Part 17 (1/2)
”Yes, it was just like her,” agreed Emmy Lou, her face shadowed with deepening distress. ”And because it was just like her and because I know now better than ever before how much she really loves me, those things make it all the harder to tell you what I came here to tell you--make it all the harder for me to decide what I should do and to ask your advice before I do decide.”
”Oh, I reckin it can't be so serious ez all that,” said Judge Priest comfortingly. ”Betwixt us we oughter be able to find a way out of the difficulty, whutever it is. S'pose, honey, you start in at the beginnin'
and give me all the facts in the matter that's worryin' you.”
She started then and, though her voice broke several times, she kept on until she came to the end of her tragic little recital. To Emmy Lou it was very tragic indeed.
”So you see, Judge Priest, just how it is,” she stated at the conclusion. ”From both sides I am catching the brunt of the whole thing.
Aunt Sharley won't budge an inch from the att.i.tude she's taken, and neither will Harvey budge an inch. He says she must go; she tells me every day she won't go. This has been going on for a week now and I'm almost distracted. At what should be the happiest time in a girl's life I'm being made terribly unhappy. Why, it breaks my heart every time I look at her. I know how much we owe her--I know I can never hope to repay her for all she has done for me and my sister.
”But oh, Judge, I do want to be the right kind of wife to Harvey. All my life long I mean to obey him and to look up to him; I don't want to begin now by disobeying him--by going counter to his wishes. And I can understand his position too. To him she's just an unreasonable, meddlesome, officious, contrary old negro woman who would insist on running the household of which he should be the head. She would too.
”It isn't that he feels unkindly toward her--he's too good and too generous for that. Why, it was Harvey who suggested that wages should go on just the same after she leaves us--he has even offered to double them if it will make her any better satisfied with the move. I'm sure, though, it can't be the question of money that figures with her. She never tells anyone about her own private affairs, but after all these years she must have a nice little sum saved up. I can't remember when she spent anything on herself--she was always so thrifty about money. At least she was careful about our expenditures, and of course she must have been about her own. So it can't be that. Harvey puts it down to plain stubbornness. He says after the first wrench of the separation is over she ought to be happier, when she's taking things easy in her own little house, than she is now, trying to do all the work in our house.
He says he wants several servants in our home--a butler, and a maid to wait on me and Mildred, and a housemaid and a cook. He says we can't have them if we keep Aunt Sharley. And we can't, either--she'd drive them off the place. No darky could get along with her a week. Oh, I just don't know what to do!”
”And whut does Aunt Sharley say?” asked the Judge.
”I told you. Sometimes she says she won't go and sometimes she says she can't go. But she won't tell why she can't--just keeps on declaring up and down that she can't. She makes a different excuse or she gives a different reason every morning; she seems to spend her nights thinking them up. Sometimes I think she is keeping something back from me--that she isn't telling me the real cause for her refusal to accept the situation and make the best of it. You know how secretive our coloured people can be sometimes.”
”All the time, you mean,” amended the old man. ”Northerners never seem to be able to git it through their heads that a darky kin be loud-mouthed and close-mouthed at the same time. Now you take that black boy Jeff of mine. Jeff knows more about me--my habits, my likes and my dislikes, my private business and my private thoughts and all--than I know myself. And I know jest egsactly ez much about his real self--whut he thinks and whut he does behind my back--ez he wants me to know, no more and no less. I judge it's much the same way with your Aunt Sharley, and with all the rest of their race too. We understand how to live with 'em, but that ain't sayin' we understand how they live.”
He looked steadfastly at his late ward.
”Honey, when you come to cast up the account you do owe a lot to that old n.i.g.g.e.r woman, don't you?--you and your sister both. Mebbe you owe even more than you think you do. There ain't many left like her in this new generation of darkies that's growed up--she belongs to a species that's mighty nigh extinct, ez you might say. Us Southern people are powerfully given, some of us, to tellin' whut we've done fur the black race--and we have done a lot, I'll admit--but sometimes I think we're p.r.o.ne to furgit some of the things they've done fur us. Hold on, honey,”
he added hastily, seeing that she was about to speak in her own defence.
”I ain't takin' issue with you aginst you nor yit aginst the young man you're fixin' to marry. After all, you've got your own lives to live. I was jest sort of studyin' out loud--not offerin' an argument in opposition.”
Still looking straight at her he asked a question:
”Tell me one thing, Emmy Lou, jest to satisfy my curiosity and before we go any further with this here bothersome affair that's makin' you unhappy. It seems like to me I heared somewheres that you first met this young man of yours whilst you and little Mildred were off at Knollwood Seminary finis.h.i.+n' your educations. Is that so or ain't it?”
”Yes, sir, that's true,” she answered. ”You see, when we first went to Knollwood, Harvey had just been sent South to take a place in the office of the trolley road at Knollwood.
”His people were interested in the line; he was a.s.sistant to the general manager then. I met him there. And he--he was interested in me, I suppose, and afterward, when he had worked his way up and had been promoted to the superintendency, his company bought our line in, too, and he induced them to transfer him here--I mean to say he was transferred here. So that's how it all happened.”
”I see,” he said musingly. ”You met him down there and he got interested--'interested' was the word you used, wasn't it, honey?--and then after a spell when you had left there he followed you here--or rather it jest so happened by a coincidence that he was sent here. Well, I don't know ez I blame him--for being interested, I mean. It strikes me that in addition to bein' an enterprisin' young man he's also got excellent taste and fine discrimination. He ought to go quite a ways in the world--whut with coincidences favourin' him and everything.”
The whimsical note died out of his voice. His tone became serious.
”Child,” he said gently, ”whut would you say--and whut's even more important, whut would you do--ef I was to tell you that ef it hadn't a-been fur old Aunt Sharley this great thing that's come into your life probably never would have come into it? What ef I was to tell you that if it hadn't a-been fur her you never would have knowed Mr. Harvey Winslow in the first place--and natch.e.l.ly wouldn't be engaged to marry him now?”
”Why, Judge Priest, how could that be?” Her widened eyes betokened a blank incredulity.
”Emmy Lou,” he answered slowly, ”in tellin' you whut I'm about to tell you I'm breakin' a solemn pledge, and that's a thing I ain't much given to doin'. But this time I figger the circ.u.mstances justify me. Now listen: You remember, don't you, that in the first year or two following after the time your mother left us, the estate was sort of snarled up?
Well, it was worse snarled up than you two children had any idea of. Two or three of the heaviest investments your father made in the later years of his life weren't turnin' out very well. The taxes on 'em amounted to mighty nigh ez much ez whut the income frum 'em did. We didn't aim to pester you two girls with all the details, so we sort of kept 'em to ourselves and done the best we could. You lived simple and there was enough to take care of you and to keep up your home, and we knowed we could depend on Aunt Sharley to manage careful. Really, she knowed more about the true condition of things than you did. Still, even so, you no doubt got an inklin' sometimes of how things stood with regards to your finances.”
She nodded, saying nothing, and he went on:
”Well, jest about that time, one day in the early part of the summer I had a visit frum Aunt Sharley. She come to me in my office down at the courthouse, and I sent Jeff to fetch Lew Lake, and we both set down there together with that old n.i.g.g.e.r woman, and she told us whut she had to say. She told us that you children had growed up with the idea that you'd go off to boardin' school somewheres after you were done with our local schools, and that you were beginnin' to talk about goin' and that it was high time fur you to be gittin' ready to go, and, in brief, she wanted to know whut about it? We told her jest how things stood--that under the terms of your father's will practically everything you owned was entailed--held in trust by us--until both of the heirs had come of age. We told her that, with your consent or without it, we didn't have the power to sell off any part of the estate, and so, that bein' the case, the necessary money to send you off to school jest natch.e.l.ly couldn't be provided noways, and that, since there was jest barely enough money comin' in to run the home and, by stintin', to care fur you and Mildred, any outside and special expense comin' on top of the regular expenses couldn't possibly be considered--or, in other words, that you two couldn't hope to go to boardin' school.