The family consisted of four persons: Margaret Lester, widow, aged
thirty six; Helen Lester, her daughter, aged sixteen; Mrs. Lester's
maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, twins, aged sixty-seven. Waking
and sleeping, the three women spent their days and nights in adoring the
young girl; in watching the movements of her sweet spirit in the mirror
of her face; in refreshing their souls with the vision of her bloom
and beauty; in listening to the music of her voice; in gratefully
recognizing how rich and fair for them was the world with this presence
in it; in shuddering to think how desolate it would be with this light
gone out of it.
By nature--and inside--the aged aunts were utterly dear and lovable and
good, but in the matter of morals and conduct their training had been so
uncompromisingly strict that it had made them exteriorly austere, not to
say stern. Their influence was effective in the house; so effective
that the mother and the daughter conformed to its moral and religious
requirements cheerfully, contentedly, happily, unquestionably. To do
this was become second nature to them. And so in this peaceful
heaven there were no clashings, no irritations, no fault-finding, no
heart-burnings.
In it a lie had no place. In it a lie was unthinkable. In it speech
was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth, implacable and
uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences be what they might.
At last, one day, under stress of circumstances, the darling of the
house sullied her lips with a lie--and confessed it, with tears
and self-upbraidings. There are not any words that can paint the
consternation of the aunts. It was as if the sky had crumpled up and
collapsed and the earth had tumbled to ruin with a crash. They sat side
by side, white and stern, gazing speechless upon the culprit, who was on
her knees before them with her face buried first in one lap and then the
other, moaning and sobbing, and appealing for sympathy and forgiveness
and getting no response, humbly kissing the hand of the one, then of the
other, only to see it withdrawn as suffering defilement by those soiled
lips.
Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hester said, in frozen amazement:
“You told a _lie_?”
Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hannah followed with the muttered and amazed
ejaculation:
“You confess it--you actually confess it--you told a lie!”
It was all they could say. The situation was new, unheard of,
incredible; they could not understand it, they did not know how to take
hold of it, it approximately paralyzed speech.
At length it was decided that the erring child must be taken to her
mother, who was ill, and who ought to know what had happened. Helen
begged, besought, implored that she might be spared this further
disgrace, and that her mother might be spared the grief and pain of
it; but this could not be: duty required this sacrifice, duty takes
precedence of all things, nothing can absolve one from a duty, with a
duty no compromise is possible.
Helen still begged, and said the sin was her own, her mother had had no
hand in it--why must she be made to suffer for it?
But the aunts were obdurate in their righteousness, and said the law
that visited the sins of the parent upon the child was by all right
and reason reversible; and therefore it was but just that the innocent
mother of a sinning child should suffer her rightful share of the grief
and pain and shame which were the allotted wages of the sin.
The three moved toward the sick-room.
At this time the doctor was approaching the house. He was still a good
distance away, however. He was a good doctor and a good man, and he had
a good heart, but one had to know him a year to get over hating him, two
years to learn to endure him, three to learn to like him, and four and
five to learn to love him. It was a slow and trying education, but it
paid. He was of great stature; he had a leonine head, a leonine face, a
rough voice, and an eye which was sometimes a pirate's and sometimes
a woman's, according to the mood. He knew nothing about etiquette, and
cared nothing about it; in speech, manner, carriage, and conduct he was
the reverse of conventional. He was frank, to the limit; he had opinions
on all subjects; they were always on tap and ready for delivery, and he
cared not a farthing whether his listener liked them or didn't. Whom
he loved he loved, and manifested it; whom he didn't love he hated, and
published it from the housetops. In his young days he had been a sailor,
and the salt-airs of all the seas blew from him yet. He was a sturdy and
loyal Christian, and believed he was the best one in the land, and the
only one whose Christianity was perfectly sound, healthy, full-charged
with common sense, and had no decayed places in it. People who had an ax
to grind, or people who for any reason wanted to get on the soft side
of him, called him The Christian--a phrase whose delicate flattery was
music to his ears, and whose capital T was such an enchanting and vivid
object to him that he could _see _it when it fell out of a person's
mouth even in the dark. Many who were fond of him stood on their
consciences with both feet and brazenly called him by that large title
habitually, because it was a pleasure to them to do anything that
would please him; and with eager and cordial malice his extensive and
diligently cultivated crop of enemies gilded it, beflowered it, expanded
it to “The _only _Christian.” Of these two titles, the latter had the
wider currency; the enemy, being greatly in the majority, attended to
that. Whatever the doctor believed, he believed with all his heart,
and would fight for it whenever he got the chance; and if the intervals
between chances grew to be irksomely wide, he would invent ways of
shortening them himself. He was severely conscientious, according to
his rather independent lights, and whatever he took to be a duty he
performed, no matter whether the judgment of the professional moralists
agreed with his own or not. At sea, in his young days, he had used
profanity freely, but as soon as he was converted he made a rule, which
he rigidly stuck to ever afterward, never to use it except on the rarest
occasions, and then only when duty commanded. He had been a hard
drinker at sea, but after his conversion he became a firm and outspoken
teetotaler, in order to be an example to the young, and from that time
forth he seldom drank; never, indeed, except when it seemed to him to be
a duty--a condition which sometimes occurred a couple of times a year,
but never as many as five times.
Necessarily, such a man is impressionable, impulsive, emotional. This
one was, and had no gift at hiding his feelings; or if he had it he took
no trouble to exercise it. He carried his soul's prevailing weather in
his face, and when he entered a room the parasols or the umbrellas went
up--figuratively speaking--according to the indications. When the soft
light was in his eye it meant approval, and delivered a benediction;
when he came with a frown he lowered the temperature ten degrees. He was
a well-beloved man in the house of his friends, but sometimes a dreaded
one.
He had a deep affection for the Lester household and its several members
returned this feeling with interest. They mourned over his kind of
Christianity, and he frankly scoffed at theirs; but both parties went on
loving each other just the same.
He was approaching the house--out of the distance; the aunts and the
culprit were moving toward the sick-chamber.