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The Cater-Cornered Sex
by
To this she had said nothing. She had waited until he was seated; then as she seated herself in her former place, with the lamp between them, she asked quietly, almost listlessly, “My daughter saw you then?”
“She did, ma’am, she did. And she refused point-blank!”
“I am sorry, Judge Priest–sorry that you should have been put to so much trouble needlessly,” she said, still holding her voice at that emotionless level. “I am sorry, sir, for your sake; but it is no more than I expected. I let you go to her against my better judgment. I should have known that your errand would be useless. Knowing Ellie, I should have known better than to send you.”
He snorted.
“Ma’am, when a little while ago, settin’ right here, I told you I thought I knowed a little something about human nature I boasted too soon. Sech a thing ez this thing which has happened to-night is brand-new in my experience. You will excuse my sayin’ so, but I kin not fathom the workin’s of a mind that would–that would–” He floundered for words in his indignation. “It is not natural, this here thing I have just seen and heard. How your own flesh and blood could–“
“Judge Priest,” she said steadily, “it is not my own flesh and blood that you accuse. That is my consolation now. For I know the stock that is in me. I know the stock that was in my husband. My own flesh and blood could never treat me so.”
He stared at her, his forehead twisted in a perplexed frown.
“I mean to say just this,” she went on: “Ellie is not my own child. She has not a drop of my blood or my husband’s blood in her. Judge Priest, I am about to tell you something which not another soul in this town excepting me–now that my husband is gone–has ever known. We never had any children, Felix and I. Always we wanted children, but none came to us. Nearly twenty-three years ago it is now, we had for a neighbor a young woman whose husband had deserted her–had run away with another woman, leaving her without a cent, in failing health and with a six-month-old girl baby. That was less than two years before we came to this town. We lived then in a little town called Calais, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
“Three months after the husband ran away the wife died. I guess it was shame and a broken heart more than anything else that killed her. She had not a soul in the world to whom she could turn for help when she was dying. We two did what we could for her. We didn’t have much–we never have had much all through our lives–but what we had we divided with her. We were literally the only friends she had in this world. At the last we took turns nursing her, my husband and I did. When she was dying she put her baby in my arms and asked me to take her and to care for her. That was what I had been praying all along that she would do, and I was glad and I gave her my promise and she lay back on the pillow and died.
“Well, she was buried and we took the child and cared for her. We came to love her as though she had been our own; we always loved her as though she had been our own. Less than a year after the mother died–that was when Ellie was about eighteen months old–we brought her with us out here to this town. Her baptismal name was Eleanor, which had been her mother’s name–Eleanor Major. The father who ran away was named Richard Major. We went on calling her Eleanor, but as our child she became Eleanor Millsap. She has never suspected–she has never for one moment dreamed that she was not our own. After she grew up and showed indifference to us, and especially after she had married and began to behave toward us in a way which has caused her, I expect, to be criticized by some people, we still nursed that secret and it gave us comfort. For we knew, both of us, that it was the alien blood in her that made her turn her back upon us. We knew the reason, if no one else did, for she was not our own flesh and blood. Our own could never have served us so. And to-night I know better than ever before, and it lessens my sense of disappointment and distress.