Ochiltree with
querulous indignation. "You'd better ask why _shouldn't_ you be
thankful to me. What have I not done for you?"
"Yes, Aunt Polly, I know you've done a great deal. You reared me in
your own house when I had been cast out of my father's; you have been a
second mother to me, and I am very grateful,--you can never say that I
have not shown my gratitude. But if you have done anything else for me,
I wish to know it. Why should I thank you for my inheritance?"
"Why should you thank me? Well, because I drove that woman and her brat
away."
"But she had no right to stay, Aunt Polly, after father died. Of course
she had no moral right before, but it was his house, and he could keep
her there if he chose. But after his death she surely had no right."
"Perhaps not so surely as you think,--if she had not been a negro. Had
she been white, there might have been a difference. When I told her to
go, she said"--
"What did she say, Aunt Polly," demanded Olivia eagerly.
It seemed for a moment as though Mrs. Ochiltree would speak no further:
but her once strong will, now weakened by her bodily infirmities,
yielded to the influence of her niece's imperious demand.
"I'll tell you the whole story," she said, "and then you'll know what
I did for you and yours." Mrs. Ochiltree's eyes assumed an
introspective expression, and her story, as it advanced, became as
keenly dramatic as though memory had thrown aside the veil of
intervening years and carried her back directly to the events which she
now described.
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