“Oh, will she never go?” Margery thought, just as the bell pealed a second time, and Grandma Ferguson came in, bringing a bundle almost as large as herself, and entering at once into full details of what she wished to have made, and how.
“I s’pose Anny is goin’ to be married,” she said, looking hard at her granddaughter, “though she hain’t noticed me enough to tell me so, right out; but everybody’s talkin’ it, and I thought I might as well have a new silk gown. My moiry antique is pretty well whipped out, and a nice silk is allus handy. I got brown—a nice shade, I call it,” and she unrolled a silk of excellent quality, but of a yellowish brown, which would be very unbecoming to her.
“Oh, grandma, why didn’t you get black instead of that horrid snuff-color?” Anna said, contemptuously, as she glanced at the silk, and then went out, leaving the old lady a good deal crest-fallen, and a little doubtful with regard to the dress she had lately thought so pretty.
Margery soothed her as well as she could, and heard her suggestions, and took her measure, and showed her some new fashion-plates, and did it all with her ears turned to her mother’s room where the talk was still going on, now low and earnest and almost pleading, and again so high and excited, that grandma asked if that was not Rennet’s voice and what she was talking so loud for. Then Margery excused herself for a moment and ran up stairs to her mother’s room, the door of which was ajar, and that accounted for the distinctness with which the sound of voices was borne to the parlor below.
Mrs. La Rue had risen from her bed and put on a dressing-gown which Reinette was buttoning for her while she was trying to bind her long, loose hair into a knot behind. Her face was white as ashes, and in her eyes there was a hunted look, as of one pursued to the last extremity. But when she saw Margery, their expression suddenly changed, and thrusting out both hands, she cried: “Oh, Margery, go away; this is no place for you.”
Advancing into the room and closing the door, Margery said in a low, firm tone of voice: “Miss Hetherton, I don’t know what all this is about, but mother is too weak and sick to be thus excited. Will you leave her until a fitter time?”
“Don’t call me Miss Hetherton, as if you were angry at me,” Reinette replied without looking up from buttoning Mrs. La Rue’s dressing-gown. “I cannot go now. Your mother knew my mother and is going to tell me about her. She is Christine Bodine.”
“Yes, I am Christine. God pity me,” the miserable woman exclaimed, and over Margery’s face there swept a look of unutterable pain and disappointment.
She had said to herself that this which Reinette had told her was true; that her mother was Christine, and still there had been a faint hope that there might be some mistake; but there was none; her mother had declared it herself, and with a low cry she turned away, saying as she did so: “There are people in the parlor, and your voices are sometimes louder than you suppose, and though they cannot understand you, they will know you are excited and that there is trouble of some kind. Speak lower; do. If this thing I hear be true we surely need not tell it to the world; we can keep it to ourselves.”
“Yes, Margery, that is what I mean to do,” Queenie said, while Mrs. La Rue exclaimed, with a ring of joy in her voice as if some unexpected relief had come to her: “Yes, yes, we need not tell; we will not tell; we will keep the secret forever.”