It was a direct question and hurt Reinette cruelly suffering as she was both mentally and physically. The wet napkin was again applied to her throbbing temples, and then, in a voice full of anguish, and yet with something defiant in its tone, she said rapidly, like one who wishes to have a disagreeable task ended:
“No, I did not know who my mother was; father never told me.”
“That’s smart, but just like him,” grandma interposed; but Reinette stopped her short, and said:
“Hush, grandma! I will not hear my father blamed for anything. He may have acted hastily and foolishly when he was young, but he was the dearest and best of fathers to me. He did not talk much, ever, and never of his private affairs, and since I know—that—that—he ran away with my mother, I am not surprised that he did not tell me who she was or anything of her early life. He knew it would pain me, and so he let me think her an English woman, as I always did——”
“Yes, but when you started for America a body would s’pose he would have told. He knew you’d have to see us then and know,” grandma said, and Reinette replied:
“Yes, and he meant to tell me when we reached New York. He had a habit of putting off things, and he put that off, and when he was dying on the ship he tried to tell me so hard. I know now what he meant when he said: ‘When it comes to you forgive me and love me just the same;’ and I do—I will—and I’ll stand by father through everything;” and Reinette’s eyes, where the great tears were standing, fairly blazed, as she defended her dead father; and her grandma cried, too, a little, but her animosity toward the Hethertons was so great and this silence of her son-in law seemed so like a fresh insult, that she was ready to fire up in an instant, and when Reinette said to her, “It is very painful for me to hear it, and still I wish you to tell me all I ought to know of mother and father both. Why did you say they ran away?” she began as far back as the first time her daughter Margaret handed Fred Hetherton a glass of beer across the counter, and in her own peculiar way, told the story of the courtship and marriage, ending with a graphic description of her call on Gen. Hetherton, who turned her from his house, and bade her never enter it again.
“And I never have till to-day,” she said, “when I wouldn’t wonder if he’d stir in his coffin if he knew I was here, seein’ he felt so much above me. If I’d been a man, I b’lieve I’d a horse-whipped him, for there’s fight in my make-up. My two brothers, Jim and Will Martin, were the prize-fighters of the town, and could lick any two men single-handed. They are dead now, both on ’em—died in the war, fightin’ for their country, and I s’pose it’s better so than if they’d lived to do wus.”
“Yes, oh, yes,” Reinette said, faintly, neither knowing what she said or what she meant, knowing only that every nerve was quivering with excitement and pain, and that she felt half crazed and stunned with all she had heard of the father and mother she had held so high.
Nothing had been omitted, and she knew all about the beer and the gingerbread her grandmother sold,—the shoes her mother closed,—the berries she had picked to buy the blue chintz gown—the pride of the Hethertons and the inexcusable silence of her father with regard to her mother’s death and her own existence. There was nothing more to tell, and Reinette could not have heard it, if there had been. Proud and high-spirited as she was, she felt completely crushed and humiliated, and as if she could never face the world again. And yet in what she had heard there was nothing derogatory to her mother’s character, or her father’s either for that matter. Only it was so different from what she had believed. By and by, when she could reason more calmly, she would feel differently and see it from a different standpoint, but now she felt as if she should scream outright if her visitors staid another minute, and she was glad when, reminded by the twelve o’clock whistle of her green peas cooking at home, grandma arose to go. She had had no intentions of wounding Reinette, but she had no sensitiveness herself, no delicacy of feeling, no refinement, and could not understand how crushed, degraded, and heart-broken Reinette felt as she fled up the stairs to her own room, and throwing herself upon the bed sobbed and moaned in a paroxysm of grief and despair.
“And these people are mine,” she said; “they belong to me, who was once so proud of my blood. Prizefighters, and brewers, and bakers, and mercy knows what, in place of the dukes and duchesses I had pictured to myself! Why did father bring me here, when he had kept the knowledge of them from me so long, or at least why did he not tell me of them? It is dreadful, and I hope I may never see one of them again.”