talk about ’ee, an’ no insultin’ remarks passed, and I’ve a-made out a story and you be to keep to’t. You be the Widow Griggs—that be your name; and your husband, what was a soldier, have a-been killed in this here war.”
“Oh, not killed; not killed!” cried the girl wildly. “Oh, Mother, don’t ’ee talk like that, for I can’t a-bear it. There, ’twould seem so wicked to be sayin’ sich things—the Lard mid make it come true. I can’t but feel as Jim be my husband; whatever he’ve a-done, and so bad as he mid be, I can’t ever feel anything else. He did mean to marry I some day when he’d got leave, and he’d ha’ done it if it hadn’t ha’ been for the war. If you call me a widow, I shall feel all the time as if Jim were really killed.”
Mrs. Frizzell folded her arms and gazed at her resolutely and severely.
“Susan, don’t let me hear ’ee talk like that—the man’s dead to you if he bain’t killed, an’ his name mustn’t ever be on your lips. I’m doin’ the best I can for ’ee, an’ I can’t think the Lard ’ud be angry with me for makin’ out a story what does no harm to nobody. As for that fellow, he be in the hands o’ the Lard—the Lard ’ull see to en. I leave en to the A’mighty.”
Mrs. Frizzell spoke with a certain almost terrible significance which made poor Susie’s blood run cold.
The stronger will gained the day, and a short time afterwards the Widow Griggs, clad in her “deep,” and sobbing in a heartrending fashion that had no pretence at all about it under her long veil, was led out of the house by her resolute little mother.
Mrs. Frizzell was by nature truthful, but in this emergency it must be owned that her veracity was exposed to tests from which it did not always escape unscathed.
When one of her neighbours asked her if she did not mean to apply for relief on her daughter’s behalf from some of the funds instituted for soldiers’ widows, she could reply boldly enough that such an appeal would be useless, as Private Griggs had married without leave, and Susan’s claim would therefore not be recognised. But when the sympathetic, but exasperatingly pertinacious Mrs. Cross—the gossip who had been chosen in the first instance to spread the news of Susan’s bereavement—plied her with questions anent her departed son-in-law, the poor woman occasionally found herself so completely cornered as to be obliged to invent appropriate answers.
Thus, before very long, it became known in the village that the late Private Griggs had been a tall, dark man, very well-looking; that he came from somewhere up the country; that his mother was breaking her heart about his loss, but his father did seem to bear up very well. They didn’t write often to Susan—no, for the poor dear were that undone she couldn’t a-bear so much as to hear his name mentioned; in fact, Mrs. Frizzell herself did scarcely ever mention it to her. (“And that’s true!” remarked the originator of this history, with infinite satisfaction.) No more didn’t Frizzell—indeed, poor Frizzell were that upset about it that the less said to en the better.
Sometimes Mrs. Frizzell was a little startled when these figments were recalled to her—many of them, indeed, were so much embellished by transmission from mouth to mouth that she scarcely recognised her own original creation; but she deemed it best to let the story pass.