Mistress Mehitable looked after her with small, stern mouth, but troubled eyes. Then she turned half helplessly to her friends, as if to say, "What can I—what ought I to do?"
Doctor John threw up both big, white hands in mock despair, and his sympathetic laugh said, "What do you expect?" But Doctor Jim, more direct and positive, said, "Best leave her alone till to-morrow, Mehitable; and then talk to her with no talk of punishing. She's not the breed that punishing's good for."
Mistress Mehitable looked sorrowful, but resolute.
"I fear that would not be right, Jim!" she said. But there was a note of deep anxiety in her voice. "People who do wrong ought to be punished. Barbara has done very, very wrong!"
Doctor Jim was as near feeling impatient as he could dare to imagine himself with Mistress Mehitable.
"Nonsense—I mean, dear lady, punishment's not in itself one of our numerous unpleasant duties. It's a means to an end, that's all. In this case, it just defeats your end. It's the wrong means altogether. Therefore—pardon me for saying it to you, Mehitable—it's wrong. It's hard enough to manage Barbara, I know, but to punish her, or talk to her of punishing, makes it harder still, eh, what?"
"Don't let your conscience trouble you, Mehitable," said Doctor John. "I'm thinking the little maid will manage to get for herself, full measure and running over, all the punishment that's coming to her. She's not the kind that punishment overlooks."
Was there a suspicion of criticism in all this? Could it be that John Pigeon and Jim Pigeon, her lifelong cavaliers, in whose sight all she did was wont to seem perfection, whose unswerving homage had been her stay through many an hour of faintness and misgiving, were now, at last, beginning to admit doubts? Two large tears gathered slowly in the corners of Mistress Mehitable's blue eyes, the resolution fled from her mouth, and her fine lips quivered girlishly. She twisted her shapely little hands in her apron, then regained her self-control with an effort.
"Dear friends," said she, "I fear I have made a sad failure of the duty which I so confidently undertook. I thought I could surely do so much for her,—could so thoroughly understand Winthrop's child. But that foreign woman—that strange blood! There is the trouble. That is what baffles all my efforts. Oh, perhaps it is partly my fault, too. Perhaps the child was right in the very singular letter she left for me, saying—just as if she were a grown woman and had the same rights as I had—that the trouble was that we could not understand each other! Oh, I fear I am not the right woman to have the care of Barbara!"
"You are the rightest woman in the world, Mehitable!" thundered Doctor Jim, in explosive protest against this self-accusation. "The rightest woman in the world to have the care of any man, woman, or child that ever lived."