Charlotte started, and a great blush flamed out all over her face and neck. She looked at her mother with angry shame. “I don't believe a word of it,” said she; “not a word of it.”
“I walked home from meetin' with Mrs. Allen this evenin',” said her mother, “an' she says it's all over town. She says Rebecca's been stealin' out, an' goin' to walk with him unbeknownst to her mother all summer. You know her mother wouldn't let him come to the house.”
“I don't believe one word of it,” repeated Charlotte.
“Mis' Allen says it's so,” said Sarah. “She says Mis' Thayer has had to stay home from evenin' meetin' on account of Ephraim—she don't like to leave him alone, he ain't been quite so well lately—an' Rebecca has made believe go to meetin' when she's been off with William. Mis' Thayer went to meetin' to-night.”
“Wasn't Mr. Thayer there?”
“Yes, he was there, but he wouldn't know what was goin' on. 'Tain't very hard to pull the wool over Caleb Thayer's eyes.”
“I don't believe one word of it,” Charlotte said, again. When she went up-stairs to bed that whisper of her mother's seemed to sound through and above all her own trouble. It was to her like a note of despair and shame, quite outside her own gamut of life. She could not believe that she heard it at all. Rebecca's face as she had always known her came up before her. “I don't believe one word of it,” she said again to herself.
But that whisper which had shocked her ear had already begun to be repeated all over the village—by furtive matrons, behind their hands, when the children had been sent out of the room; by girls, blushing beneath each other's eyes as they whispered; by the lounging men in the village store; it was sent like an evil strain through the consciousness of the village, until everybody except Rebecca's own family had heard it.
Barnabas saw little of other people, and nobody dared repeat the whisper to him, and they had too much mercy or too little courage to repeat it to Caleb or Deborah. Indeed, it is doubtful if any woman in the village, even Hannah Berry, would have ventured to face Deborah Thayer with this rumor concerning her daughter.
Deborah had of late felt anxious about Rebecca, who did not seem like herself. Her face was strangely changed; all the old meaning had gone out of it, and given place to another, which her mother could not interpret. Sometimes Rebecca looked like a stranger to her as she moved about the house. She said to many that Rebecca was miserable, and was incensed that she got so little sympathy in response. Once when Rebecca fainted in meeting, and had to be carried out, she felt in the midst of her alarm a certain triumph. “I guess folks will see now that I ain't been fussin' over her for nothin',” she thought. When Rebecca revived under a sprinkle of water, out in the vestibule, she said impatiently to the other women bending their grave, concerned faces over her, “She's been miserable for some time. I ain't surprised at this at all myself.”