There came a lull. I forgot the weapon in my pocket. I said nothing,
and suddenly she stood erect before me, wiping her swollen eyes.
“Willie,” she gulped, “she’s gone!”
“Nettie?”
“Gone! . . . Run away. . . . Run away from her home. Oh, Willie,
Willie! The shame of it! The sin and shame of it!”
She flung herself upon my shoulder, and clung to me, and began again to
wish her daughter lying dead at our feet.
“There, there,” said I, and all my being was a-tremble. “Where has she
gone?” I said as softly as I could.
But for the time she was preoccupied with her own sorrow, and I had to
hold her there, and comfort her with the blackness of finality
spreading over my soul.
“Where has she gone?” I asked for the fourth time.
“I don’t know—we don’t know. And oh, Willie, she went out yesterday
morning! I said to her, ‘Nettie,’ I said to her, ‘you’re mighty fine
for a morning call.’ ‘Fine clo’s for a fine day,’ she said, and that
was her last words to me!—Willie!—the child I suckled at my breast!”
“Yes, yes. But where has she gone?” I said.
She went on with sobs, and now telling her story with a sort of
fragmentary hurry: “She went out bright and shining, out of this house
for ever. She was smiling, Willie—as if she was glad to be going.
(“Glad to be going,” I echoed with soundless lips.) ‘You’re mighty fine
for the morning,’ I says; ‘mighty fine.’ ‘Let the girl be pretty,’ says
her father, ‘while she’s young!’ And somewhere she’d got a parcel of
her things hidden to pick up, and she was going off—out of this house
for ever!”
She became quiet.
“Let the girl be pretty,” she repeated; “let the girl be pretty while
she’s young. . . . Oh! how can we go on _living_, Willie? He doesn’t
show it, but he’s like a stricken beast. He’s wounded to the heart. She
was always his favorite. He never seemed to care for Puss like he did
for her. And she’s wounded him—”
“Where has she gone?” I reverted at last to that.
“We don’t know. She leaves her own blood, she trusts herself— Oh,
Willie, it’ll kill me! I wish she and me together were lying in our
graves.”
“But”—I moistened my lips and spoke slowly—“she may have gone to
marry.”
“If that was so! I’ve prayed to God it might be so, Willie. I’ve prayed
that he’d take pity on her—him, I mean, she’s with.”