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Luella Miller
by
“Then I spoke out: ‘Has to do it I’ says I. ‘Has to do it!’ She don’t have to do it, either. Maria Brown has her own home and enough to live on. She ain’t beholden to you to come over here and slave for you and kill herself.’
“Luella she jest set and stared at me for all the world like a doll-baby that was so abused that it was comin’ to life.
“‘Yes,’ says I, ‘she’s killin’ herself. She’s goin’ to die just the way Erastus did, and Lily, and your Aunt Abby. You’re killin’ her jest as you did them. I don’t know what there is about you, but you seem to bring a curse,’ says I. ‘You kill everybody that is fool enough to care anythin’ about you and do for you.’
“She stared at me and she was pretty pale.
“‘And Maria ain’t the only one you’re goin’ to kill,’ says I. ‘You’re goin’ to kill Doctor Malcom before you’re done with him.’
“Then a red colour came flamin’ all over her face. ‘I ain’t goin’ to kill him, either,’ says she, and she begun to cry.
“‘Yes, you BE!’ says I. Then I spoke as I had never spoke before. You see, I felt it on account of Erastus. I told her that she hadn’t any business to think of another man after she’d been married to one that had died for her: that she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that’s true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it–if she wa’n’t like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin’ everybody without knowin’ what it was doin’.
“Luella she kept gettin’ paler and paler, and she never took her eyes off my face. There was somethin’ awful about the way she looked at me and never spoke one word. After awhile I quit talkin’ and I went home. I watched that night, but her lamp went out before nine o’clock, and when Doctor Malcom came drivin’ past and sort of slowed up he see there wa’n’t any light and he drove along. I saw her sort of shy out of meetin’ the next Sunday, too, so he shouldn’t go home with her, and I begun to think mebbe she did have some conscience after all. It was only a week after that that Maria Brown died–sort of sudden at the last, though everybody had seen it was comin’. Well, then there was a good deal of feelin’ and pretty dark whispers. Folks said the days of witchcraft had come again, and they were pretty shy of Luella. She acted sort of offish to the Doctor and he didn’t go there, and there wa’n’t anybody to do anythin’ for her. I don’t know how she DID get along. I wouldn’t go in there and offer to help her–not because I was afraid of dyin’ like the rest, but I thought she was just as well able to do her own work as I was to do it for her, and I thought it was about time that she did it and stopped killin’ other folks. But it wa’n’t very long before folks began to say that Luella herself was goin’ into a decline jest the way her husband, and Lily, and Aunt Abby and the others had, and I saw myself that she looked pretty bad. I used to see her goin’ past from the store with a bundle as if she could hardly crawl, but I remembered how Erastus used to wait and ‘tend when he couldn’t hardly put one foot before the other, and I didn’t go out to help her.
“But at last one afternoon I saw the Doctor come drivin’ up like mad with his medicine chest, and Mrs. Babbit came in after supper and said that Luella was real sick.