“I’m afraid she thought she had,” said the young man, gravely.
“Mind telling me?”
“No, sir. I reckon you don’t know my aunt was crazy?”
“I’ve had some such notion. She lost her mind when they all died of yellow-fever—or was it when Colonel Cary was killed?”
“I don’t know precisely. I imagine that she was queer after his death, and all the family dying later, that finished the wreck. There were some painful circumstances connected with the colonel’s death—”
“I’ve heard them.”
“Yes, sir. Well, sir, my mother was not to blame—not so much to blame as you may think. She was almost a stranger to her sister, raised in another State; and she had never seen her or Colonel Cary, her betrothed; and when she did see him—well, sir, my mother was a beautiful, daring, brilliant girl, and poor Aunt Margaret timid and awkward. She broke the engagement, not Cary.”
“It was to see your mother he came to the plantation!”
“Yes, sir. And he was killed. Poor Aunt Margaret saw it. She came back to the house riding in a miserable dump-cart, holding his head in her lap. She wouldn’t let my mother come near him. ‘Now he knows which loved him best,’ she said ‘He’s mine!’ And it didn’t soften her when my mother married my father. She seemed to think that proved she hadn’t cared for Colonel Cary. Then the yellow-fever came, and they all went. Her mind broke down completely then; she used to think that on the day Colonel Cary was shot they all came back for a while, and she would set chairs for them and offer them wine and cake—as if they were visiting her. And after they left she would pour the wine in the glasses into the grate and burn the cake. She said that they enjoyed it, and ate really, but they left a semblance. She got hold of some queer books, I reckon, for she had the strangest notions; and she spent no end of money on some spiritual mediums; greedy harpies that got a heap of money out of her. My father and mother had come to Cary Hall, then, to live, and of course they didn’t like it. The great trouble, my mother often said to me, was that though they were sisters, they were raised apart, and were as much strangers as—we are. You can imagine how they felt to see the property being squandered. Ten thousand dollars, sir, went in one year—”