“Let me beg,” interposed March, “that you will not go on with what cannot but be distressing to you. You need no justification in my sight. If you will permit me to call to-morrow morning we can talk matters over calmly and at leisure. It is late, and you have had a severe nervous strain.”
“Unless you insist upon the postponement I would rather speak now, while my mind is steady in the purpose to make an end of subterfuge and concealment. I am weary, but it is of falsehoods, acted and spoken. Hester has told me of your generous pretense of misunderstanding the nature of Mr. Wayt’s attack. There it is again!”—relapsing into her usual tone, and with whimsical vexation that made March smile. “I am afraid I have forgotten how to be frank! My poor sister’s eager talk of ‘attacks’ and ‘seizures’ and ‘turns’ and ‘sunstroke’ and ‘constitutional headaches’ has unbalanced my perceptions of right and wrong.”
“You cannot expect me to agree with you there?” the suppressed smile becoming visible.
She was not to be turned aside from the straight track.
“Nothing so perverts conscience as a systematic course of concealment, even when it is practiced for what seem to be noble ends. I have felt this for a long time. Lately the sense of guilt has been insupportable. It may be relief—if not expiation—to tell the truth in the plainest terms I can use. It may leave me more wretched than I am now. But right is right.”
Her chin trembled and she raised her hand to cover it. Her admirable composure was smoldering excitement, kept under by will and the conscience whose rectitude she undervalued. With a sub-pang, March perceived that this disclosure was not a confidence, but a duty.
“Mr. Wayt was a confirmed opium eater and drinker, twelve years ago,” she resumed in a cold monotone. “He would drink intoxicating liquors, too, when narcotics were not to be had. I believe the appetite for the two is a common symptom of the habit. His wife shielded him, then, as she does now, and so successfully that he kept a church in Cincinnati for four years. Hester was a beautiful, active child, eight years old, and a great pet with her father. He does not care for children, as a rule, but she was pretty and clever and amused him. One day she begged her mother to let her take ‘dear papa’s’ lunch up to him. It was always ‘dear papa’ with her. He had a way of locking himself in his study from morning until night Saturday. Even his wife did not suspect that he wrote his Sunday sermon with a glass of laudanum and brandy at his side. He was busy upon a set of popular discourses on ‘Crying Sins of the Day.’ They drew immense crowds.”
A sarcastic gleam passed over her face, and for the first time the listener saw a likeness to the witty and wise cripple.
“Hester knocked again and again without getting answered. Then her father called out that he was busy and did not want any lunch. She was always willful, and he had indulged her unreasonably. So she declared that she would not go away until he opened the door and took the tray—not if she had to stand there and knock all day. He tore open the door in a fury, threw the tray and the lunch downstairs, and flung the child after it. The drugged drink had made him crazy.”
March shuddered.