“I said cheated!” he answered roughly, as if he was trying to harden his own feelings. “He would be putting dependence upon her inherited characteristics, wouldn’t he? And then, if anything ever cropped out in her, if he didn’t know, how could he understand her or forgive her or help her?”
“Judge,” said I, “you spoke of my being a woman. Well, sir, I am an ignorant woman, but I know well enough that there are some things that you and I had best leave alone—some things that God will take care of by Himself.”
At that his face screwed up in pain.
“Honor is honor!” he said, jumping up. “Truth is truth! And heredity is heredity!”
He seized his hat and went into the hall and down the front steps and off along the pavement with his long strides, like a man followed by a fiend.
It was the last word he ever spoke on the subject until Mr. Estabrook came into our life. Then I saw from the first how things were going. When I caught the look on the girl’s face as she watched the first man in whom she had taken that special interest, and when I saw him—begging your pardon—staring at her as if she were not real, I knew, with a sick feeling in my heart and throat, that the day would come when he would take her away from us.
It was like a panic to me. I could not stand it and I called the Judge. I wanted to speak with him. I nodded and beckoned to him and tried to show him what was going on, for though a mother has the eyes of a hawk, a father is often blind. And I thought that night he was going out without my having a chance to say a word. I went down to the kitchen and then to the dark laundry, out of sight of the cook. I threw my apron over my head and cried like an old fool from fright. It was in the midst of it that I heard the gate-latch.
“The woman again!” I said to myself. “The strange woman! She feels there’s something wrong, too. She’s come back!”
I could hear my own heart thumping as I stared out into the dark, wiping my eyes to get the fog out of them. Minutes went by before I saw that it was the Judge. He had come back to hear what I had to say, and I think when I told him that he was as upset as I had been. Well I remember how his voice trembled as he told me how he had written the paper telling the whole secret, except for my knowing about it, to Julianna, in case he should die, and how, then and there, I made up my mind that if God would let me I would keep the girl from ever reading it. And to this day she does not know that I loved her that much. What made me fail to do this is something you are aware of already, just as you know all the story of the marriage and a time of happiness before this new and dreadful, dreadful thing, whatever it is, came to us.
Well enough for you, Mr. Estabrook, to notice the change in your wife. It is well enough for you to wonder what has come to her and why she has driven you out of your own house. But do not forget that I held her as a baby in my arms and saw her grow into a woman, as free from guilt or blame as any that ever lived. It may all be a mystery to you, sir. I tell you it is all a hundred times more a mystery to me who know no more of it than you, though in these terrible days I have been alone with her, locked into a deserted house, with every other servant sent away and the quiet of the grave over everything.