“I wish I knew printed from painted. This dish is either very valuable or utterly worthless; some things are just on the borderland. You two must really go away.” She put out one hand deprecatingly. “There ought to be some tin tacks, or a ledge, in front of the shelves, so that the plates could stand up.”
Gainah looked at her, a brilliant, dainty, voluble creature, high up on a mahogany chair whose back was carved in wheat-ears. She had all the color and pertness of a bullfinch. She looked at her, this dangerous republican; looked at white fingers carelessly handling china which for over thirty years only her own hands had touched. She had grown to believe that it was hers, that Jethro himself was hers, and the farm too, with its fat acres and its ripe family tradition. She had been undisputed queen at Folly Corner the best part of her life. All the family connections, when they paid Jethro a rare visit, had deferred to her. Yet not one of them knew the truth—that Jethro’s father had almost married her.
She thought of that as she watched Pamela standing radiant on the chair. A horrible pang for the muddles, incomplete past, and a still more set feeling of bitterest, merciless revenge contracted her heart. She turned away without a word, leaving the cousins in the china closet. She sat herself down in the ruins of her temple, and looked blankly at the devastation wrought by Pamela’s active fingers in two short hours.
She knew for whom this room had been refurnished more than thirty years before. Not for Jethro’s mother. She, after the fashion of frugal first wives, had saved and gone short of household elaborations. The room had been furnished for her. She, Gainah Toat, had been the elder Jethro’s second fancy. She had been a good-looking woman well within thirty in those days; while he had been nearer sixty, having married a middle-aged cousin—of the plain variety of women, warranted to wear well—when he was fifty or more. But she, Gainah, had inspired him with positive passion. Bah! She knew what a man’s passion was, and how far it led him. She knew that it made even a miser like the elder Jethro dip deeply into his pocket.
She remembered driving with him into Liddleshorn, just as Pamela had to-day driven in with his son, and choosing the flowery carpet, the round table, the piano—on which she could never hope to play a note. Neighbors had condoled with her on the prospect of a new wife at Folly Corner. She had said nothing, by his wish—he was a taciturn man. But she remembered the flutter of triumph which had worked behind her dry lips all the time. She knew that she was to be the bride of whom they gossiped and about whose appearance they speculated.
What might have been! He had been dead more than thirty years, and she had dutifully kept the secret of his weakness. Not even Jethro knew that there had been love passages, of a fairly practical sort—on one side at least—between Gainah and his father. Her courting scenes had been seasoned with matter-of-fact reference to the crops or the prospects of early ducklings. She had always been grim and unbending.
What might have been! If only the master of Folly Corner had not been pitched out of the high gig. His head had cracked on a heap of big stones by the road, piled high all ready for autumn breaking.
She remembered so well the day they brought him home. It was on a Monday, and she had, for once, managed to cut her nails without thinking of a fox’s tail—sure sign of a present.
That was the present they brought her—the dying body of the substantial man, who loved her in his common-sense way, who would have redeemed her from service.
She remembered the day of the funeral. It was a cold day. The bereft house had seemed to rock and moan with every wail of the agonized wind outside. The front door, through which they carried the long, wide coffin, was flung widely back by her orders until the burial service had been read at the church. If that had not been done there would have been another death within the year. Bitterly as she had been disappointed and foiled, she did not want to die. Neither did she want baby Jethro to die; she loved him a great deal better than she had loved his father—there was no ulterior motive mixed up with her regard for the child.