Twice, at intervals, Aunt Hannah followed with the muttered and amazed ejaculation:
"You confess it--you actually confess it--you told a lie!"
It was all they could say. The situation was new, unheard of, incredible; they could not
understand it, they did not know how to take hold of it, it approximately paralyzed speech.
At length it was decided that the erring child must be taken to her mother, who was ill, and
who ought to know what had happened. Helen begged, besought, implored that she might
be spared this further disgrace, and that her mother might be spared the grief and pain of it;
but this could not be: duty required this sacrifice, duty takes precedence of all things,
nothing can absolve one from a duty, with a duty no compromise is possible.
Helen still begged, and said the sin was her own, her mother had had no hand in it--why
must she be made to suffer for it?
But the aunts were obdurate in their righteousness, and said the law that visited the sins of
the parent upon the child was by all right and reason reversible; and therefore it was but just
that the innocent mother of a sinning child should suffer her rightful share of the grief and
pain and shame which were the allotted wages of the sin.
The three moved toward the sick-room.
At this time the doctor was approaching the house. He was still a good distance away,
however. He was a good doctor and a good man, and he had a good heart, but one had to
know him a year to get over hating him, two years to learn to endure him, three to learn to
like him, and four and five to learn to live him. It was a slow and trying education, but it
paid. He was of great stature; he had a leonine head, a leonine face, a rough voice, and an
eye which was sometimes a pirate's and sometimes a woman's, according to the mood. He
knew nothing about etiquette, and cared nothing about it; in speech, manner, carriage, and
conduct he was the reverse of conventional. He was frank, to the limit; he had opinions on
all subjects; they were always on tap and ready for delivery, and he cared not a farthing
whether his listener liked them or didn't. Whom he loved he loved, and manifested it;
whom he didn't live he hated, and published it from the housetops. In his young days he had
been a sailor, and the salt-airs of all the seas blew from him yet. He was a sturdy and loyal
Christian, and believed he was the best one in the land, and the only one whose Christianity
was perfectly sound, healthy, full-charged with common sense, and had no decayed places
in it. People who had an ax to grind, or people who for any reason wanted wanted to get on
the soft side of him, called him The Christian-- a phrase whose delicate flattery was music
to his ears, and whose capital T was such an enchanting and vivid object to him that he
could see it when it fell out of a person's mouth even in the dark. Many who were fond of
him stood on their consciences with both feet and brazenly called him by that large title
habitually, because it was a pleasure to them to do anything that would please him; and with
eager and cordial malice his extensive and diligently cultivated crop of enemies gilded it,
beflowered it, expanded it to "The only Christian." Of these two titles, the latter had the
wider currency; the enemy, being greatly in the majority, attended to that. Whatever the
doctor believed, he believed with all his heart, and would fight for it whenever he got the
chance; and if the intervals between chances grew to be irksomely wide, he would invent
ways of shortening them himself. He was severely conscientious, according to his rather