“Gone? Oh, don't—don't tell me that, Mrs. Porter!”
“No, not that, quite; but wait till I am through,” Mrs. Porter said, her tone hard and crisp. “When I got to the porch I saw her just disappearing in the orchard. And then I heard somebody whistling like a whippoorwill. It was Nelson Floyd. He was standing at the grape-arbor, and the two met there. They went inside and sat down, and then, as there was a thick row of rose-bushes between the house and the arbor, I slipped up behind it. I crouched down low till I was almost flat on the ground. I heard every word that passed between them.”
Hillhouse said nothing. The veins in his forehead stood out full and dark. Drops of perspiration, the dew of mental agony, appeared on his cheeks.
“Don't form hasty judgment,” Mrs. Porter said. “If I ever doubted, or feared my child's weakness on that man's account, I don't now. She's as good and pure as the day she was born. In fact, I don't believe she would have gone out to meet him that way if she hadn't been nearly crazy over the uncertainty as to what had happened to him. I don't blame her; I'd have done it myself if I'd cared as much for a man as she does about him—or thinks she does.”
“You say you heard what passed?” Hillhouse panted.
“Yes, and never since I was born have I heard such stuff as he poured into that poor child's ears. As I listened to his talk, one instant my heart would bleed with sympathy and the next I'd want to grab him by the throat and strangle him. He was all hell and all heaven's angels bound up in one human shape to entrap one frail human being. He went over all his suffering from babyhood up, saying he had had as much put on him as he could stand. He had come back by stealth and didn't want a soul but her to know he was here; he didn't intend ever to face the sneers of these folks and let them throw up his mother's sin to him. He'd been on a long and terrible debauch, but had sobered up and promised to stay that way if she would run away with him to some far-off place where no soul would ever know his history. He had no end of funds, he said; he'd made money on investments outside of Springtown, and he promised to gratify every wish of hers. She was to have the finest and best in the land, and get away from a miserable existence under my roof. Oh, I hate him—poisoning her mind against the mother who nursed her!”
“He wanted her to elope!” gasped Hillhouse—“to elope with a man just off of a long drunk and with a record like that behind him—her, that beautiful, patient child! But what did she say?”
“At first she refused to go, as well as I could make out, and then she told him she would have to think over it. He is to meet her at the same place next Friday night, and if she decides to go between now and then she will be ready.”
“Thank God, we've discovered it ahead of time!” Hillhouse said, fervently, and he got up, and, with his head hanging low and his bony hands clutched behind him over the tails of his long, black coat, he walked back and forth from the window to the door. “I tell you, Sister Porter,” he almost sobbed, “I can't give her up to him. I can't, I tell you. It isn't in me. I'd die rather than have her go off with him.”
“So would I—so would I, fearin' what I now do,” Mrs. Porter said, without looking at him.