The $30,000 Bequest - Mark Twain (ebooks that read to you .txt) 📗

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it withdrawn as suffering defilement by those soiled lips.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

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.