“Oh, you are a sham,” laughed Andrew, hugging the little maid close to his heart. “Have you told mamma about the jam?”
“Not yet, papa. I heard the groom telling the stable boy yesterday, ‘never to do anything to-day that he could put off till to-morrow,’ so I think I’ll not tell mamma till to-morrow.”
“What a philosopher I have here,” said Andrew, drawing the flaxen curls through his fingers, “but did you not misunderstand Teddy? Did he not say: ‘Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day?’”
“He may have said that,” replied Mary, nodding her small head, “but I like the other way a heap better.”
“You are not alone, dear child,” said Andrew, a gloom settling upon his face again. “Most people like to transpose the good old adage. I among them,” he sighed.
Mary looked up quickly. She was quick to note these sudden changes in her father. “I love you, papa. I do love you, best of anybody in all this world.”
“Do you love me better than you love your mamma?” whispered Andrew longingly.
The child laid her cool cheek against the hot face of her father, and clasped him about the neck. “I love you first; then I love mamma; next I love Grandma Willing, who has gone to heaven, and then I love Dinah. Poor Dinah. Teddy threw her into a bucket of dirty water yesterday, and she doesn’t look very clean, and then the mean thing laughed, so he did.”
Oh, what sweet music was the prattle of this child to Andrew. Her baby love and caressing ways was all the heaven which he ever expected to enjoy. With his child in his arms he forgot for a time the sword of Damocles suspended by a hair, and which might fall at any moment and crush him. Few moments in Andrew Willing’s life could justly be called happy ones, but when he looked back over the sin-laden years, he did not regret what he had done, except that the knowledge of his sin being known might tear from him the only two beings whom he loved. He looked after Mary as she ran from the room hugging the beloved Dinah. “Proclaim my sin,” he murmured, “and by so doing become a jail-bird, shut away forever from my wife and child? Never! I may suffer all the tortures of the dammed, but I will still keep my secret. I must go more into society, or Victoria, with her keen intuition, will surely discover something, and I must also fill the house with guests. It will, perhaps, serve to drive these demons away which so harass me.”
He stepped out of the window, went down the veranda steps, and took the avenue leading to the lake. With bent head and eyes fixed moodily upon the ground, he walked along. He was envied by many people for his wide domains and apparent prosperity. Men who had met with adversity would turn to their neighbors and say: “Talk of luck, why look at Andrew Willing. He is the luckiest dog going. Everything he touches turns to gold. His tobacco crops are always the finest. His negroes never sicken and die. Everything runs smoothly with him. Even his blind brother was conveniently killed in a railway accident, and Andrew profits again as usual by taking the fair widow along with the property.” But if these men could have looked deep into this wretched man’s heart; if they could have known the misery and tortures which every hour in the day he endured, then would their envy have been turned to pity, guilty though he might be. Andrew had been trying for ten years to stifle his conscience, which seemed to grow more active with advancing years, and would not be stilled. At the turn in the avenue he stopped, and looked back at the old gabled house in which he had spent so many happy hours; which also held the beings whom he adored, but alas, a home filled with grinning demons, whose devilish, hideous whisperings in his ears whenever he entered, were driving him to the verge of madness. He smote his breast remorsefully as his eyes wandered over the house, and rested for a moment on the highest gable which had once been the room of his father’s favorite slave, but whose stained glass windows had been boarded up for over thirty years. “Peace, peace!” he cried. “Will I ever know peace again until I have made reparation to those I have wronged? And when I have done so, what then? A felon’s cell or a suicide’s grave will be all I shall have to look forward to. Oh, God! I cannot. I cannot. Let fate do her worst. I will keep my secret.”