"Tabitha! This Tabitha! The pale, meek girl, who bore so uncomplainingly what we boys resented. Can this be Tabitha?"
"Yes," replied Jane. "It can. It is. The weight of a guilty secret has ploughed my face with these deep furrows. Call me not meek; I was anything but that, I was a sinful, wicked woman. Oh! I have much to tell: much that has been locked up in my heart for more than thirty years. How I have suffered under the burden that at last has grown too heavy for me to bear, and I sink under its load, must divulge it; must have her forgiveness, ere I die!"
"Your words fill me with a foreboding of evil," replied Mr. Linchmore. "Think well before you speak, Tabitha. Is it necessary that this secret, sinful as you say it is, should be divulged. Does it concern, does it benefit those living?"
"If it did not, I would never speak it, but struggle on with its sorrow, till I died. No hard, and cruel as my mistress was, not from Tabitha should come the tale that will denounce her and her evil ways."
"She was my mother, Tabitha," said Mr. Linchmore, as if reproaching her harshness.
"True, she was. I do not forget it; still I must speak, must tell of her sin and mine, for it is sin, fearful sin. I would, for your sake, Master Robert, that it were otherwise; but when I tell of my wrong-doing, with mine must come hers. It must. Justice must be done. The mother's craving, broken heart must be healed."
"God forbid that I should be the one to stand in the way. Speak, Tabitha! but be as merciful as you can; remember you speak of one whose memory ought to be dear to me. I will steel my heart to hear—and bear."
"Do so," she said. "It is a long story. I must go back to the days when I was a child, and your mother, Miss Julia, took me away from my home to hers. She was of an imperious will and proud nature; her mother had died at giving her birth, and her father had never controlled her in any way. She was as wild and wayward as the trees that grew in the forest near here, when they were shaken by the wind. With her, to ask was to have, and when she brought me home and declared her intention of bringing me up, and making a companion and plaything of me, no objection was raised, and she petted and scolded me by turns, as it suited her haughty will. At first I disliked her, then feared, and at length loved, worshipped her, as some beautiful spirit. Her father died; but then it was too late to save his child, or let others teach her wild spirit lessons of meekness and obedience; then your grandmother came and took us both away to live in her own home. She was a widow, with two sons, the eldest not quite so old as Miss Julia.
"A change came over your mother. She loved. Loved the eldest of the two, your father; loved as only she could love, with all the wild, impetuous passion of her nature. It would have been strange had he not loved her in return—so beautiful, so wayward, so bright a being as she was then. They were engaged to be married, and, I believe, had they married then all would have gone well, and perhaps the evil that followed been averted. But they did not marry, they tarried—tarried until another girl, a niece, was left desolate, and she too came to Brampton."
Jane, or Tabitha, paused for a moment, then went on more slowly,