Miss Clinton's promises were not very trustworthy in this respect, for she had successively endowed and disinherited every one of her relatives and friends. But that was no reason why her request should be refused. She was a lonely old woman, and Carl must go to her.
He consented rather reluctantly, protesting that he would only stay a week. But, when he got there, it was not so easy to tear himself away.
"A newspaper to edit?" cried the old lady. "What signifies a newspaper in a little country town? Nobody ever reads it."
"Not when I edit it?" says Carl with a laugh. He found the old lady amusing.
"No, not even then, Master Vanity," she replies. "Stay here, Carl. It is miserable to be left alone so. I sha'n't keep you very long. You shall have any room you choose, and money enough to be respectable, and you may smoke from morning to night. There is only one thing you may not do. I won't have a dog in this house, for two reasons: he might go mad, and he might worry my cat. Will you stay? Old people live longer when they have young ones about them; and, besides, I'm lonely. Bird torments me. She hints religion, and reads the Bible when she thinks I don't see her. I know she is searching out texts that she thinks will fit my case. I am getting old, Carl, and I forget a little the arguments against all this superstition. They are true, but I forget them; and sometimes in the night, or when I feel nervous, the nonsensical religious stories I have heard come up and frighten me, and I have nothing to oppose to them. Alice torments me, too. She is so sure, she looks so much, she goes about with her religion just like a little child holding its mother's hand, while I am sure of nothing, and have nothing to lean on but this stick"—holding out a cane in her shaking hand.
"It must be comfortable to believe so," she went on, after two or three gasping breaths. "I envy the fools who can. But I can't. My head is too clear for that. And I want you here, Carl, to remind me of the arguments that I forget, and to talk to me when I am nervous. They tell me that you are a free-thinker, and I know that you are clever. Stay, for God's sake! I suppose there may be a God."
Carl shrank from the wild appeal in that frightened old face; shrank yet more from the horrible task assigned him. Unbelief, as he had contemplated it, looked gallant, noble, and aspiring; but this unbelief seemed like a glimpse into that perdition which he had denied. In this old scoffer he felt as if contemplating a distorted image of himself. It was as if he had been asked to commit a crime, a sacrilege. There was such a crime as sacrilege, he saw.
But he could not refuse to stay.
"Perhaps it would be better for us both to look for arguments against than for our theories," he said gravely.
Anything, so that he did not leave her, she insisted. Indeed, she wanted his masculine strength more than anything else. Every one about feared her, or was tenderly careful of her, but this young man had already more than once good-naturedly scouted her notions. He was one to be fearless and tell the truth, and she felt safe with him. Besides, he was a man, and clever, and it would not hurt her pride to be influenced by him. If her insensible and selfish heart felt no longer the necessity of loving, it still felt the equally feminine necessity of submission and sacrifice. Already in the bottom of her heart was a faint hope that Carl might insist on having a dog in the house, and that she might show her dawning fondness for him by consenting—a greater concession than she had ever yet made in her life.