"Pity! she'll have none from me. I hated her! she wrecked my happiness when I was a young girl, and for what? but to gratify her insane jealousy. Do you see this?" said she, taking off her cap, and shaking down the thick masses of almost snow-white hair; "it was once golden, and as fair as yours, but a few short months of—of agony changed it to what you see, and drove me mad; she worked the wreck; she caused the—the madness, and gloried in it. And yet you wonder that I condemn her?"
Her hair was the silvered hair of an old woman, and as it fell from its concealment down her shoulders almost to her feet, throwing a pale, softened, mournful shadow over her excited features, Amy was struck with the beauty of her face; she must once have been very beautiful; while her face, lighted up as it now was, was not the face of an aged woman. No; it must have been, as she herself said, a sudden, severe sorrow years ago that had helped to change that once luxuriant golden hair to grey. Her figure, as she stood confronting Amy, was slight, and by no means ungraceful; that also bore no trace of age, and although she generally walked with the aid of a thick staff, it was more to steady the weakness of her steps than to support the tottering, uncertain ones of old age.
Who? and what had caused such a wreck? It must have been some terrible blow to have sent her mad in her youth, and to have left her even now, at times—whenever the dark remembrance of it swept over her—hardly sane in more mature age. Would the divulging of the secret remove the sad weight from her heart, or quiet the agony of her thoughts? It might in a measure do so, but Amy shrank from sustaining alone the frenzy that might ensue, and as Goody Grey repeated her last question of "Do you wonder that I condemn her?" Amy, with the view of soothing her, replied gently—
"She may have lived hardened in sin, but through the dark shadows remorse must have swept at times, and stung her deeply. Besides, her life and death were most wretched, and deserve your pity more than anger."
"Had she known remorse, she never could have died so revengefully. I don't believe she ever felt its sting, and as for pity, she would have scorned it!" and Goody Grey laughed a wild, bitter laugh at the thought.
"Did she injure you so very deeply?"
"How dare you ask me that question? Are not you afraid to? Don't you know it stirs up all my worst passions within me, and sends me mad, —mad do I say? No, no, I am not mad now; I was once, but that, like the rest, is past—past for ever!" and her voice changed suddenly from its fierceness to an almost mournful sadness.
"Did you know her well?" Amy ventured to ask, notwithstanding the rebuff her last question had met with.
"Aye, did I; too well—too well! Would to God I had never seen her, it would have been better had I died first: but I live, if such a life as mine can be called living. And she is dead and I haven't forgiven her; never will; unless," said she, correcting herself, "unless—oh God! I dare not think of that; does it not bring sorrow—deep, intense, despairing sorrow, sorrow that scorches my brain?" and either exhausted with her fierce excitement, or overwhelmed with the recollection of the cause of her grief, she sank down in a chair, and covering her face with her hands, moaned and rocked herself about afresh.