Explore "God and the Man" by Robert W. Buchanan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Emerging from her trance of wrathful prayer, Mistress Christianson gradually led her children to understand the real facts of the interview between herself and Richard Orchardson. The hereditary enemy of her husband and her family had, it appeared, made overtures of a seemingly friendly nature, and had offered, if the dame wished it, to withdraw all pressure for the payment of the mortgage money. He had no wish, he said, to be too hard on a helpless woman, or to visit the husband's folly and improvidence on the head of his widow. At this first allusion to the dead, she had been unable to restrain her indignation, and in a few fierce words she had launched her life-long hate at her enemy's head, demanding that he should cease to darken her door.
'Why did he come to the house he hath made desolate?' she now cried angrily. 'To lay some other trap, sure, for the folk he hath destroyed. I knew when he rode up, with that fox-smile upon his face, and the boy grinning by his side, that he meant some hidden mischief; so that, when he spoke of kindness, my soul went sick.'