"The debt on this paltry shack and few acres of rocky land? Huh! if that was all I had to complain about I'd bounce out of this bed and shout for joy. Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!"
"Then, mother, what—" Virginia drew herself up with a start. Her mother, it now struck her, had said her trouble was due to a discovery she had made that morning. What else could it be than that her mother had accidentally seen her in company with Ann Boyd? Yes, that was it, and Virginia hastily told herself that some satisfying explanation must be made, some plausible and pacifying reason must be forthcoming that would allay her mother's anger, but it was hard to lie, in open words, as she had been doing in act. The gentle girl shuddered before the impending ordeal and clinched her hands in her lap. Yes, it was hard to lie, and yet the truth—the whole truth—was impossible.
"Mother," she began, "you see—I suppose I'll have to confess to you that Mrs. Boyd and I—"
"Don't blacken your soul with lies!" her mother hurled at her, furiously. "I slipped up in a few feet of you both at the spring and saw you kissing her, and heard you tell her you loved her more than anybody in the world, and that she'd treated you better than I ever did, and that she was the best woman that ever lived. Explain all that, if you can, but don't set there and lie to me who gave you what life you've got, and toiled and stinted and worked my hands to the bone to raise, you and let you hold your own with others. If there's a speck of truth in you, don't deny what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my two ears."
"I'll not deny it, then," Virginia said. She rose and moved to the small-paned window and stood with her face turned away. "I have met Mrs. Boyd several times and talked to her. I don't think she has ever had justice done her by you and her neighbors; she is not rightly understood, and, feeling that you have been all along the chief influence against her, and have always kept her early trouble stirred up, I felt like being her friend as well as I could, and at the same time remain true to you."
"Oh, you poor, poor little sniffling idiot!" Jane said, as she drew her thin legs out from the coverings and rested her feet on the floor and leaned forward. "All this time you've been thinking, in your grand way, that you were doing a kindness to her, when she was just using you as a tool, to devil me. Huh! didn't she throw it up to me once at the wash-place where she and I met? She told me to my teeth that something was coming that would bring my face to the earth in shame. I thought she knew about the cancer, and was gloating over it; but she wasn't speaking of that, for when I came back from Atlanta, sound and whole, she hurled her hints at me again. She said she knew nothing about the cancer at that time, but that she still knew something that would make me slink from the faces of men and women like a whipped hound. I discovered what she meant to-day. She meant that because my testimony had something to do with Joe Boyd's leaving with her child, she had won over mine to herself. That's been her mean and sneaking plot all this time, in which she has been decoying you from a respectable roof and making you her easy tool—the tool with which she expected to stab at my pride and humble me in the eyes of everybody."
"Mother, stop!" Virginia turned and sat down again on the bed. "That woman shall not have another—not one other—false charge piled up around her. God knows I don't see how I can tell you all the truth, but it is due to her now. It will more than justify her, and that's my duty. Listen, and don't interrupt me. I want to go straight through this, and when I have finished you may turn from me and force me to go to her for a home. You have never dreamed that I could do what I am about to confess I did. I am not going to excuse myself, either. What I did, I did. The shame of it, now that I see clearly, is killing me. No, stop! Let me go on. I have been receiving the attentions of Langdon Chester in secret. After the first time you saw us together and objected so strongly, I told him not to come to the house again; but, like many another silly girl, I was hungry for admiration, and met him elsewhere. I loved to hear the nice things he said, although I didn't always believe them. He—he tried to induce me to do a number of imprudent things, which, somehow, I was able to refuse, as they concerned my own pleasure alone; but then you began to worry about the money to go to Atlanta on. Day by day you grew more and more despondent and desperate as every effort failed, and one day, when you were down at the lowest ebb of hope, he told me that he—do you understand, mother?—Langdon Chester told me that he thought he could get up the money, but that no one must know that he—"
"Oh, my God, don't, don't, don't!" Jane groaned. "Don't tell me that you—"
"Stop! let me go on," Virginia said, in a low, desperate tone. "I'm going to tell the whole horrible thing and be done with it forever. He said he had sent his best horse to Darley to sell it, and that the man would be back about ten o'clock at night with the money. He told me, mother, that he wanted me to slip away from home after you went to sleep and come there for the money. I didn't hesitate long. I wanted to save your life. I agreed. I might have failed to go after I parted with him if I'd had time to reflect, but when I came in to supper you were more desperate than ever. You went to your room praying and moaning, and kept it up till you dropped asleep only a few minutes before the appointed time. Well, I slipped away and—went."
"Oh, God have mercy on me—mercy, mercy, mercy!" Jane groaned. "You went there to that man!"