The $30,000 Bequest, Mark Twain [best book club books for discussion TXT] 📗
- Author: Mark Twain
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injury or shame?”
“No.”
“Not even a friend?”
“No.”
“Not even your dearest friend?”
“No. I would not.”
The doctor struggled in silence awhile with this situation;
then he asked:
“Not even to save him from bitter pain and misery and grief?”
“No. Not even to save his life.”
Another pause. Then:
“Nor his soul?”
There was a hush—a silence which endured a measurable interval—
then Hester answered, in a low voice, but with decision:
“Nor his soul?”
No one spoke for a while; then the doctor said:
“Is it with you the same, Hannah?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I ask you both—why?”
“Because to tell such a lie, or any lie, is a sin, and could cost
us the loss of our own souls—WOULD, indeed, if we died without
time to repent.”
“Strange … strange … it is past belief.” Then he
asked, roughly: “Is such a soul as that WORTH saving?”
He rose up, mumbling and grumbling, and started for the door,
stumping vigorously along. At the threshold he turned and rasped
out an admonition: “Reform! Drop this mean and sordid and selfish
devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up
something to do that’s got some dignity to it! RISK your souls! risk
them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!”
The good old gentlewomen sat paralyzed, pulverized, outraged, insulted,
and brooded in bitterness and indignation over these blasphemies.
They were hurt to the heart, poor old ladies, and said they could
never forgive these injuries.
“Reform!”
They kept repeating that word resentfully. “Reform—and learn
to tell lies!”
Time slipped along, and in due course a change came over their spirits.
They had completed the human being’s first duty—which is to think
about himself until he has exhausted the subject, then he is in a
condition to take up minor interests and think of other people.
This changes the complexion of his spirits—generally wholesomely.
The minds of the two old ladies reverted to their beloved niece
and the fearful disease which had smitten her; instantly they forgot
the hurts their self-love had received, and a passionate desire
rose in their hearts to go to the help of the sufferer and comfort
her with their love, and minister to her, and labor for her the best
they could with their weak hands, and joyfully and affectionately
wear out their poor old bodies in her dear service if only they might
have the privilege.
“And we shall have it!” said Hester, with the tears running
down her face. “There are no nurses comparable to us, for there
are no others that will stand their watch by that bed till they
drop and die, and God knows we would do that.”
“Amen,” said Hannah, smiling approval and endorsement through the
mist of moisture that blurred her glasses. “The doctor knows us,
and knows we will not disobey again; and he will call no others.
He will not dare!”
“Dare?” said Hester, with temper, and dashing the water from her eyes;
“he will dare anything—that Christian devil! But it will do no
good for him to try it this time—but, laws! Hannah! after all’s
said and done, he is gifted and wise and good, and he would not
think of such a thing… . It is surely time for one of us to go
to that room. What is keeping him? Why doesn’t he come and say so?”
They caught the sound of his approaching step. He entered, sat down,
and began to talk.
“Margaret is a sick woman,” he said. “She is still sleeping,
but she will wake presently; then one of you must go to her.
She will be worse before she is better. Pretty soon a night-and-day
watch must be set. How much of it can you two undertake?”
“All of it!” burst from both ladies at once.
The doctor’s eyes flashed, and he said, with energy:
“You DO ring true, you brave old relics! And you SHALL do all of
the nursing you can, for there’s none to match you in that divine
office in this town; but you can’t do all of it, and it would
be a crime to let you.” It was grand praise, golden praise,
coming from such a source, and it took nearly all the resentment
out of the aged twin’s hearts. “Your Tilly and my old Nancy shall
do the rest—good nurses both, white souls with black skins,
watchful, loving, tender—just perfect nurses!—and competent liars
from the cradle… . Look you! keep a little watch on Helen;
she is sick, and is going to be sicker.”
The ladies looked a little surprised, and not credulous; and Hester said:
“How is that? It isn’t an hour since you said she was as sound
as a nut.”
The doctor answered, tranquilly:
“It was a lie.”
The ladies turned upon him indignantly, and Hannah said:
“How can you make an odious confession like that, in so indifferent
a tone, when you know how we feel about all forms of—”
“Hush! You are as ignorant as cats, both of you, and you don’t know
what you are talking about. You are like all the rest of the moral moles;
you lie from morning till night, but because you don’t do it with
your mouths, but only with your lying eyes, your lying inflections,
your deceptively misplaced emphasis, and your misleading gestures,
you turn up your complacent noses and parade before God and
the world as saintly and unsmirched Truth-Speakers, in whose
cold-storage souls a lie would freeze to death if it got there!
Why will you humbug yourselves with that foolish notion that no
lie is a lie except a spoken one? What is the difference between
lying with your eyes and lying with your mouth? There is none;
and if you would reflect a moment you would see that it is so.
There isn’t a human being that doesn’t tell a gross of lies every day
of his life; and you—why, between you, you tell thirty thousand;
yet you flare up here in a lurid hypocritical horror because I
tell that child a benevolent and sinless lie to protect her from
her imagination, which would get to work and warm up her blood to a
fever in an hour, if I were disloyal enough to my duty to let it.
Which I should probably do if I were interested in saving my soul
by such disreputable means.
“Come, let us reason together. Let us examine details. When you
two were in the sick-room raising that riot, what would you have
done if you had known I was coming?”
“Well, what?”
“You would have slipped out and carried Helen with you—wouldn’t you?”
The ladies were silent.
“What would be your object and intention?”
“Well, what?”
“To keep me from finding out your guilt; to beguile me to infer that
Margaret’s excitement proceeded from some cause not known to you.
In a word, to tell me a lie—a silent lie. Moreover, a possibly
harmful one.”
The twins colored, but did not speak.
“You not only tell myriads of silent lies, but you tell lies
with your mouths—you two.”
“THAT is not so!”
“It is so. But only harmless ones. You never dream of uttering
a harmful one. Do you know that that is a concession—and a confession?”
“How do you mean?”
“It is an unconscious concession that harmless lies are not criminal;
it is a confession that you constantly MAKE that discrimination.
For instance, you declined old Mrs. Foster’s invitation last week
to meet those odious Higbies at supper—in a polite note in which you
expressed regret and said you were very sorry you could not go.
It was a lie. It was as unmitigated a lie as was ever uttered.
Deny it, Hester—with another lie.”
Hester replied with a toss of her head.
“That will not do. Answer. Was it a lie, or wasn’t it?”
The color stole into the cheeks of both women, and with a struggle
and an effort they got out their confession:
“It was a lie.”
“Good—the reform is beginning; there is hope for you yet;
you will not tell a lie to save your dearest friend’s soul, but you
will spew out one without a scruple to save yourself the discomfort
of telling an unpleasant truth.”
He rose. Hester, speaking for both, said; coldly:
“We have lied; we perceive it; it will occur no more. To lie is
a sin. We shall never tell another one of any kind whatsoever,
even lies of courtesy or benevolence, to save any one a pang
or a sorrow decreed for him by God.”
“Ah, how soon you will fall! In fact, you have fallen already;
for what you have just uttered is a lie. Good-by. Reform!
One of you go to the sick-room now.”
Twelve days later.
Mother and child were lingering in the grip of the hideous disease.
Of hope for either there was little. The aged sisters looked white
and worn, but they would not give up their posts. Their hearts
were breaking, poor old things, but their grit was steadfast
and indestructible. All the twelve days the mother had pined for
the child, and the child for the mother, but both knew that the prayer
of these longings could not be granted. When the mother was told—
on the first day—that her disease was typhoid, she was frightened,
and asked if there was danger that Helen could have contracted it the
day before, when she was in the sick-chamber on that confession visit.
Hester told her the doctor had poo-pooed the idea. It troubled
Hester to say it, although it was true, for she had not believed
the doctor; but when she saw the mother’s joy in the news, the pain
in her conscience lost something of its force—a result which made
her ashamed of the constructive deception which she had practiced,
though not ashamed enough to make her distinctly and definitely
wish she had refrained from it. From that moment the sick woman
understood that her daughter must remain away, and she said she would
reconcile herself to the separation the best she could, for she
would rather suffer death than have her child’s health imperiled.
That afternoon Helen had to take to her bed, ill. She grew worse
during the night. In the morning her mother asked after her:
“Is she well?”
Hester turned cold; she opened her lips, but the words refused to come.
The mother lay languidly looking, musing, waiting; suddenly she
turned white and gasped out:
“Oh, my God! what is it? is she sick?”
Then the poor aunt’s tortured heart rose in rebellion, and words came:
“No—be comforted; she is well.”
The sick woman put all her happy heart in her gratitude:
“Thank God for those dear words! Kiss me. How I worship you
for saying them!”
Hester told this incident to Hannah, who received it with
a rebuking look, and said, coldly:
“Sister, it was a lie.”
Hester’s lips trembled piteously; she choked down a sob, and said:
“Oh, Hannah, it was a sin, but I could not help it. I could not
endure the fright and the misery that were in her face.”
“No matter. It was a lie. God will hold you to account for it.”
“Oh, I know it, I know it,” cried Hester, wringing her hands,
“but even if it were now, I
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