“Don't you think that last stuff Doctor Prescott put in his eyes did him any good?” asked Mrs. Edwards.
“No, I don't. He didn't think it would, himself. He said all there was to do was to go to Boston and see that great doctor there and have an operation, an' it's goin' to cost three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars!—it's easy enough to talk—three hundred dollars! Adoniram has been laid up with jaundice half the winter. I've bound shoes, and I've knit these fine stockin's for Mis' Doctor Prescott. They go towards the doctor's bill, but they're a drop in the bucket. She'd allow considerable on them, but it ain't her say. Three hundred dollars!”
“It's a sight of money,” said Belinda Lamb. “I s'pose you could mortgage the house, Paulina Maria, and then when Henry got his eyesight back he could work to pay it off.”
A deep red transfused Paulina Maria's transparent pallor, but before she could speak Ann Edwards interposed. “Mortgage!” said she, with a sniff of her nostrils, as if she scented battle. “Mortgage! Load a poor horse down to the ground till his legs break under him, set a baby to layin' a stone wall till he drops, but don't talk to me of mortgages; I guess I know enough about them. My poor husband would have been alive and well to-day if it hadn't been for a mortgage. It sounds easy enough—jest a little interest money to pay every year, an' all this money down; but I tell you 'tis like a leech that sucks at body and soul. You get so the mortgage looks worse than your sins, an' you pray to be forgiven that instead of them. I know. Don't you have a mortgage put on your house, Paulina Maria Judd, or you'll rue the day. I'd—steal before I'd do it!”
Paulina Maria made no response; she was quite pale again.
“I should think you'd be afraid Henry would go entirely blind if you didn't have something done for him,” said Belinda Lamb.
“I be,” replied Paulina Maria, sternly. She rose to go, and Belinda also, with languid response of motion, as if Paulina Maria were an upstirring wind.
When Paulina Maria opened the outer door there was a rush of dank night air.
“Don't you want me to walk home with you and Aunt Belinda?” asked Jerome. “It's pretty dark.”
“No, thank you,” replied Paulina Maria, grimly, looking back, a pale, wavering shape against the parallelogram of night; “the things I'm afraid of walk in the light as much as the dark, an' you can't keep 'em off.”