"True,--true; she was no woman, but a fiend! a very devil in her hate and revenge!"
"Ah, speak not so," replied Amy, as the first startling effect of her words and wild looks had passed away. "Say not such dreadful words. If any woman could have lived and died as you say, she deserves your pity, not your condemnation."
"Pity! she'll have none from me. I hated her! she wrecked my happiness when I was a young girl, and for what? but to gratify her insane jealousy. Do you see this?" said she, taking off her cap, and shaking down the thick masses of almost snow-white hair; "it was once golden, and as fair as yours, but a few short months of--of agony changed it to what you see, and drove me mad; _she_ worked the wreck; _she_ caused the--the madness, and gloried in it. And yet you wonder that I condemn her?"
Her hair was the silvered hair of an old woman, and as it fell from its concealment down her shoulders almost to her feet, throwing a pale, softened, mournful shadow over her excited features, Amy was struck with the beauty of her face; she must once have been very beautiful; while her face, lighted up as it now was, was not the face of an aged woman. No; it must have been, as she herself said, a sudden, severe sorrow years ago that had helped to change that once luxuriant golden hair to grey. Her figure, as she stood confronting Amy, was slight, and by no means ungraceful; that also bore no trace of age, and although she generally walked with the aid of a thick staff, it was more to steady the weakness of her steps than to support the tottering, uncertain ones of old age.
Who? and what had caused such a wreck? It must have been some terrible blow to have sent her mad in her youth, and to have left her even now, at times--whenever the dark remembrance of it swept over her--hardly sane in more mature age. Would the divulging of the secret remove the sad weight from her heart, or quiet the agony of her thoughts? It might in a measure do so, but Amy shrank from sustaining alone the frenzy that might ensue, and as Goody Grey repeated her last question of "Do you wonder that I condemn her?" Amy, with the view of soothing her, replied gently--
"She may have lived hardened in sin, but through the dark shadows remorse must have swept at times, and stung her deeply. Besides, her life and death were most wretched, and deserve your pity more than anger."