“Good gracious!” said Margaret Lyndsay. “Dorothy, how can a good woman like you say such things?”
“I can. And he’s a-failing before my very eyes,” she added, upon which she became silent. A tear or two dropped down her cheeks. “Now, wouldn’t you lie, Mrs. Lyndsay, if you was me?”
Anne looked up with interest as to what the answer might be.
“I might; I would,” said Margaret. “I am afraid I should.” Then she put a sympathetic hand on her friend’s knee, while Anne looked grave, and Rose watched Dorothy, with instant pity in her heart.
But this was not Dorothy’s common way.
“My lands! I’ve been making a fool of myself!” She had the aversion of the strong to the alms of sympathy. As she spoke she rose. “Come over and see me when you feel right good, Miss Anne. I do love a talk—and my roses! I’ve got a lot of them to blooming this year, and if that isn’t enough to make a woman happy, what is?”
With this she said good-by and went down to the beach. Anne watched with envy, in which was no unkindliness, the vigor with which the dugout shot forth from the shore. “A fine nature, that. It does one good to talk to her. Example is a strange medicine. It is hard to analyze its value. Because she endures with patience, I may. Yes; my helps are larger.”
As Mrs. Maybrook walked up to her house she thought over, as was the habit of her lonely life, the talk she had had with Mr. Lyndsay and its occasion. In her younger days of wandering, Hiram and she had lived long amidst rough people in the West, among miners and loose ruffians of all degrees of wickedness. Thus the idea of crime was not so unfamiliar as to strike her as it did Lyndsay. She had seen men shot, and had been where murder and plunder were common. She had overheard a half-evolved scheme of villainy, one to be easily thwarted; nor, knowing, as she did, Colkett and his wife, did it greatly amaze her. Still, it was rare to hear of crime on the river. She had found more or less explanation of this wickedness in what she remembered of the Colketts, and had said in explanation to Mr. Lyndsay:
“She was a right fine-looking woman when she married Joe Colkett; but she never was less than bad. She’s about the only one I ever came across that would give her man—that is, her first man—drink, and buy it for him, too, till she poisoned him. When the children came, and two were idiots, like drunkards’ brats are, as every one knows, she put it all on her first man—Fairlamb was his name. At last she was left with them, and nothing to do but get another man. She’d have married ’most any one to keep those children. That’s the only good about her; but the funny thing is the way that stump of a fellow does love her. He does, though!”
“A queer story!” said Lyndsay.