Bessie's Fortune

And then Mrs. Martha, as if bent on torturing her husband, to whom every word was a stab, wondered if any man ever had wanted Hannah Jerrold for his wife, and asked her husband if he had ever heard of any such thing.

"I should not be likely to know it," he replied, "for until you came, I never heard any gossip."

There was an implied rebuke in this answer, and it silenced Mrs. Martha, who said no more of Hannah, but as soon as possible got her lord to bed, with a soapstone at his feet and a blanket wrapped around him, in order to make him sweat and break up the cold she was certain he had taken.

Meanwhile at the farm-house Burton and his sister were standing together near the kitchen fire, where poor Grey had stood two hours before, and heard what changed the coloring of his whole life. They were speaking of him, and what they said was this: "If it were only myself I might bear it," Burton said, "though life can never be to me again what it has been, and I shall think like Cain that the sin is branded on me; and I was so proud, and stood so high, and meant to make the name of Jerrold so honorable a name that Grey and his children would rejoice that they bore it. Of course Grey will never know, but I shall, and that will make a difference. Hannah," he added, quickly, struck by something in her face, "what did you mean, or rather what did father mean by your making restitution to the peddler's friends? What is there to restore?"

In his recital of his crime the old man had omitted to speak of the money and the will, or, at most, he had touched so lightly upon them that it had escaped the notice of his son, whose mind was wholly absorbed in one idea, and that of the body buried under the floor within a few feet of him. Hannah explained to him what her father meant, and told him of the box and the gold, to which she had every year added the interest--compound interest, too--so that the amount had more than quadrupled, and she had found it necessary to have another and larger box in which to keep the treasure.

"That is why I have so often asked you to change bills into gold for me," she said. "Paper might depreciate in value, or the banks go down, but gold is gold everywhere, and I have tried so hard to earn or save the interest, denying myself many things which I should have enjoyed as well as most women, and getting for myself the reputation of closeness and even stinginess, which I did not deserve. I had to be economical with myself to meet my payments, which increased as the years went on, until they are so large that sometimes I have not been able to put the whole in the box at the end of the year, and I am behindhand now, but I keep an exact account, and shall make it up in time."