“Law, Miss Maria, nobody won’t say nothin’ to Miss Becky. But all the little niggehs has come out to look at her.”
“Go yourself and see if she needs anything.”
“I have heard,” remarked Miss Vandewater, through the silence which followed, “that Becky Inchbald, for all she was so close-mouthed at first, threatens now to carry her child to its father.”
Mrs. Poynton, with an instant’s pause on the subject, hoped he could be found and made to do his duty. The judge’s wife heard with a mere lifting of the eyebrows. She thought it scarcely a fit topic to mention before America. But America’s plane was so much above Becky Inchbald that she had never even disapproved of the girl.
Becky Inchbald’s people were not poor whites, for they owned land and slaves; but their raw unfitness for encountering the old stock held them on the verge of society. That Becky was uneducated was her own fault. She had become the mother of a hapless baby and the scandal of the neighborhood before America Poynton’s engagement was announced.
“She’s spiteful about that baby,” pursued Miss Sally. “There’ll be trouble somewhere before sundown, if she’s started out with it.”
“I do not see that Inchbald’s affairs need disturb us,” suggested the judge’s wife, making dimples at the finger roots of one hand as she smoothed her polished hair.
“Some women are never disturbed about any of the sin in the world,” said Miss Vandewater incisively, “until it comes into their houses and takes their children by the throat.”
“That can never be said of you, Miss Sally,” the judge’s indolent wife responded, smiling. Though she generally bore Miss Sally’s attacks as a lady should, and felt indulgent sympathy for the migratory spinster, she sometimes allowed herself to retort.
“Aunt and Miss Sally, kiss and make up,” said America, with the deliberate accent that gave weight to all her words. But without response one of the combatants sat glowering, while the other, waving a lazy fan, indicated through the window Ross Carr cantering to his appointment, man and steed moving like one, so perfect was his horsemanship.