Neither of the three thought of interrupting Hester, who had the field to herself, and who, now that she was fairly launched, went on rapidly:
“I’ll make a clean breast of it, bein’ the will is found, which I never meant it should be, and then them as is mistress here now can take me to jail as soon as they likes. It don’t matter, the few days I’ve got left to live. I signed that fust Will, me and Aleck, twenty odd year ago, and more, and I knew pretty well what was in it, and that it was right, and gin the property to the proper person; and then I thought no more about it till a few months before he died, when Aleck and me was called in agin to witness another will, here in this room, standin’ about as I set now, with the old gentleman where that woman is, Aleck where you be, and Lawyer Schofield where Mr. Franklin stands. I thought it was a queer thing, and mistrusted somethin’ wrong, particularly as I remembered a conversation I overheard a week or so before about you, Roger, and your mother, compared to who, that other woman ain’t fit to live in the same place; and she won’t neither, she’ll find, when we all get our dues.”
Both Roger and Frank knew she referred to Mrs. Walter Scott, who, if angry glances could have annihilated her, would have done so. But Hester was not afraid of her, and went on, not very connectedly, but still intelligibly, to those who were listening so intently:
“She pisoned his mind with snaky, insinuatin’ lies, which she didn’t exactly speak out, as I heard, but hinted at, and made me so mad that I wanted to throttle her then, and I wish I had bust into the room and told her it was all a lie, as I could prove and swear to; for, from the day Jessie Morton married Squire Irving until the summer she went to Saratoga, when you, Roger, was quite a little shaver, she never laid eyes on that man, who was her ruin afterward. I know it is so, and so does others, for I’ve inquired; and if the scamp was here, he’d tell you so, which I wish he was, and if I knew where to find him, I’d go on my hands and knees to get his word, too, that what this good-for-nothing snake in the grass told was a lie!”
Human nature could endure no more, and Mrs. Walter Scott sprang to her feet, and turning to her son, asked,—
“If he, a man, would sit quietly, and hear his mother so abused?”
“You have a right to stop her,” she said, as she saw Frank hesitate. “A right to turn her out of the house.”
“I’d like to see him do it,” Hester rejoined, her old face aglow with passion and fierce anger.
“Hush, Hester, hush,” Roger said, in his quiet, gentle way; “and you, Helen, sit down and listen. If I can bear this, you certainly can.”
The perspiration was rolling from his face in great drops a second time, and something like a groan broke from his lips as he covered his eyes with his hands and said, “My mother, oh, my mother, that I should hear her so maligned.”