“I understand!” March said, with sympathetic warmth. “You never disappoint me. Tell me what I can do to help you. I cannot let you endure all this alone any longer.”
“Nobody can take my share of the burden. I would hardly know myself without it. It will be the heavier for my sister’s distress and Hester’s anger when they hear what I have decided to do. Hester was on her way over to your house when you met her, full of news she could not wait until to-morrow to tell. My mother’s only brother went to Japan thirty years ago and became rich. He died last March, leaving most of his fortune to benevolent institutions in America. To each of us, his sister’s children, he bequeathed ten thousand dollars. It is not a fortune, but with our modest tastes, and when joined to the little I already have, it will support us decently. My first thought, when the news reached us, a week ago, was ‘Now, Mr. Wayt need never take another charge! We need not live upon tainted food!’”
“You are a noble woman, Hetty——”
She interrupted him.
“I am not! This is not self-sacrifice, but self-preservation. If the money had not been given to us, I must have found some way out of a false position. I want you to tell your father all you know. Keep back nothing I have told you. He is a good and a merciful man. Let him speak openly to Mr. Wayt and forbid him ever to enter the pulpit again upon penalty of public exposure and suspension from the ministry. What Judge Gilchrist says will have weight. With all his high looks and sounding talk, Mr. Wayt is a coward. He would not venture to resist the decision. Then we will go away quietly. I have thought of the little town in which my sister and I were born. Living is cheap there and there are excellent schools for the children. Twenty-five thousand dollars will go very far in that region, and we can be honest people once more.”
“You have arranged it all, have you?” said March, not at all in the tone she had expected to hear. “Give them the cheap town, and the good schools, and the twenty-five thousand dollars by all means. They can have everything but you!”
CHAPTER X.
The long storm in August set in next day. A fine, close drizzle veiled the world by 7 o’clock. At 8.30, the twins and Fanny needed their waterproof cloaks for the walk to school. By noon the patter on the piazza roof and falling floods upon lawn and garden and streets were slow, but abundant. It was scrubbing day and closet day, and, as Hester fretted sometimes to methodical Mary Ann on Friday, “all the rest of the week,” below stairs. Hetty had to prepare a dessert and to set the lunch table. Before going down she made up a little fire in the sewing room, and put out Hester’s color-box, glass of water, stretching board, paper, and easel within easy reach, should she decide to use them. Silently, and not too suggestively, she set upon the table near by a vase containing some fine specimens of the moccasin flower sent in by May Gilchrist, with a note addressed to “Queen Mab.” Hester hated hints, but if she lacked a study she would not have to look far for it.