She stood up, most like some formal, old-fashioned schoolmistress reciting a piece of prose learned by heart, without animation and without interest. The dry click of the beads alone marked the emphasis. The young Anglican priests towered one on either side, and the quivering silence of the crowded courthouse alone evidenced the terrible nature of the disclosures.
CHAPTER XXXIV
JEREMY ORRIN, BREADWINNER
"I had a younger brother, dear to me far above my life" (this was Aphra Orrin's beginning). "He was the youngest of all—left to me in guard by a father who feared in him the wild blood of my mother. For my father had married a gipsy girl whose beauty had taken him at a village merrymaking. In the Upper Ward they do not understand that kind of mésalliance in a schoolmaster. And so, for my mother's sake, he had to leave his schoolhouse, after fighting the battle against odds for many years.
"He died rich in his new occupation of cotton spinner, but he knew that the blood of my mother ran in all of us. Once, in a great snowstorm when the schoolhouse was cut off from all other houses—it was in the days soon after Jeremy (the youngest of us all) was born, my father awakened to find my mother leaning over him, the wood axe in her hand, murder in her eye. He had only time to roll beneath the bed, and seize her by the feet, pulling her down and so mastering her. He had to keep his mad wife, my mother, six days in the schoolhouse, with only himself for guard, till she could be taken to the asylum, where she died.
"After this shock my father soon followed her to the grave, and I was left with three poor girls on my hands, who could do nothing for themselves in the world—hardly even what I told them—and with Jeremy my brother. If it had not been for Jeremy, I might have managed better. But he spoiled it all. He was wild from his youth. The least opposition would arouse him to ungovernable fury. He would, like my mother, take up a knife, an axe, or whatever was at hand, and strike with incredible swiftness and strength.
"After we had lost our money—after I had lost it, that is—my own and my family's—it became my duty to provide for them more than ever. I had lost it, because richer people had revenged on me and on these four helpless ones my poor father's too rapid success. So I had no right to be squeamish as to means of vengeance on the rich.
"But while we were in the midst of some sad dreamy days at Bristol, Jeremy began to bring home money, for which he either would or could give no account. Nevertheless, I could not be sure which of the two it was. He was so wayward that if I ventured to ask for an explanation that would be a sufficient reason for his refusing it.
"I began, however, to notice that within a day or two after Jeremy's flush periods, there was always a hue and cry in the papers—a sailor robbed and his body found floating in the dock, a 'long course' captain knocked on the head, and the ship's money missing. Now Jeremy could never be kept away from the docks. Jeremy had plenty of money. Jeremy only laughed when I asked him how he earned so much without a trade.