“Don’t you think, Annie, we’d better refer him to Mr. Peck? I _should_ like to hear Mr. Brandreth and Mr. Peek discussing it. I must tell Jack about it. I might get him to ask Sue Northwick, and get her ideas.”
“Has Mr. Wilmington known the Northwicks long?” Annie asked.
“He used to go to their Boston house when he was at Harvard.”
“Oh, then,” said Annie, “perhaps _he_ accounts for her playing Juliet; though, as Tybalt, I don’t see exactly how he–“
“Oh, it’s at the rehearsals, you know, that the fun is, and then it don’t matter what part you have.”
Annie lay awake a long time that night. She was sure that she ought not to like Lyra if she did not approve of her, and that she ought not to have gone home to tea with her and spent the evening with her unless she fully respected her. But she had to own to herself that she did like her, and enjoyed hearing her soft drawl. She tried to think how Jack Wilmington’s having gone to Boston for the evening made it somehow less censurable for her to spend it with Lyra, even if she did not approve of her. As she drowsed, this became perfectly clear.
XIII.
In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro’ had suffered one kind of deterioration which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still not old. But now the grandmothers had died out, and the maiden aunts had faded in, and she could not find just such houses anywhere in Hatboro’. The decay of the Unitarians as a sect perhaps had something to do with the literary lapse of the place: their highly intellectualised belief had favoured taste in a direction where the more ritualistic and emotional religions did not promote it: and it is certain that they were no longer the leading people.
It would have been hard to say just who these leading people were. The old political and juristic pre-eminence which the lawyers had once enjoyed was a tradition; the learned professions yielded in distinction to the growing wealth and plutocratic influence of the prosperous manufacturers; the situation might be summed up in the fact that Colonel Marvin of the shoe interest and Mr. Wilmington now filled the place once held by Judge Kilburn and Squire Putney. The social life in private houses had undoubtedly shrunk; but it had expanded in the direction of church sociables, and it had become much more ecclesiastical in every way, without becoming more religious. As formerly, some people were acceptable, and some were not; but it was, as everywhere else, more a question of money; there was an aristocracy and a commonalty, but there was a confusion and a more ready convertibility in the materials of each.
The social authority of such a person as Mrs. Gerrish was not the only change that bewildered Annie, and the effort to extend her relations with the village people was one from which she shrank till her consciousness had more perfectly adjusted itself to the new conditions. Meanwhile Dr. Morrell came to call the night after their tea at the Putneys’, and he fell into the habit of coming several nights in the week, and staying late. Sometimes he was sent for at her house by sick people, and he must have left word at his office where he was to be found.
He had spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro’, gave her a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing to live in Hatboro’ at all, and he seemed incredulous about her staying after summer was over. She felt that she mystified him, and sometimes she felt the pursuit of a curiosity which was a little too like a psychical diagnosis. He had a way of sitting beside her table and playing with her paper-cutter, while he submitted with a quizzical smile to her endeavours to turn him to account. She did not mind his laughing at her eagerness (a woman is willing enough to join a man in making fun of her femininity if she believes that he respects her), and she tried to make him talk about Hatboro’, and tell her how she could be of use among the working people. She would have liked very much to know whether he gave his medical service gratis among them, and whether he found it a pleasure and a privilege to do so. There was one moment when she would have liked to ask him to let her be at the charges of his more indigent patients, but with the words behind her lips she perceived that it would not do. At the best, it would be taking his opportunity from him and making it hers. She began to see that one ought to have a conscience about doing good.
She let the chance of proposing this impossibility go by; and after a little silence Dr. Morrell seemed to revert, in her interest, to the economical situation in Hatboro’.
“You know that most of the hands in the hat-shops are from the farms around; and some of them own property here in the village. I know the owner of three small houses who’s always worked in the shops. You couldn’t very well offer help to a landed proprietor like that?”
“No,” said Annie, abashed in view of him.
“I suppose you ought to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really wanted to deal with overwork and squalor.”
“I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing anywhere,” she said desperately.
The doctor’s eyes twinkled sympathetically. “I don’t know whether Benson earned his three houses altogether in the hat-shops. He ‘likes a good horse,’ as he says; and he likes to trade it for a better; I know that from experience. But he’s a great friend of mine. Well, then, there are more women than men in the shops, and they earn more. I suppose that’s rather disappointing too.”
“It is, rather.”
“But, on the other hand, the work only lasts eight months of the year, and that cuts wages down to an average of a dollar a day.”
“Ah!” cried Annie. “There’s some hope in _that_! What do they do when the work stops?”
“Oh, they go back to their country-seats.”
“All?”
“Perhaps not all.”
“I _thought_ so!”
“Well, you’d better look round among those that stay.”
Even among these she looked in vain for destitution; she could find that in satisfactory degree only in straggling veterans of the great army of tramps which once overran country places in the summer.
She would have preferred not to see or know the objects of her charity, and because she preferred this she forced herself to face their distasteful misery. Mrs. Bolton had orders to send no one from the door who asked for food or work, but to call Annie and let her judge the case. She knew that it was folly, and she was afraid it was worse, but she could not send the homeless creatures away as hungry or poor as they came. They filled her gentlewoman’s soul with loathing; but if she kept beyond the range of the powerful corporeal odour that enveloped them, she could experience the luxury of pity for them. The filthy rags that caricatured them, their sick or sodden faces, always frowsed with a week’s beard, represented typical poverty to her, and accused her comfortable state with a poignant contrast; and she consoled herself as far as she could with the superstition that in meeting them she was fulfilling a duty sacred in proportion to the disgust she felt in the encounter.
The work at the hat-shops fell off after the spring orders, and did not revive till the beginning of August. If there was less money among the hands and their families who remained than there was in time of full work, the weather made less demand upon their resources. The children lived mostly out-of-doors, and seemed to have always what they wanted of the season’s fruit and vegetables. They got these too late from the decaying lots at the provision stores, and too early from the nearest orchards; and Dr. Morrell admitted that there was a good deal of sickness, especially among the little ones, from this diet. Annie wondered whether she ought not to offer herself as a nurse among them; she asked him whether she could not be of use in that way, and had to confess that she knew nothing about the prevailing disease.
“Then, I don’t think you’d better undertake it,” he said. “There are too many nurses there already, such as they are. It’s the dull time in most of the shops, you know, and the women have plenty of leisure. There are about five volunteer nurses for every patient, not counting the grandmothers on both sides. I think they would resent any outside aid.”
“Ah, I’m always on the outside! But can’t I send–I mean carry–them anything nourishing, any little dishes–“
“Arrowroot is about all the convalescents can manage.” She made a note of it. “But jelly and chicken broth are always relished by their friends.”
“Dr. Morrell, I must ask you not to turn me into ridicule, if you please. I cannot permit it.”
“I beg your pardon–I do indeed, Miss Kilburn. I didn’t mean to ridicule you. I began seriously, but I was led astray by remembering what becomes of most of the good things sent to sick people.”
“I know,” she said, breaking into a laugh. “I have eaten lots of them for my father. And is arrowroot the only thing?”
The doctor reflected gravely. “Why, no. There’s a poor little life now and then that might be saved by the sea-air. Yes, if you care to send some of my patients, with a mother and a grandmother apiece, to the seaside–“
“Don’t say another word, doctor,” cried Annie. “You make me _so_ happy! I will–I will send their whole families. And you won’t, you _won’t_ let a case escape, will you, doctor?” It was a break in the iron wall of uselessness which had closed her in; she behaved like a young girl with an invitation to a ball.
When the first patient came back well from the seaside her rejoicing overflowed in exultation before the friends to whom she confessed her agency in the affair. Putney pretended that he could not see what pleasure she could reasonably take in restoring the child to the sort of life it had been born to; but that was a matter she would not consider, theoretically or practically.
She began to go outside of Dr. Morrell’s authority; she looked up two cases herself, and, upon advising with their grandmothers, sent them to the seaside, and she was at the station when the train came in with the young mother and the still younger aunt of one of the sick children. She did not see the baby, and the mother passed her with a stare of impassioned reproach, and fell sobbing on the neck of her husband, waiting for her on the platform. Annie felt the blood drop back upon her heart. She caught at the girlish aunt, who was looking about her with a sense of the interest which attached to herself as a party to the spectacle.
“Oh, Rebecca, where is the child?”
“Well, there, Miss Kilburn, I’m _ril_ sorry to tell you, but I guess the sea-air didn’t do it a great deal of good, if any. I tell Maria she’ll see it in the right light after a while, but of course she can’t, first off. Well, there! _Somebody’s_ got to look after it. You’ll excuse _me_, Miss Kilburn.”
Annie saw her run off to the baggage-car, from which the baggage-man was handing out a narrow box. The ground reeled under her feet; she got the public depot carriage and drove home.
She sent for Dr. Morrell, and poured out the confession of her error upon him before he could speak. “I am a murderess,” she ended hysterically. “Don’t deny it!”
“I think you can be got off on the ground of insanity, Miss Kilburn, if you go on in this way,” he answered.
Her desperation broke in tears. “Oh, what shall I do–what shall I do? I’ve killed the child!”
“Oh no, you haven’t,” he retorted. “I know the case. The only hope for it was the sea-air; I was going to ask you to send it–“
She took down her handkerchief and gave him a piercing look. “Dr. Morrell, if you are lying to me–“
“I’m not lying, Miss Kilburn,” he answered. “You’ve done a very unwarrantable thing in both of the cases that you sent to the seaside on your own responsibility. One of them I certainly shouldn’t have advised sending, but it’s turned out well. You’ve no more credit for it, though, than for this that died; and you won’t think I’m lying, perhaps, when I say you’re equally to blame in both instances.”
“I–I beg your pardon,” she faltered, with dawning comfort in his severity. “I didn’t mean–I didn’t intend to say–“
“I know it,” said Dr. Morrell, allowing himself to smile. “Just remember that you blundered into doing the only thing left to be done for Mrs. Savor’s child; and–don’t try it again. That’s all.”
He smiled once more, and at some permissive light in her face, he began even to laugh.
“You–you’re horrible!”
“Oh no, I’m not,” he gasped. “All the tears in the world wouldn’t help; and my laughing hurts nobody. I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for the mother; but I’ve told you the truth–I have indeed; and you _must_ believe me.”
The child’s father came to see her the next night. “Rebecca she seemed to think that you felt kind of bad, may be, because Maria wouldn’t speak to you when she first got off the cars yesterday, and I don’t say she done exactly right, myself. The way I look at it, and the way I tell Maria _she’d_ ought to, is like this: You done what you done for the best, and we wa’n’t _obliged_ to take your advice anyway. But of course Maria she’d kind of set her heart on savin’ it, and she can’t seem to get over it right away.” He talked on much longer to the same effect, tilted back in his chair, and looking down, while he covered and uncovered one of his knees with his straw hat. He had the usual rustic difficulty in getting away, but Annie was glad to keep him, in her gratitude for his kindness. Besides, she could not let him go without satisfying a suspicion she had.
“And Dr. Morrell–have you seen him for Mrs. Savor–have you–” She stopped, for shame of her hypocrisy.
“No, ‘m. We hain’t seen him _sence_. I guess she’ll get along.”
It needed this stroke to complete her humiliation before the single-hearted fellow.
“I–I suppose,” she stammered out, “that you–your wife, wouldn’t like me to come to the–I can understand that; but oh! if there is anything I can do for you–flowers–or my carriage–or helping anyway–“
Mr. Savor stood up. “I’m much obliged to _you_, Miss Kilburn; but we thought we hadn’t better wait, well not a great while, and–the funeral was this afternoon. Well, I wish you good evening.”
She met the mother, a few days after, in the street; with an impulse to cross over to the other side she advanced straight upon her.
“Mrs. Savor! What can I say to you?”
“Oh, I don’t presume but what you meant for the best, Miss Kilburn. But I guess I shall know what to do next time. I kind of felt the whole while that it was a resk. But it’s all right now.”
Annie realised, in her resentment of the poor thing’s uncouth sorrow, that she had spoken to her with the hope of getting, not giving, comfort.
“Yes, yes,” she confessed. “I was to blame.” The bereaved mother did not gainsay her, and she felt that, whatever was the justice of the case, she had met her present deserts.
She had to bear the discredit into which the seaside fell with the mothers of all the other sick children. She tried to bring Dr. Morrell once to the consideration of her culpability in the case of those who might have lived if the case of Mrs. Savor’s baby had not frightened their mothers from sending them to the seaside; but he refused to grapple with the problem. She was obliged to believe him when he said he should not have advised sending any of the recent cases there; that the disease was changing its character, and such a course could have done no good.
“Look here, Miss Kilburn,” he said, after scanning her face sharply, “I’m going to leave you a little tonic. I think you’re rather run down.”
“Well,” she said passively.
XIV.
It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called herself; some who knew of the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered what must always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of our democracy–an indifference and an incredulity concerning the feelings of people of lower station which could not be surpassed in another civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated as a great trial for Miss Kilburn; but the mother’s bereavement was regarded as something those people were used to, and got over more easily than one could imagine.
Annie’s mission took her to the ministers of the various denominations, and she was able to overcome any scruples they might have about the theatricals by urging the excellence of their object. As a Unitarian, she was not prepared for the liberality with which the matter was considered; the Episcopalians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist preacher, who volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the Baptist church, and help present the affair in the right light; she had expected a degree of narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which her sect learned to attribute to others in the militant period before they had imbibed so much of its own tolerance.
But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him, and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her; but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him, but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them apart.
Except for what she had heard Putney say, and what she learned casually from the people themselves, she could not have believed he ever did anything for them. He came and went so elusively, as far as Annie was concerned, that she knew of his presence in the houses of sickness and death usually by his little girl, whom she found playing about in the street before the door with the children of the hands. She seemed to hold her own among the others in their plays and their squabbles; if she tried to make up to her, Idella smiled, but she would not be approached, and Annie’s heart went out to the little mischief in as helpless goodwill as toward the minister himself.
She used to hear his voice through the summer-open windows when he called upon the Boltons, and wondered if some accident would not bring them together, but she had to send for Mrs. Bolton at last, and bid her tell Mr. Peck that she would like to see him before he went away, one night. He came, and then she began a parrying parley of preliminary nothings before she could say that she supposed he knew the ladies were going on with their scheme for the establishment of the Social Union; he admitted vaguely that he had heard something to that effect, and she added that the invited dance and supper had been given up.
He remained apparently indifferent to the fact, and she hurried on: “And I ought to say, Mr. Peck, that nearly every one–every one whose opinion you would value–agreed with you that it would have been extremely ill-advised, and–and shocking. And I’m quite ashamed that I should not have seen it from the beginning; and I hope–I hope you will forgive me if I said things in my–my excitement that must have–I mean not only what I said to you, but what I said to others; and I assure you that I regret them, and–“
She went on and repeated herself at length, and he listened patiently, but as if the matter had not really concerned either of them personally. She had to conclude that what she had said of him had not reached him, and she ended by confessing that she had clung to the Social Union project because it seemed the only thing in which her attempts to do good were not mischievous.
Mr. Peck’s thin face kindled with a friendlier interest than it had shown while the question at all related to himself, and a light of something that she took for humorous compassion came into his large, pale blue eyes. At least it was intelligence; and perhaps the woman nature craves this as much as it is supposed to crave sympathy; perhaps the two are finally one.
“I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck–an experience of mine,” she said abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors. He listened intently, and at the end he said: “I understand. But that is sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it.”
“Oh, I _thank_ you!” she gasped. “You don’t know what a load you have lifted from me!”
Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.
“If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it, is, what a responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any harm, but if _I_ try it–“
“Yes,” said the minister, “it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves. A” man begins poor, or his father or grandfather before him–it doesn’t matter how far back he begins–and then he is in accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”
“Yes,” said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. “And I assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that I had no idea then that–that–you were speaking from your own experience when you–you said how working people looked at things. I didn’t know that you had been–that is, that–“
“Yes,” said the minister, coming to her relief, “I once worked in a cotton-mill. Then,” he continued, dismissing the personal concern, “it seems to me that I saw things in their right light, as I have never been able to see them since–“
“And how brutal,” she broke in, “how cruel and vulgar, what I said must have seemed to you!”
“I fancied,” he continued evasively, “that I had authority to set myself apart from my fellow-workmen, to be a teacher and guide to the true life. But it was a great error. The true life was the life of work, and no one ever had authority to turn from it. Christ Himself came as a labouring man.”
“That is true,” said Annie; and his words transfigured the man who spoke them, so that her heart turned reverently toward him. “But if you had been meant to work in a mill all your life,” she pursued, “would you have been given the powers you have, and that you have just used to save me from despair?”
The minister rose, and said, with a sigh: “No one was meant to work in a mill all his life. Good night.”
She would have liked to keep him longer, but she could not think how, at once. As he turned to go out through the Boltons’ part of the house, “Won’t you go out through my door?” she asked, with a helpless effort at hospitality.
“Oh, if you wish,” he answered submissively.
When she had closed the door upon him she went to speak with Mrs. Bolton. She was in the kitchen mixing flour to make bread, and Annie traced her by following the lamp-light through the open door. It discovered Bolton sitting in the outer doorway, his back against one jamb and his stocking-feet resting against the base of the other.
“Mrs. Bolton,” Annie began at once, making herself free of one of the hard kitchen chairs, “how is Mr. Peck getting on in Hatboro’?”
“I d’know as I know just what you mean, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton, on the defensive.
“I mean, is there a party against him in his church? Is he unpopular?”
Mrs. Bolton took some flour and sprinkled it on her bread-board; then she lifted the mass of dough out of the trough before her, and let it sink softly upon the board.
“I d’know as you can say he’s unpoplah. He ain’t poplah with some. Yes, there’s a party–the Gerrish party.”
“Is it a strong one?”
“It’s pretty strong.”
“Do you think it will prevail?”
“Well, most o’ folks don’t know _what_ they want; and if there’s some folks that know what they _don’t_ want, they can generally keep from havin’ it.”
Bolton made a soft husky prefatory noise of protest in his throat, which seemed to stimulate his wife to a more definite assertion, and she cut in before he could speak–
“_I_ should say that unless them that stood Mr. Peck’s friends first off, and got him here, done something to keep him, his enemies wa’n’t goin’ to take up his cause.”
Annie divined a personal reproach for Bolton in the apparent abstraction.
“Oh, now, you’ll see it’ll all come out right in the end, Pauliny,” he mildly opposed. “There ain’t any such great feelin’ about Mr. Peck; nothin’ but what’ll work itself off perfec’ly natural, give it time. It’s goin’ to come out all right.”
“Yes, at the day o’ jedgment,” Mrs. Bolton assented, plunging her fists into the dough, and beginning to work a contempt for her husband’s optimism into it.
“Yes, an’ a good deal before,” he returned. “There’s always somethin’ to objec’ to every minister; we ain’t any of us perfect, and Mr. Peck’s got his failin’s; he hain’t built up the church quite so much as some on ’em expected but what he would; and there’s some that don’t like his prayers; and some of ’em thinks he ain’t doctrinal enough. But I guess, take it all round, he suits pretty well. It’ll come out all right, Pauliny. You’ll see.”
A pause ensued, of which Annie felt the awfulness. It seemed to her that Mrs. Bolton’s impatience with this intolerable hopefulness must burst violently. She hastened to interpose. “I think the trouble is that people don’t fully understand Mr. Peck at first. But they do finally.”
“Yes; take time,” said Bolton.
“Take eternity, I guess, for some,” retorted his wife. “If you think William B. Gerrish is goin’ to work round with time–” She stopped for want of some sufficiently rejectional phrase, and did not go on.
“The way I look at it,” said Bolton, with incorrigible courage, “is like this: When it comes to anything like askin’ Mr. Peck to resign, it’ll develop his strength. You can’t tell how strong he is without you try to git red of him. I ‘most wish it would come, once, fair and square.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Bolton,” said Annie. “I don’t believe that your church would let such a man go when it really came to it. Don’t they all feel that he has great ability?”
“Oh, I guess they appreciate him as far forth as ability goes. Some on ’em complains that he’s a little _too_ intellectial, if anything. But I tell ’em it’s a good fault; it’s a thing that can be got over in time.”
Mrs. Bolton had ceased to take part in the discussion. She finished kneading her dough, and having fitted it into two baking-pans and dusted it with flour, she laid a clean towel over both. But when Annie rose she took the lamp from the mantel-shelf, where it stood, and held it up for her to find her way back to her own door.
Annie went to bed with a spirit lightened as well as chastened, and kept saying over the words of Mr. Peck, so as to keep fast hold of the consolation they had given her. They humbled her with, a sense of his wisdom and insight; the thought of them kept her awake. She remembered the tonic that Dr. Morrell had left with her, and after questioning whether she really needed it now, she made sure by getting up and taking it.
XV.
The spring had filled and flushed into summer. Bolton had gone over the grass on the slope before the house, and it was growing thick again, dark green above the yellow of its stubble, and the young generation of robins was foraging in it for the callow grasshoppers. Some boughs of the maples were beginning to lose the elastic upward lift of their prime, and to hang looser and limper with the burden of their foliage. The elms drooped lower toward the grass, and swept the straggling tops left standing in their shade.
The early part of September had been fixed for the theatricals. Annie refused to have anything to do with them, and the preparations remained altogether with Brandreth. “The minuet,” he said to her one afternoon, when he had come to report to her as a co-ordinate authority, “is going to be something exquisite, I assure you. A good many of the ladies studied it in the Continental times, you know, when we had all those Martha Washington parties–or, I forgot you were out of the country–and it will be done perfectly. We’re going to have the ball-room scene on the tennis-court just in front of the evergreens, don’t you know, and then the balcony scene in the same place. We have to cut some of the business between Romeo and Juliet, because it’s too long, you know, and some of it’s too–too passionate; we couldn’t do it properly, and we’ve decided to leave it out. But we sketch along through the play, and we have Friar Laurence coming with Juliet out of his cell onto the tennis-court and meeting Romeo; so that tells the story of the marriage. You can’t imagine what a Mercutio Mr. Putney makes; he throws himself into it heart and soul, especially where he fights with Tybalt and gets killed. I give him lines there out of other scenes too; the tennis-court sets that part admirably; they come out of a street at the side. I think the scenery will surprise you, Miss Kilburn. Well, and then we have the Nurse and Juliet, and the poison scene–we put it into the garden, on the tennis-court, and we condense the different acts so as to give an idea of all that’s happened, with Romeo banished, and all that. Then he comes back from Mantua, and we have the tomb scene set at one side of the tennis-court just opposite the street scene; and he fights with Paris; and then we have Juliet come to the door of the tomb–it’s a liberty, of course; but we couldn’t arrange the light inside–and she stabs herself and falls on Romeo’s body, and that ends the play. You see, it gives a notion of the whole action, and tells the story pretty well. I think you’ll be pleased.”
“I’ve no doubt I shall,” said Annie. “Did you make the adaptation yourself, Mr. Brandreth?”
“Well, yes, I did,” Mr. Brandreth modestly admitted. “It’s been a good deal of work, but it’s been a pleasure too. You know how that is, Miss Kilburn, in your charities.”
“_Don’t_ speak of my charities, Mr. Brandreth. I’m not a charitable person.”
“You won’t get people to believe _that_” said Mr. Brandreth. “Everybody knows how much good you do. But, as I was saying, my idea was to give a notion of the whole play in a series of passages or tableaux. Some of my friends think I’ve succeeded so well in telling the story, don’t you know, without a change of scene, that they’re urging me to publish my arrangement for the use of out-of-door theatricals.”
“I should think it would be a very good idea,” said Annie. “I suppose Mr. Chapley would do it?”
“Well, I don’t know–I don’t know,” Mr. Brandreth answered, with a note of trouble in his voice. “I’m afraid not,” he added sadly. “Miss Kilburn, I’ve been put in a very unfair position by Miss Northwick’s changing her mind about Juliet, after the part had been offered to Miss Chapley. I’ve been made the means of a seeming slight to Miss Chapley, when, if it hadn’t been for the cause, I’d rather have thrown up the whole affair. She gave up the part instantly when she heard that Miss Northwick wished to change her mind, but all the same I know–.”
He stopped, and Annie said encouragingly: “Yes, I see. But perhaps she doesn’t really care.”
“That’s what she said,” returned Mr. Brandreth ruefully. “But I don’t know. I have never spoken of it with her since I went to tell her about it, after I got Miss Northwick’s note.”
“Well, Mr. Brandreth, I think you’ve really been victimised; and I don’t believe the Social Union will ever be worth what it’s costing.”
“I was sure you would appreciate–would understand;” and Mr. Brandreth pressed her hand gratefully in leave-taking.
She heard him talking with some one at the gate, whose sharp, “All right, my son!” identified Putney.
She ran to the door to welcome him.
“Oh, you’re _both_ here!” she rejoiced, at sight of Mrs. Putney too.
“I can send Ellen home,” suggested Putney.
“Oh _no_, indeed!” said Annie, with single-mindedness at which she laughed with Mrs. Putney. “Only it seemed too good to have you both,” she explained, kissing Mrs. Putney. “I’m _so_ glad to see you!”
“Well, what’s the reason?” Putney dropped into a chair and began to rock nervously. “Don’t be ashamed: we’re _all_ selfish. Has Brandreth been putting up any more jobs on you?”
“No, no! Only giving me a hint of his troubles and sorrows with those wretched Social Union theatricals. Poor young fellow! I’m sorry for him. He is really very sweet and unselfish. I like him.”
“Yes, Brandreth is one of the most lady-like fellows I ever saw,” said Putney. “That Juliet business has pretty near been the death of him. I told him to offer Miss Chapley some other part–Rosaline, the part of the young lady who was dropped; but he couldn’t seem to see it. Well, and how come on the good works, Annie?”
“The good works! Ralph, tell me: _do_ people think me a charitable person? Do they suppose I’ve done or can do any good whatever?” She looked from Putney to his wife, and back again with comic entreaty.
“Why, aren’t you a charitable person? Don’t you do any good?” he asked.
“No!” she shouted. “Not the least in the world!”
“It is pretty rough,” said Putney, taking out a cigar for a dry smoke; “and nobody will believe me when I report what you say, Annie. Mrs. Munger is telling round that she don’t see how you can live through the summer at the rate you’re going. She’s got it down pretty cold about your taking Brother Peck’s idea of the invited dance and supper, and joining hands with him to save the vanity of the self-respecting poor. She says that your suppression of that one unpopular feature has done more than anything else to promote the success of the Social Union. You ought to be glad Brother Peck is coming to the show.”
“To the theatricals?”
Putney nodded his head. “That’s what he says. I believe Brother Peck is coming to see how the upper classes amuse themselves when they really try to benefit the lower classes.”
Annie would not laugh at his joke. “Ralph,” she asked, “is it true that Mr. Peck is so unpopular in his church? Is he really going to be turned out–dismissed?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. But they’ll bounce him if they can.”
“And can nothing be done? Can’t his friends unite?”
“Oh, they’re united enough now; what they’re afraid of is that they’re not numerous enough. Why don’t you buy in, Annie, and help control the stock? That old Unitarian concern of yours isn’t ever going to get into running order again, and if you owned a pew in Ellen’s church you could have a vote in church meeting, after a while, and you could lend Brother Peck your moral support now.”
“I never liked that sort of thing, Ralph. I shouldn’t believe with your people.”
“Ellen’s people, please. _I_ don’t believe with them either. But I always vote right. Now you think it over.”
“No, I shall not think it over. I don’t approve of it. If I should take a pew in your church it would be simply to hear Mr. Peck preach, and contribute toward his–“
“Salary? Yes, that’s the way to look at it in the beginning. I knew you’d work round. Why, Annie, in a year’s time you’ll be trying to _buy_ votes for Brother Peck.”
“I should _never_ vote,” she retorted. “And I shall keep myself out of all temptation by not going to your church.”
“Ellen’s church,” Putney corrected.
She went the next Sunday to hear Mr. Peck preach, and Putney, who seemed to see her the moment she entered the church, rose, as the sexton was showing her up the aisle, and opened the door of his pew for her with ironical welcome.
“You can always have a seat with us, Annie,” he mocked, on their way out of the church together.
“Thank you, Ralph,” she answered boldly. “I’m going to speak to the sexton for a pew.”
XVI.
A wire had been carried from the village to the scene of the play at South Hatboro’, and electric globes fizzed and hissed overhead, flooding the open tennis-court with the radiance of sharper moonlight, and stamping the thick velvety shadows of the shrubbery and tree-tops deep into the raw green of the grass along its borders.
The spectators were seated on the verandas and terraced turf at the rear of the house, and they crowded the sides of the court up to a certain point, where a cord stretched across it kept them from encroaching upon the space intended for the action. Another rope enclosed an area all round them, where chairs and benches were placed for those who had tickets. After the rejection of the exclusive feature of the original plan, Mrs. Munger had liberalised more and more: she caused it to be known that all who could get into her grounds would be welcome on the outside of that rope, even though they did not pay anything; but a large number of tickets had been sold to the hands, as well as to the other villagers, and the area within the rope was closely packed. Some of the boys climbed the neighbouring trees, where from time to time the town authorities threatened them, but did not really dislodge them.
Annie, with other friends of Mrs. Munger, gained a reserved seat on the veranda through the drawing-room windows; but once there, she found herself in the midst of a sufficiently mixed company.
“How do, Miss Kilburn? That you? Well, I declare!” said a voice that she seemed to know, in a key of nervous excitement. Mrs. Savor’s husband leaned across his wife’s lap and shook hands with Annie. “William thought I better come,” Mrs. Savor seemed called upon to explain. “I got to do _something_. Ain’t it just too cute for anything the way they got them screens worked into the shrubbery down they-ar? It’s like the cycloraymy to Boston; you can’t tell where the ground ends and the paintin’ commences. Oh, I do want ’em to _begin_!”
Mr. Savor laughed at his wife’s impatience, and she said playfully: “What you laughin’ at? I guess you’re full as excited as what I be, when all’s said and done.”
There were other acquaintances of Annie’s from Over the Track, in the group about her, and upon the example of the Savors they all greeted her. The wives and sweethearts tittered with self-derisive expectation; the men were gravely jocose, like all Americans in unwonted circumstances, but they were respectful to the coming performance, perhaps as a tribute to Annie. She wondered how some of them came to have those seats, which were reserved at an extra price; she did not allow for that self-respect which causes the American workman to supply himself with the best his money can buy while his money lasts.
She turned to see who was on her other hand. A row of three small children stretched from her to Mrs. Gerrish, whom she did not recognise at first. “Oh, Emmeline!” she said; and then, for want of something else, she added, “Where is Mr. Gerrish? Isn’t he coming?”
“He was detained at the store,” said Mrs. Gerrish, with cold importance; “but he will be here. May I ask, Annie,” she pursued solemnly, “how you got here?”
“How did I get here? Why, through the windows. Didn’t you?”
“May I ask who had charge of the arrangements?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Annie. “I suppose Mrs. Munger.”
A burst of music came from the dense shadow into which the group of evergreens at the bottom of the tennis-court deepened away from the glister of the electrics. There was a deeper hush; then a slight jarring and scraping of a chair beyond Mrs. Gerrish, who leaned across her children and said, “He’s come, Annie–right through the parlour window!” Her voice was lifted to carry above the music, and all the people near were able to share the fact that righted Mrs. Gerrish in her own esteem.
From the covert of the low pines in the middle of the scene Miss Northwick and Mr. Brandreth appeared hand in hand, and then the place filled with figures from other apertures of the little grove and through the artificial wings at the sides, and walked the minuet. Mr. Fellows, the painter, had helped with the costumes, supplying some from his own artistic properties, and mediavalising others; the Boston costumers had been drawn upon by the men; and they all moved through the stately figures with a security which discipline had given them. The broad solid colours which they wore took the light and shadow with picturesque effectiveness; the masks contributed a sense of mystery novel in Hatboro’, and kept the friends of the dancers in exciting doubt of their identity; the strangeness of the audience to all spectacles of the sort held its judgment in suspense. The minuet was encored, and had to be given again, and it was some time before the applause of the repetition allowed the characters to be heard when the partners of the minuet began to move about arm in arm, and the drama properly began. When the applause died away it was still not easy to hear; a boy in one of the trees called, “Louder!” and made some of the people laugh, but for the rest they were very orderly throughout.
Toward the end of the fourth act Annie was startled by a child dashing itself against her knees, and breaking into a gurgle of shy laughter as children do.
“Why, you little witch!” she said to the uplifted face of Idella Peck. “Where is your father?”
“Oh, somewhere,” said the child, with entire ease of mind.
“And your hat?” said Annie, putting her hand on the curly bare head–“where’s your hat?”
“On the ground.”
“On the ground–where?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Idella lightly, as if the pursuit bored her.
Annie pulled her up on her lap. “Well, now, you stay here with me, if you please, till your papa or your hat comes after you.”
“My–hat–can’t–come–after–me!” said the child, turning back her head, so as to laugh her sense of the joke in Annie’s face.
“No matter; your papa can, and I’m going to keep you.”
Idella let her head fall back against Annie’s breast, and began to finger the rings on the hand which Annie laid across her lap to keep her.
“For goodness gracious!” said Mrs. Savor, “who you got there, Miss Kilburn?”
“Mr. Peck’s little girl.”
“Where’d she spring from?”
Mrs. Gerrish leaned forward and spoke across the six legs of her children, who were all three standing up in their chairs: “You don’t mean to say that’s Idella Peck? Where’s her father?”
“Somewhere, she says,” said Annie, willing to answer Mrs. Gerrish with the child’s nonchalance.
“Well, that’s great!” said Mrs. Gerrish. “I should think he better be looking after her–or some one.”
The music ceased, and the last act of the play began. Before it ended, Idella had fallen asleep, and Annie sat still with her after the crowd around her began to break up. Mrs. Savor kept her seat beside Annie. She said, “Don’t you want I should spell you a little while, Miss Kilburn?” She leaned over the face of the sleeping child. “Why, she ain’t much more than a baby! William, you go and see if you can’t find Mr. Peck. I’m goin’ to stay here with Miss Kilburn.” Her husband humoured her whim, and made his way through the knots and clumps of people toward the rope enclosing the tennis-court. “Won’t you let me hold her, Miss Kilburn?” she pleaded again.
“No, no; she isn’t heavy; I like to hold her,” replied Annie. Then something occurred to her, and she started in amazement at herself.
“Or yes, Mrs. Savor, you _may_ take her a while;” and she put the child into the arms of the bereaved creature, who had fallen desolately back in her chair. She hugged Idella up to her breast, and hungrily mumbled her with kisses, and moaned out over her, “Oh dear! Oh my! Oh my!”
XVII.
The people beyond the rope had nearly all gone away, and Mr. Savor was coming back across the court with Mr. Peck. The players appeared from the grove at the other end of the court in their vivid costumes, chatting and laughing with their friends, who went down from the piazzas and terraces to congratulate them. Mrs. Munger hurried about among them, saying something to each group. She caught sight of Mr. Peck and Mr. Savor, and she ran after them, arriving with them where Annie sat.
“I hope you were not anxious about Idella,” Annie said, laughing.
“No; I didn’t miss her at once,” said the minister simply; “and then I thought she had merely gone off with some of the other children who were playing about.”
“You shall talk all that over later,” said Mrs. Munger. “Now, Miss Kilburn, I want you and Mr. Peck and Mr. and Mrs. Savor to stay for a cup of coffee that I’m going to give our friends out there. Don’t you think they deserve it? Wasn’t it a wonderful success? They must be frightfully exhausted. Just go right out to them. I’ll be with you in one moment. Oh yes, the child! Well, bring her into the house, Mrs. Savor; I’ll find a place for her, and then you can go out with me.”
“I guess you won’t get Maria away from her very easy,” said Mr. Savor, laughing. His wife stood with the child’s cheek pressed tight against hers.
“Oh, I’ll manage that,” said Mrs. Munger. “I’m counting on Mrs. Savor.” She added in a hurried undertone to Annie: “I’ve asked a number of the workpeople to stay–representative workpeople, the foremen in the different shops and their families–and you’ll find your friends of all classes together. It’s a great day for the Social Union!” she said aloud. “I’m sure _you_ must feel that, Mr. Peck. Miss Kilburn and I have to thank you for saving us from a great mistake at the outset, and now your staying,” she continued, “will give it just the appearance we want. I’m going to keep your little girl as a hostage, and you shall not go till I let you. Come, Mrs. Savor!” She bustled away with Mrs. Savor, and Mr. Peck reluctantly accompanied Annie down over the lawn.
He was silent, but Mr. Savor was hilarious. “Well, Mr. Putney,” he said, when he joined the group of which Putney was the centre, “you done that in apple-pie order. I never see anything much better than the way you carried on with Mrs. Wilmington.”
“Thank you, Mr. Savor,” said Putney; “I’m glad you liked it. You couldn’t say I was trying to flatter her up much, anyway.”
“No, no!” Mr. Savor assented, with delight in the joke.
“Well, Annie,” said Putney. He shook hands with her, and Mrs. Putney, who was there with Dr. Morrell, asked her where she had sat.
“We kept looking all round for you.”
“Yes,” said Putney, with his hand on his boy’s shoulder, “we wanted to know how you liked the Mercutio.”
“Ralph, it was incomparable!”
“Well, that will do for a beginning. It’s a little cold, but it’s in the right spirit. You mean that the Mercutio wasn’t comparable to the Nurse.”
“Oh, Lyra was wonderful!” said Annie. “Don’t you think so, Ellen?”
“She was Lyra,” said Mrs. Putney definitely.
“No; she wasn’t Lyra at all!” retorted Annie. “That was the marvel of it. She was Juliet’s nurse.”
“Perhaps she was a little of both,” suggested Putney. “What did you think of the performance, Mr. Peck? I don’t want a personal tribute, but if you offer it, I shall not be ungrateful.”
“I have been very much interested,” said the minister. “It was all very new to me. I realised for the first time in my life the great power that the theatre must be. I felt how much the drama could do–how much good.”
“Well, that’s what we’re after,” said Putney. “We had no personal motive; good, right straight along, was our motto. Nobody wanted to outshine anybody else. I kept my Mercutio down all through, so’s not to get ahead of Romeo or Tybalt in the public esteem. Did our friends outside the rope catch on to my idea?” Mr. Peck smiled at the banter, but he seemed not to know just what to say, and Putney went on: “That’s why I made it so bad. I didn’t want anybody to go home feeling sorry that Mercutio was killed. I don’t suppose Winthrop could have slept.”
“You won’t sleep yourself to-night, I’m afraid,” said his wife.
“Oh, Mrs. Munger has promised me a particularly weak cup of coffee. She has got us all in, it seems, for a sort of supper, in spite of everything. I understand it includes representatives of all the stations and conditions present except the outcasts beyond the rope. I don’t see what you’re doing here, Mr. Peck.”
“Was Mr. Peck really outside the rope?” Annie asked Dr. Morrell, as they dropped apart from the others a little.
“I believe he gave his chair to one of the women from the outside,” said the doctor.
Annie moved with him toward Lyra, who was joking with some of the hands.
With all her good-nature, she had the effect of patronising them, as she stood talking about the play with them in her drawl, which she had got back to again. They were admiring her, in her dress of the querulous old nurse, and told her how they never would have known her. But there was an insincerity in the effusion of some of the more nervous women, and in the reticence of the others, who were holding back out of self-respect.
She met Annie and Morrell with eager relief. “Well, Annie?”
“Perfect!”
“Well, now, that’s very nice; you can’t go beyond perfect, you know. I _did_ do it pretty well, didn’t I? Poor Mr. Brandreth! Have you seen him? You must say something comforting to him. He’s really been sacrificed in this business. You know he wanted Miss Chapley. She would have made a lovely Juliet. Of course she blames him for it. She thinks he wanted to make up to Miss Northwick, when Miss Northwick was just flinging herself at Jack. Look at her!”
Jack Wilmington and Miss Sue Northwick were standing together near her father and a party of her friends, and she was smiling and talking at him. Eyes, lips, gestures, attitude expressed in the proud girl a fawning eagerness to please the man, who received her homage rather as if it bored him. His indifferent manner may have been one secret of his power over her, and perhaps she was not capable of all the suffering she was capable of inflicting.
Lyra turned to walk toward the house, deflecting a little in the direction of her nephew and Miss Northwick. “Jack!” she drawled over the shoulder next them as she passed, “I wish you’d bring your aunty’s wrap to her on the piazza.”
“Why, stay here!” Putney called after her. “They’re going to fetch the refreshments out here.”
“Yes, but I’m tired, Ralph, and I can’t sit on the grass, at my age.”
She moved on, with her sweeping, lounging pace, and Jack Wilmington, after a moment’s hesitation, bowed to Miss Northwick and went after her.
The girl remained apart from her friends, as if expecting his return.
Silhouetted against the bright windows, Lyra waited till Jack Wilmington reappeared with a shawl and laid it on her shoulders. Then she sank into a chair. The young man stood beside her talking down upon her. Something restive and insistent expressed itself in their respective attitudes. He sat down at her side.
Miss Northwick joined her friends carelessly.
“Ah, Miss Kilburn,” said Mr. Brandreth’s voice at Annie’s ear, “I’m glad to find you. I’ve just run home with mother–she feels the night air–and I was afraid you would slip through our fingers before I got back. This little business of the refreshments was an afterthought of Mrs. Munger’s, and we meant it for a surprise–we knew you’d approve of it in the form it took.” He looked round at the straggling workpeople, who represented the harmonisation of classes, keeping to themselves as if they had been there alone.
“Yes,” Annie was obliged to say; “it’s very pleasant.” She added: “You must all be rather hungry, Mr. Brandreth. If the Social Union ever gets on its feet, it will have _you_ to thank more than any one.”
“Oh, don’t speak of me, Miss Kilburn! Do you know, we’ve netted about two hundred dollars. Isn’t that pretty good, doctor?”
“Very,” said the doctor. “Hadn’t we better follow Mrs. Wilmington’s example, and get up under the piazza roof? I’m afraid you’ll be the worse for the night air, Miss Kilburn. Putney,” he called to his friend, “we’re going up to the house.”
“All right. I guess that’s a good idea.”
The doctor called to the different knots and groups, telling them to come up to the house. Some of the workpeople slipped away through the grounds and did not come. The Northwicks and their friends moved toward the house.
Mrs. Munger came down the lawn to meet her guests. “Ah, that’s right. It’s much better indoors. I was just coming for you.” She addressed herself more particularly to the Northwicks. “Coffee will be ready in a few moments. We’ve met with a little delay.”
“I’m afraid we must say good night at once,” said Mr. Northwick. “We had arranged to have our friends and some other guests with us at home. And we’re quite late now.”
Mrs. Munger protested. “Take our Juliet from us! Oh, Miss Northwick, how can I thank you enough? The whole play turned upon you!”
“It’s just as well,” she said to Annie, as the Northwicks and their friends walked across the lawn to the gate, where they had carriages waiting. “They’d have been difficult to manage, and everybody else will feel a little more at home without them. Poor Mr. Brandreth, I’m sure _you_ will! I did pity you so, with such a Juliet on your hands!”
In-doors the representatives of the lower classes were less at ease than they were without. Some of the ministers mingled with them, and tried to form a bond between them and the other villagers. Mr. Peck took no part in this work; he stood holding his elbows with his hands, and talking with a perfunctory air to an old lady of his congregation.
The young ladies of South Hatboro’, as Mrs. Munger’s assistants, went about impartially to high and low with trays of refreshments. Annie saw Putney, where he stood with his wife and boy, refuse coffee, and she watched him anxiously when the claret-cup came. He waved his hand over it, and said, “No; I’ll take some of the lemonade.” As he lifted a glass of it toward his lips he stopped and made as if to put it down again, and his hand shook so that he spilled some of it. Then he dashed it off, and reached for another glass. “I want some more,” he said, with a laugh; “I’m thirsty.” He drank a second glass, and when he saw a tray coming toward Annie, where Dr. Morrell had joined her, he came over and exchanged his empty glass for a full one.
“Not much to brag of as lemonade,” he said, “but first-rate rum punch.”
“Look here, Putney,” whispered the doctor, laying his hand on his arm, “don’t you take any more of that. Give me that glass!”
“Oh, all right!” laughed Putney, dashing it off. “You’re welcome to the tumbler, if you want it, Doc.”
XVIII.
Mrs. Munger’s guests kept on talking and laughing. With the coffee and the punch there began to be a little more freedom. Some prohibitionists among the working people went away when they found that the lemonade was punch; but Mrs. Munger did not know it, and she saw the ideal of a Social Union figuratively accomplished in her own house. She stirred about among her guests till she produced a fleeting, empty good-fellowship among them. One of the shoe-shop hands, with an inextinguishable scent of leather and the character of a droll, seconded her efforts with noisy jokes. He proposed games, and would not be snubbed by the refusal of his boss to countenance him, he had the applause of so many others. Mrs. Munger approved of the idea.
“Don’t you think it would be great fun, Mrs. Gerrish?” she asked.
“Well, now, if Squire Putney would lead off,” said the joker, looking round.
Putney could not be found, nor Dr. Morrell.
“They’re off somewhere for a smoke,” said Mrs. Munger. “Well, that’s right. I want everybody to feel that my house is their own to-night, and to come and go just as they like. Do you suppose Mr. Peck is offended?” she asked, under her breath, as she passed Annie. “He _couldn’t_ feel that this is the same thing; but I can’t see him anywhere. He wouldn’t go without taking leave, you don’t suppose?”
Annie joined Mrs. Putney. They talked at first with those who came to ask where Putney and the doctor were; but finally they withdrew into a little alcove from the parlour, where Mrs. Munger approved of their being when she discovered them; they must be very tired, and ought to rest on the lounge there. Her theory of the exhaustion of those who had taken part in the play embraced their families.
The time wore on toward midnight, and her guests got themselves away with more or less difficulty as they attempted the formality of leave-taking or not. Some of the hands who thought this necessary found it a serious affair; but most of them slipped off without saying good night to Mrs. Munger or expressing that rapture with the whole evening from beginning to end which the ladies of South Hatboro’ professed. The ladies of South Hatboro’ and Old Hatboro’ had met in a general intimacy not approached before, and they parted with a flow of mutual esteem. The Gerrish children had dropped asleep in nooks and corners, from which Mr. Gerrish hunted them up and put them together for departure, while his wife remained with Mrs. Munger, unable to stop talking, and no longer amenable to the looks with which he governed her in public.
Lyra came downstairs, hooded and wrapped for departure, with Jack Wilmington by her side. “Why, _Ellen_!” she said, looking into the little alcove from the hall. “Are you here yet? And Annie! Where in the world is Ralph?” At the pleading look with which Mrs. Putney replied, she exclaimed: “Oh, it’s what I was afraid of! I don’t see what the woman could have been about! But of course she didn’t think of poor Ralph. Ellen, let me take you and Winthrop home! Dr. Morrell will be sure to bring Ralph.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Putney passively, but without rising.
“Annie can come too. There’s plenty of room. Jack can walk.”
Jack Wilmington joined Lyra in urging Annie to take his place. He said to her, apart, “Young Munger has been telling me that Putney got at the sideboard and carried off the rum. I’ll stay and help look after him.”
A crazy laugh came into the parlour from the piazza outside, and the group in the alcove started forward. Putney stood at a window, resting one arm on the bar of the long lower sash, which was raised to its full height, and looking ironically in upon Mrs. Munger and her remaining guests. He was still in his Mercutio dress, but he had lost his plumed cap, and was bareheaded. A pace or two behind him stood Mr. Peck, regarding the effect of this apparition upon the company with the same dreamy, indrawn presence he had in the pulpit.
“Well, Mrs. Munger, I’m glad I got back in time to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it. Brother Peck wanted me to go home, but I told him, Not till I’ve thanked Mrs. Munger, Brother Peck; not till I’ve drunk her health in her own old particular Jamaica.” He put to his lips the black bottle which he had been holding in his right hand behind him; then he took it away, looked at it, and flung it rolling-along the piazza floor. “Didn’t get hold of the inexhaustible bottle that time; never do. But it’s a good article; a better article than you used to sell on the sly, Bill Gerrish. You’ll excuse my helping myself, Mrs. Munger; I knew you’d want me to. Well, it’s been a great occasion, Mrs. Munger.” He winked at the hostess. “You’ve had your little invited supper, after all. You’re a manager, Mrs. Munger. You’ve made even the wrath of Brother Peck to praise you.”
The ladies involuntarily shrank backward as Putney suddenly entered through the window and gained the corner of the piano at a dash. He stayed himself against it, slightly swaying, and turned his flaming eyes from one to another, as if questioning whom he should attack next.
Except for the wild look in them, which was not so much wilder than they wore in all times of excitement, and an occasional halt at a difficult word, he gave no sign of being drunk. The liquor had as yet merely intensified him.
Mrs. Munger had the inspiration to treat him as one caresses a dangerous lunatic. “I’m sure you’re very kind, Mr. Putney, to come back. Do sit down!”
“Why?” demanded Putney. “Everybody else standing.”
“That’s true,” said Mrs. Munger. “I’m sure I don’t know why–“
“Oh yes, you do, Mrs. Munger. It’s because they want to have a good view of a man who’s made a fool of himself–“
“Oh, now, Mr. _Putney_!” said Mrs. Munger, with hospitable deprecation. “I’m sure no one wants to do anything of the kind.” She looked round at the company for corroboration, but no one cared to attract Putney’s attention by any sound or sign.
“But I’ll tell you what,” said Putney, with a savage burst, “that a woman who puts hell-fire before a poor devil who can’t keep out of it when he sees it, is better worth looking at.”
“Mr. Putney, I assure you,” said Mrs. Munger, “that it was the _mildest_ punch! And I really didn’t think–I didn’t remember–“
She turned toward Mrs. Putney with her explanation, but Putney seemed to have forgotten her, and he turned upon Mr. Gerrish, “How’s that drunkard’s grave getting along that you’ve dug for your porter?” Gerrish remained prudently silent. “I know you, Billy. You’re all right. You’ve got the pull on your conscience; we all have, one way or another. Here’s Annie Kilburn, come back from Rome, where she couldn’t seem to fix it up with hers to suit her, and she’s trying to get round it in Hatboro’ with good works. Why, there isn’t any occasion for good works in Hatboro’. I could have told you that before you came,” he said, addressing Annie directly. “What we want is faith, and lots of it. The church is going to pieces because we haven’t got any faith.”
His hand slipped from the piano, and he dropped heavily back upon a chair that stood near. The concussion seemed to complete in his brain the transition from his normal dispositions to their opposite, which had already begun. “Bill Gerrish has done more for Hatboro’ than any other man in the place. He’s the only man that holds the church together, because he knows the value of _faith_.” He said this without a trace of irony, glaring at Annie with fierce defiance. “You come back here, and try to set up for a saint in a town where William B. Gerrish has done–has done more to establish the dry-goods business on a metro-me-tro-politan basis than any other man out of New York or Boston.”
He stopped and looked round, mystified, as if this were not the point which he had been aiming at.
Lyra broke into a spluttering laugh, and suddenly checked herself. Putney smiled slightly. “Pretty good, eh? Say, where was I?” he asked slyly. Lyra hid her face behind Annie’s shoulder. “What’s that dress you got on? What’s all this about, anyway? Oh yes, I know. _Romeo and Juliet_–Social Union. Well,” he resumed, with a frown, “there’s too much _Romeo and Juliet_, too much Social Union, in this town already.” He stopped, and seemed preparing to launch some deadly phrase at Mrs. Wilmington, but he only said, “You’re all right, Lyra.”
“Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish, “we must be going. Good night, ma’am. Mrs. Gerrish, it’s time the children were at home.”
“Of course it is,” said Putney, watching the Gerrishes getting their children together. He waved his hand after them, and called out, “William Gerrish, you’re a man; I honour you.”
He laid hold of the piano and pulled himself to his feet, and seemed to become aware, for the first time, of his wife, where she stood with their boy beside her.
“What you doing here with that child at this time of night?” he shouted at her, all that was left of the man in his eyes changing into the glare of a pitiless brute. “Why don’t you go home? You want to show people what I did to him? You want to publish my shame, do you? Is that it? Look here!”
He began to work himself along toward her by help of the piano. A step was heard on the piazza without, and Dr. Morrell entered through the open window.
“Come now, Putney,” he said gently. The other men closed round them.
Putney stopped. “What’s this? Interfering in family matters? You better go home and look after your own wives, if you got any. Get out the way, ‘n’ you mind your own business, Doc. Morrell. You meddle too much.” His speech was thickening and breaking. “You think science going do everything–evolution! Talk me about evolution! What’s evolution done for Hatboro’? ‘Volved Gerrish’s store. One day of Christianity–real Christianity–Where’s that boy? If I get hold of him–“
He lunged forward, and Jack Wilmington and young Munger stepped before him.
Mrs. Putney had not moved, nor lost the look of sad, passive vigilance which she had worn since her husband reappeared.
She pushed the men aside.
“Ralph, behave yourself! _Here’s_ Winthrop, and we want you to take us home. Come now!” She passed her arm through his, and the boy took his other hand. The action, so full of fearless custom and wonted affection from them both, seemed with her words to operate another total change in his mood.
“All right; I’m going, Ellen. Got to say good night Mrs. Munger, that’s all.” He managed to get to her, with his wife on his arm and his boy at his side. “Want to thank you for a pleasant evening, Mrs. Munger–want to thank you–“
“And _I_ want to thank you _too_, Mrs. Munger,” said Mrs. Putney, with an intensity of bitterness no repetition of the words could give, “It’s been a pleasant evening for _me_!”
Putney wished to stop and explain, but his wife pulled him away.
Dr. Morrell and Annie followed to get them safely into the carriage; he went with them, and when she came back Mrs. Munger was saying: “I will leave it to Mr. Wilmington, or any one, if I’m to blame. It had quite gone out of my head about Mr. Putney. There was plenty of coffee, besides, and if everything that could harm particular persons had to be kept out of the way, society couldn’t go on. We ought to consider the greatest good of the greatest number.” She looked round from one to another for support. No one said anything, and Mrs. Munger, trembling on the verge of a collapse, made a direct appeal: “Don’t you think so, Mr. Peck?”
The minister broke his silence with reluctance. “It’s sometimes best to have the effect of error unmistakable. Then we are sure it’s error.”
Mrs. Munger gave a sob of relief into her handkerchief. “Yes, that’s just what I say.”
Lyra bent her face on her arm, and Jack Wilmington put his head out of the window where he stood.
Mr. Peck remained staring at Mrs. Munger, as if doubtful what to do. Then he said: “You seem not to have understood me, ma’am. I should be to blame if I left you in doubt. You have been guilty of forgetting your brother’s weakness, and if the consequence has promptly followed in his shame, it is for you to realise it. I wish you a good evening.”
He went out with a dignity that thrilled Annie. Lyra leaned toward her and said, choking with laughter, “He’s left Idella asleep upstairs. We haven’t _any_ of us got _perfect_ memories, have we?”
“Run after him!” Annie said to Jack Wilmington, in undertone, “and get him into my carriage. I’ll get the little girl. Lyra, _don’t_ speak of it.”
“Never!” said Mrs. Wilmington, with delight. “I’m solid for Mr. Peck every time.”
XIX.
Annie made up a bed for Idella on a wide, old-fashioned lounge in her room, and put her away in it, swathed in a night-gown which she found among the survivals of her own childish clothing in that old chest of drawers. When she woke in the morning she looked across at the little creature, with a tender sense of possession and protection suffusing her troubled recollections of the night before. Idella stirred, stretched herself with a long sigh, and then sat up and stared round the strange place as if she were still in a dream.
“Would you like to come in here with me?” Annie suggested from her bed.
The child pushed back her hair with her little hands, and after waiting to realise the situation to the limit of her small experience, she said, with a smile that showed her pretty teeth, “Yes.”
“Then come.”
Idella tumbled out of bed, pulling up the nightgown, which was too long for her, and softly thumped across the carpet. Annie leaned over and lifted her up, and pressed the little face to her own, and felt the play of the quick, light breath over her cheek.
“Would you like to stay with me–live with me–Idella?” she asked.
The child turned her face away, and hid a roguish smile in the pillow. “I don’t know.”
“Would you like to be my little girl?”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because–because”–she seemed to search her mind–“because your night-gowns are too long.”
“Oh, is that all? That’s no reason. Think of something else.”
Idella rubbed her face hard on the pillow. “You dress up cats.”
She lifted her face, and looked with eyes of laughing malice into Annie’s, and Annie pushed her face against Idella’s neck and cried, “You’re a rogue!”
The little one screamed with laughter and gurgled: “Oh, you tickle! You tickle!”
They had a childish romp, prolonged through the details of Idella’s washing and dressing, and Annie tried to lose, in her frolic with the child, the anxieties that had beset her waking; she succeeded in confusing them with one another in one dull, indefinite pain.
She wondered when Mr. Peck would come for Idella, but they were still at their belated breakfast when Mrs. Bolton came in to say that Bolton had met the minister on his way up, and had asked him if Idella might not stay the week out with them.
“I don’ know but he done more’n he’d ought.
“But she can be with us the rest part, when you’ve got done with her.”
“I haven’t begun to get done with her,” said Annie. “I’m glad Mr. Bolton asked.”
After breakfast Bolton himself appeared, to ask if Idella might go up to the orchard with him. Idella ran out of the room and came back with her hat on, and tugging to get into her shabby little sack. Annie helped her with it, and Idella tucked her hand into Bolton’s loose, hard fist, and gave it a pull toward the door.
“Well, I don’t see but what she’s goin’,” he said.
“Yes; you’d better ask her the next time if _I_ can go,” said Annie.
“Well, why don’t you?” asked Bolton, humouring the joke. “I guess you’d enjoy it about as well as any. We’re just goin’ for a basket of wind-falls for pies. I guess we ain’t a-goin’ to be gone a great while.”
Annie watched them up the lane from the library window with a queer grudge at heart; Bolton stiffly lumbering forward at an angle of forty-five degrees, the child whirling and dancing at his side, and now before and now after him.
At the sound of wheels on the gravel before the front door, Annie turned away with such an imperative need of its being Dr. Morrell’s buggy that it was almost an intolerable disappointment to find it Mrs. Munger’s phaeton.
Mrs. Munger burst in upon her in an excitement which somehow had an effect of premeditation.
“Miss Kilburn, I wish to know what you think of Mr. and Mrs. Putney’s behaviour to me, and Mr. Peck’s, in my own house, last night. They are friends of yours, and I wish to know if you approve of it. I come to you _as_ their friend, and I am sure you will feel as I do that my hospitality has been abused. It was an outrage for Mr. Putney to get intoxicated in my house; and for Mr. Peck to attack me as he did before everybody, because Mr. Putney had taken advantage of his privileges, was abominable. I am not a member of his church; and even if I were, he would have had no right to speak so to me.”
Annie felt the blood fly to her head, and she waited a moment to regain her coolness. “I wonder you came to ask me, Mrs. Munger, if you were so sure that I agreed with you. I’m certainly Mr. and Mrs. Putney’s friend, and so far as admiring Mr. Peck’s sincerity and goodness is concerned, I’m _his_ friend. But I’m obliged to say that you’re mistaken about the rest.”
She folded her hands at her waist, and stood up very straight, looking firmly at Mrs. Munger, who made a show of taking a new grip of her senses as she sank unbidden into a chair.
“Why, what do you mean, Miss Kilburn?”
“It seems to me that I needn’t say.”
“Why, but you must! You _must_, you know. I can’t be _left_ so! I must know where I _stand_! I must be sure of my _ground_! I can’t go on without understanding just how much you mean by my being mistaken.”
She looked Annie in the face with eyes superficially expressive of indignant surprise, and Annie perceived that she wished to restore herself in her own esteem by browbeating some one else into the affirmation of her innocence.
“Well, if you must know, Mrs. Munger, I mean that you ought to have remembered Mr. Putney’s infirmity, and that it was cruel to put temptation in his way. Everybody knows that he can’t resist it, and that he is making such a hard fight to keep out of it. And then, if you press me for an opinion, I must say that you were not justifiable in asking Mr. Peck to take part in a social entertainment when we had explicitly dropped that part of the affair.”
Mrs. Munger had not pressed Annie for an opinion on this point at all; but in their interest in it they both ignored the fact. Mrs. Munger tacitly admitted her position in retorting, “He needn’t have stayed.”
“You made him stay–you remember how–and he couldn’t have got away without being rude.”
“And you think he wasn’t rude to scold me before my guests?”
“He told you the truth. He didn’t wish to say anything, but you forced him to speak, just as you have forced me.”
“Forced _you_? Miss Kilburn!”
“Yes. I don’t at all agree with Mr. Peck in many things, but he is a good man, and last night he spoke the truth. I shouldn’t be speaking it if I didn’t tell you I thought so.”
“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, rising.
“After this you can’t expect me to have anything to do with the Social Union; you couldn’t _wish_ me to, if that’s your opinion of my character.”
“I haven’t expressed any opinion of your character, Mrs. Munger, if you’ll remember, please; and as for the Social Union, I shall have nothing further to do with it myself.”
Annie drew herself up a little higher, and silently waited for her visitor to go.
But Mrs. Munger remained.
“I don’t believe Mrs. Putney herself would say what you have said,” she remarked, after an embarrassing moment. “If it were really so I should be willing to make any reparation–to acknowledge it. Will you go with me to Mrs. Putney’s? I have my phaeton here, and–“
“I shouldn’t dream of going to Mrs. Putney’s with you.”
Mrs. Munger urged, with the effect of invincible argument: “I’ve been down in the village, and I’ve talked to a good many about it–some of them hadn’t heard of it before–and I must say, Miss Kilburn, that people generally take a very different view of it from what you do. They think that my hospitality has been shamefully abused. Mr. Gates said he should think I would have Mr. Putney arrested. But I don’t care for all that. What I wish is to prove to you that I am right; and if I can go with you to call on Mrs. Putney, I shall not care what any one else says. Will you come?”
“Certainly not,” cried Annie.
They both stood a moment, and in this moment Dr. Morrell drove up, and dropped his hitching-weight beyond Mrs. Munger’s phaeton.
As he entered she said: “We will let Dr. Morrell decide. I’ve been asking Miss Kilburn to go with me to Mrs. Putney’s. I think it would be a graceful and proper thing for me to do, to express my sympathy and interest, and to hear what Mrs. Putney really has to say. Don’t _you_ think I ought to go to see her, doctor?”
The doctor laughed. “I can’t prescribe in matters of social duty. But what do you want to see Mrs. Putney for?”
“What for? Why, doctor, on account of Mr. Putney–what took place last night.”
“Yes? What was that?”
“What was _that_? Why, his strange behaviour–his–his intoxication.”
“Was he intoxicated? Did you think so?”
“Why, you were there, doctor. Didn’t you think so?”
Annie looked at him with as much astonishment as Mrs. Munger.
The doctor laughed again. “You can’t always tell when Putney’s joking; he’s a great joker. Perhaps he was hoaxing.”
“Oh doctor, do you think he _could_ have been?” said Mrs. Munger, with clasped hands. “It would make me the happiest woman in the world! I’d forgive him all he’s made me suffer. But _you’re_ joking _now_, doctor?”
“You can’t tell when people are joking. If I’m not, does it follow that I’m really intoxicated?”
“Oh, but that’s nonsense, Dr. Morrell. That’s mere–what do you call it?–chop logic. But I don’t mind it. I grasp at a straw.” Mrs. Munger grasped at a straw of the mind, to show how. “But what _do_ you mean?”
“Well, Mrs. Putney wasn’t intoxicated last night, but she’s not well this morning. I’m afraid she couldn’t see you.”
“Just as you _say_, doctor,” cried Mrs. Munger, with mounting cheerfulness. “I _wish_ I knew just how much you meant, and how little.” She moved closer to the doctor, and bent a look of candid fondness upon him. “But I know you’re trying to mystify me.”
She pursued him with questions which he easily parried, smiling and laughing. At the end she left him to Annie, with adieux that were almost radiant. “Anyhow, I shall take the benefit of the doubt, and if Mr. Putney was hoaxing, I shall not give myself away. _Do_ find out what he means, Miss Kilburn, won’t you?” She took hold of Annie’s unoffered hand, and pressed it in a double leathern grasp, and ran out of the room with a lightness of spirit which her physical bulk imperfectly expressed.
XX.
“Well?” said Annie, to the change which came over Morrell’s face when Mrs. Munger was gone.
“Oh, it’s a miserable business! He must go on now to the end of his debauch. He’s got past doing any mischief, I’m thankful to say. But I had hoped to tide him over a while longer, and now that fool has spoiled everything. Well!”
Annie’s heart warmed to his vexation, and she postponed another emotion. “Yes, she _is_ a fool. I wish you had qualified the term, doctor.”
They looked at each other solemnly, and then laughed. “It won’t do for a physician to swear,” said Morrell. “I wish you’d give me a cup of coffee. I’ve been up all night.”
“With Ralph?”
“With Putney.”
“You shall have it instantly; that is, as instantly as Mrs. Bolton can kindle up a fire and make it.” She went out to the kitchen, and gave the order with an imperiousness which she softened in Dr. Morrell’s interest by explaining rather fully to Mrs. Bolton.
When she came back she wanted to talk seriously, tragically, about Putney. But the doctor would not. He said that it paid to sit up with Putney, drunk or sober, and hear him go on. He repeated some things Putney said about Mr. Peck, about Gerrish, about Mrs. Munger.
“But why did you try to put her off in that way–to make her believe he wasn’t intoxicated?” asked Annie, venting her postponed emotion, which was of disapproval.
“I don’t know. It came into my head. But she knows better.”
“It was rather cruel; not that she deserves any mercy. She caught so at the idea.”
“Oh yes, I saw that. She’ll humbug herself with it, and you’ll see that before night there’ll be two theories of Putney’s escapade. I think the last will be the popular one. It will jump with the general opinion of Putney’s ability to carry anything out. And Mrs. Munger will do all she can to support it.”
Mrs. Bolton brought in the coffee-pot, and Annie hesitated a moment, with her hand on it, before pouring out a cup.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“I know you don’t. But you can say that it wasn’t Putney who hoaxed Mrs. Munger, but Dr. Morrell.”
“Oh, you didn’t either of you hoax her.”
“Well, then, there’s no harm done.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“And you won’t give me any coffee?”
“Oh yes, I’ll give you some _coffee_,” said Annie, with a sigh of baffled scrupulosity that made them both laugh.
He broke out again after he had begun to drink his coffee.
“Well?” she demanded, from her own lapse into silence.
“Oh, nothing! Only Putney. He wants Brother Peck, as he calls him, to unite all the religious elements of Hatboro’ in a church of his own, and send out missionaries to the heathen of South Hatboro’ to preach a practical Christianity. He makes South Hatboro’ stand for all that’s worldly and depraved.”
“Poor Ralph! Is that the way he talks?”
“Oh, not all the time. He talks a great many other ways.”
“I wonder you can laugh.”
“He’s been very severe on Brother Peck for neglecting the discipline of his child. He says he ought to remember his duty to others, and save the community from having the child grow up into a capricious, wilful woman. Putney was very hard upon your sex, Miss Kilburn. He attributed nearly all the trouble in the world to women’s wilfulness and caprice.”
He looked across the table at her with his merry eyes, whose sweetness she felt even in her sudden preoccupation with the notion which she now launched upon him, leaning forward and pushing some books and magazines aside, as if she wished to have nothing between her need and his response.
“Dr. Morrell, what should you think of my asking Mr. Peck to give me his little girl?”
“To give you his–“
“Yes. Let me take Idella–keep her–adopt her! I’ve nothing to do, as you know very well, and she’d be an occupation; and it would be far better for her. What Ralph says is true. She’s growing up without any sort of training; and I think if she keeps on she will be mischievous to herself and every one else.”
“Really?” asked the doctor. “Is it so bad as that?”
“Of course not. And of course I don’t want Mr. Peck to renounce all claim to his child; but to let me have her for the present, or indefinitely, and get her some decent clothes, and trim her hair properly, and give her some sort of instruction–“
“May I come in?” drawled Mrs. Wilmington’s mellow voice, and Annie turned and saw Lyra peering round the edge of the half-opened library door. “I’ve been discreetly hemming and scraping and hammering on the wood-work so as not to overhear, and I’d have gone away if I hadn’t been afraid of being overheard.”
“Oh, come in, Lyra,” said Annie; and she hoped that she had kept the spirit of resignation with which she spoke out of her voice.
Dr. Morrell jumped up with an apparent desire to escape that wounded and exasperated her. She put out her hand quite haughtily to him and asked, “Oh, must you go?”
“Yes. How do you do, Mrs. Wilmington? You’d better get Miss Kilburn to give you a cup of her coffee.”
“Oh, I will,” said Lyra. She forbore any reference, even by a look, to the intimate little situation she had disturbed.
Morrell added to Annie: “I like your plan. It ‘a the best thing you could do.”
She found she had been keeping his hand, and in the revulsion from wrath to joy she violently wrung it.
“I’m _so_ glad!” She could not help following him to the door, in the hope that he would say something more, but he did not, and she could only repeat her rapturous gratitude in several forms of incoherency.
She ran back to Mrs. Wilmington. “Lyra, what do you think of my taking Mr. Peck’s little girl?”
Mrs. Wilmington never allowed herself to seem surprised at anything; she was, in fact, surprised at very few things. She had got into the easiest chair in the room, and she answered from it, with a luxurious interest in the affair, “Well, you know what people will say, Annie.”
“No, I don’t. _What_ will they say?”
“That you’re after Mr. Peck pretty openly.”
Annie turned scarlet. “And when they find I’m _not_?” she demanded with severity, that had no effect upon Lyra.
“Then they’ll say you couldn’t get him.”
“They may say what they please. What do you think of the plan?”
“I think it would be the greatest blessing for the poor little thing,” said Lyra, with a nearer approach to seriousness than she usually made. “And the greatest care for you,” she added, after a moment.
“I shall not care for the care. I shall be glad of it–thankful for it,” cried Annie fervidly.
“If you can get it,” Lyra suggested.
“I believe I can get it. I believe I can make Mr. Peck see that it’s a duty. I shall ask him to regard it as a charity to me–as a mercy.”
“Well, that’s a good way to work upon Mr. Peck’s feelings,” said Lyra demurely. “Was that the plan that Dr. Morrell approved of so highly?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know but it was some course of treatment. You pressed his hand so affectionately. I said to myself, Well, Annie’s either an enthusiastic patient, or else–“
“What?” demanded Annie, at the little stop Lyra made.
“Well, you know what people do _say_, Annie.”
“What?”
“Why, that you’re very much out of health, or–” Lyra made another of her tantalising stops.
“Or what?”
“Or Dr. Morrell is very much in love.”
“Lyra, I can’t allow you to say such things to me.”
“No; that’s what I’ve kept saying to myself all the time. But you would have it _out_ of me. _I_ didn’t want to say it.”
It was impossible to resist Lyra’s pretended deprecation. Annie laughed. “I suppose I can’t help people’s talking, and I ought to be too old to care.”
“You ought, but you’re not,” said Lyra flatteringly. “Well, Annie, what do you think of our little evening at Mrs. Munger’s in the dim retrospect? Poor Ralph! What did the doctor say about him?” She listened with so keen a relish for the report of Putney’s sayings that Annie felt as if she had been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra’s amusement. “Oh dear, I wish I could hear him! I thought I should have died last night when he came back, and began to scare everybody blue with his highly personal remarks. I wish he’d had time to get round to the Northwicks.”
“Lyra,” said Annie, nerving herself to the office; “don’t you think it was wicked to treat that poor girl as you did?”
“Well, I suppose that’s the way some people might look at it,” said Lyra dispassionately.
“Then how–_how_ could you do it?”
“Oh, it’s easy enough to behave wickedly, Annie, when you feel like it,” said Lyra, much amused by Annie’s fervour, apparently. “Besides, I don’t know that it was so _very_ wicked. What makes you think it was?”
“Oh, it wasn’t that merely. Lyra, may I–_may_ I speak to you plainly, frankly–like a sister?” Annie’s heart filled with tenderness for Lyra, with the wish to help her, to save a person who charmed her so much.
“Well, like a _step_-sister, you may,” said Lyra demurely.
“It wasn’t for her sake alone that I hated to see it. It was for your sake–for _his_ sake.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you, Annie,” said Lyra, without the least resentment. “And I know what you mean. But it really doesn’t hurt either Jack or me. I’m not very goody-goody, Annie; I don’t pretend to be; but I’m not very baddy-baddy either. I assure you”–Lyra laughed mischievously–“I’m one of the very few persons in Hatboro’ who are better than they should be.”
“I know it, Lyra–I know it. But you have no right to keep him from taking a fancy to some young girl–and marrying her; to keep him to yourself; to make people talk.”
“There’s something in that,” Lyra assented, with impartiality. “But I don’t think it would be well for Jack to marry yet; and if I see him taking a fancy to any real nice girl, I sha’n’t interfere with him. But I shall be very _particular_, Annie.”
She looked at Annie with such a droll mock earnest, and shook her head with such a burlesque of grandmotherly solicitude, that Annie laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, Lyra, Lyra!”
“And as for me,” Lyra went on, “I assure you I don’t care for the little bit of harm it does me.”
“But you ought–you ought!” cried Annie. “You ought to respect yourself enough to care. You ought to respect other women enough.”
“Oh, I guess I’d let the balance of the sex slide, Annie,” said Lyra.
“No, you mustn’t; you can’t. We are all bound together; we owe everything to each other.”
“Isn’t that rather Peckish?” Lyra suggested.
“I don’t know. But it’s true, Lyra. And I shouldn’t be ashamed of getting it from Mr. Peck.”
“Oh, I didn’t say you would be.”
“And I hope you won’t be hurt with me. I know that it’s a most unwarrantable thing to speak to you about such a matter; but you know why I do it.”
“Yes, I suppose it’s because you like me; and I appreciate that, I assure you, Annie.”
Lyra was soberer than she had yet been, and Annie felt that she was really gaining ground. “And your husband; you ought to respect _him_–“
Lyra laughed out with great relish. “Oh, now, Annie, you _are_ joking! Why in the _world_ should I respect Mr. Wilmington? An old man like him marrying a young girl like me!” She jumped up and laughed at the look in Annie’s face. “Will you go round with me to the Putneys? thought Ellen might like to see us.”
“No, no. I can’t go,” said Annie, finding it impossible to recover at once from the quite unanswerable blow her sense of decorum–she thought it her moral sense–had received.
“Well, you’ll be glad to have _me_ go, anyway,” said Lyra. She saw Annie shrinking from her, and she took hold of her, and pulled her up and kissed her. “You dear old thing! I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world. And whichever it is, Annie, the parson or the doctor, I wish him joy.”
That afternoon, as Annie was walking to the village, the doctor drove up to the sidewalk, and stopped near her. “Miss Kilburn, I’ve got a letter from home. They write me about my mother in a way that makes me rather anxious, and I shall run down to Chelsea this evening.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for your bad news. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“She’s old; that’s the only cause for anxiety. But of course I must go.”
“Oh yes, indeed. I do hope you’ll find all right with her.”
“Thank you very much. I’m sorry that I must leave Putney at such a time. But I leave him with Mr. Peck, who’s promised to be with him. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Yes, I do; it’s very kind of you–very kind indeed.”
“Thank you,” said the doctor. It was not the phrase exactly, but it served the purpose of the cordial interest in which they parted as well as another.
XXI.
During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her that when some of Idella’s shabby playmates from Over the Track casually found their way to the woods past Annie’s house, and tried to tempt Idella to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but developed an intense admiration for her in every way–for her dresses, her rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner’s things, and the house prettier and larger.