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Page 62
"After they had told me all they had to tell about their experience
with the child, they told me about the house and the people that
had lived there before they did. It seemed something dreadful had
happened in that house. And the land agent had never let on to
them. I don't think they would have bought it if he had, no matter
how cheap it was, for even if folks aren't really afraid of
anything, they don't want to live in houses where such dreadful
things have happened that you keep thinking about them. I know
after they told me I should never have stayed there another night,
if I hadn't thought so much of them, no matter how comfortable I
was made; and I never was nervous, either. But I stayed. Of
course, it didn't happen in my room. If it had I could not have
stayed."
"What was it?" asked Mrs. Emerson in an awed voice.
"It was an awful thing. That child had lived in the house with her
father and mother two years before. They had come--or the father
had--from a real good family. He had a good situation: he was a
drummer for a big leather house in the city, and they lived real
pretty, with plenty to do with. But the mother was a real wicked
woman. She was as handsome as a picture, and they said she came
from good sort of people enough in Boston, but she was bad clean
through, though she was real pretty spoken and most everybody liked
her. She used to dress out and make a great show, and she never
seemed to take much interest in the child, and folks began to say
she wasn't treated right.
"The woman had a hard time keeping a girl. For some reason one
wouldn't stay. They would leave and then talk about her awfully,
telling all kinds of things. People didn't believe it at first;
then they began to. They said that the woman made that little
thing, though she wasn't much over five years old, and small and
babyish for her age, do most of the work, what there was done; they
said the house used to look like a pig-sty when she didn't have
help. They said the little thing used to stand on a chair and wash
dishes, and they'd seen her carrying in sticks of wood most as big
as she was many a time, and they'd heard her mother scolding her.
The woman was a fine singer, and had a voice like a screech-owl
when she scolded.
"The father was away most of the time, and when that happened he
had been away out West for some weeks. There had been a married
man hanging about the mother for some time, and folks had talked
some; but they weren't sure there was anything wrong, and he was a
man very high up, with money, so they kept pretty still for fear he
would hear of it and make trouble for them, and of course nobody
was sure, though folks did say afterward that the father of the
child had ought to have been told.
"But that was very easy to say; it wouldn't have been so easy to
find anybody who would have been willing to tell him such a thing
as that, especially when they weren't any too sure. He set his
eyes by his wife, too. They said all he seemed to think of was to
earn money to buy things to deck her out in. And he about
worshiped the child, too. They said he was a real nice man. The
men that are treated so bad mostly are real nice men. I've always
noticed that.
"Well, one morning that man that there had been whispers about was
missing. He had been gone quite a while, though, before they
really knew that he was missing, because he had gone away and told
his wife that he had to go to New York on business and might be
gone a week, and not to worry if he didn't get home, and not to
worry if he didn't write, because he should be thinking from day to
day that he might take the next train home and there would be no
use in writing. So the wife waited, and she tried not to worry
until it was two days over the week, then she run into a
neighbour's and fainted dead away on the floor; and then they made
inquiries and found out that he had skipped--with some money that
didn't belong to him, too.
"Then folks began to ask where was that woman, and they found out
by comparing notes that nobody had seen her since the man went
away; but three or four women remembered that she had told them
that she thought of taking the child and going to Boston to visit
her folks, so when they hadn't seen her around, and the house shut,
they jumped to the conclusion that was where she was. They were
the neighbours that lived right around her, but they didn't have
much to do with her, and she'd gone out of her way to tell them
about her Boston plan, and they didn't make much reply when she
did.
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