She let Mrs. Bolton go to the door, and she did not rise to meet the doctor; she saw from his smile that he knew he had a moral rather than a physical trouble to deal with, but she did not relax the severity of her glare in sympathy, as she was tempted from some infinite remoteness to do.
When he said, “You’re not well,” she whispered solemnly back, “Not at all.”
He did not pursue his inquiry into her condition, but said, with an irrelevant cheerfulness that piqued her, “I was coming here this evening at any rate, and I got your message on the way up from my office.”
“You are very kind,” she said, a little more audibly.
“I wanted to tell you,” he went on, “of what a time Putney and I have had to-day working up public sentiment for Mr. Peck, so as to keep him here.”
Annie did not change her position, but the expression of her glance changed.
“We’ve been round in the enemy’s camp, everywhere; and I’ve committed Gerrish himself to an armed neutrality. That wasn’t difficult. The difficulty was in another quarter — with Mr. Peck himself. He’s more opposed than any one else to his stay in Hatboro’. You know he intended going away this morning?”
“Did he?” Annie asked dishonestly. The question obliged her to say something.
“Yes. He came to Putney before breakfast to thank him and take leave of him, and to tell him of the plan he had for — Imagine what!”
“I don’t know,” said Annie, hoarsely, after an effort, as if the untruth would not come easily. “I am worse than Mrs. Munger,” she thought.
“For going to Fall River to teach school among the mill-hands’ children! And to open a night-school for the hands themselves.”
The doctor waited for her sensation, and in its absence he looked so disappointed that she was forced to say, “To teach school?”
Then he went on briskly again. “Yes. Putney laboured with him on his knees, so to speak, and got him to postpone his going till to-morrow morning; and then he came to me for help. We enlisted Mrs. Wilmington in the cause, and we’ve spent the day working up the Peck sentiment to a fever-heat. It’s been a very queer campaign; three Gentiles toiling for a saint against the elect, and bringing them all over at last. We’ve got a paper, signed by a large majority of the members of the church — the church, not the society — asking Mr. Peck to remain; and Putney’s gone to him with the paper, and he’s coming round here to report Mr. Peck’s decision. We all agreed that it wouldn’t do to say anything about his plan for the future, and I fancy some of his people signed our petition under the impression that they were keeping a valuable man out of another pulpit.”
Annie accompanied the doctor’s words, which she took in to the last syllable, with a symphony of conjecture as to how the change in Mr. Peck’s plans, if they prevailed with him, would affect her, and the doctor had not ceased to speak before she perceived that it would be deliverance perfect and complete, however inglorious. But the tacit drama so vividly preoccupied her with its minor questions of how to descend to this escape with dignity that still she did not speak, and he took up the word again.
“I confess I’ve had my misgivings about Mr. Peck, and about his final usefulness in a community like this. In spite of all that Putney can say of his hard-headedness, I’m afraid that he’s a good deal of a dreamer. But I gave way to Putney, and I hope you’ll appreciate what I’ve done for your favourite.”
“You are very good,” she said, in mechanical acknowledgment: her mind was set so strenuously to break from her dishonest reticence that she did not know really what she was saying. “Why — why do you call him a dreamer?” She cast about in that direction at random.
“Why? Well, for one thing, the reason he gave Putney for giving up his luxuries here: that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay in the world, he must share them. It seems to me that I might as well say that as long as there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I must share them. Then he has a queer notion that he can go back and find instruction in the working-men — that they alone have the light and the truth, and know the meaning of life. I don’t say anything against them. My observation and my experience is that if others were as good as they are in the ratio of their advantages, Mr. Peck needn’t go to them for his ideal. But their conditions warp and dull them; they see things askew, and they don’t see them clearly. I might as well expose myself to the small-pox in hopes of treating my fellow-sufferers more intelligently.”
She could not perceive where his analogies rang false; they only overwhelmed her with a deeper sense of her own folly.
“But I don’t know,” he went on, “that a dreamer is such a desperate character, if you can only keep him from trying to realise his dreams; and if Mr. Peck consents to stay in Hatboro’, perhaps we can manage it.” He drew his chair a little toward the lounge where she reclined, and asked, with the kindliness that was both personal and professional, “What seems to be the matter?”
She started up. “There is nothing — nothing that medicine can help. Why do you call him my favourite?” she demanded violently. “But you have wasted your time. If he had made up his mind to what you say, he would never give it up — never in the world!” she added hysterically. “If you’ve interfered between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly any one had any duty, you’ve done a very unwarrantable thing.” She was aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words themselves, but she hurried on: “I am going with him. He was here last night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the mills; and I shall not care what people think, if it’s right—”
She stopped and weakly dropped back on the lounge, and hid her face in the pillow.
“I really don’t understand.” The doctor began, with a physician’s carefulness, to unwind the coil she had flung down to him. “Are the Savors going, and the child?”
“He will give her the child for the one they lost — you know how! And they will take it with them.”
“But you — what have you—”
“I must have the child too! I can’t give it up, and I shall go with them. There’s no other way. You don’t know. I’ve given him my word, and there is no hope!”
“He asked you,” said the doctor, to make sure he had heard aright— “he asked you — advised you — to go to work in a cotton-mill?”
“No;” she lifted her face to confront him. “He told me not to go; but I said I would.”
They sat staring at each other in a silence which neither of them broke, and which promised to last indefinitely. They were still in their daze when Putney’s voice came through the open hall door.
“Hello! hello! hello! Hello, Central! Can’t I make you hear, any one?” His steps advanced into the hall, and he put his head in at the library doorway. “Thought you’d be here,” he said, nodding at the doctor. “Well, doctor, Brother Peck’s beaten us again. He’s going.”
“Going?” the doctor echoed.
“Yes. It’s no use. I put the whole case before him, and I argued it with a force of logic that would have fetched the twelfth man with eleven stubborn fellows against him on a jury; but it didn’t fetch Brother Peck. He was very appreciative and grateful, but he believes he’s got a call to give up the ministry, for the present at least. Well, there’s some consolation in supposing he may know best, after all. It seemed to us that he had a great opportunity in Hatboro’, but if he turns his back on it, perhaps it’s a sign he wasn’t equal to it. The doctor told you what we’ve been up to, Annie?”
“Yes,” she answered faintly, from the depths of the labyrinth in which she was plunged again.
“I’m sorry for your news about him,” said the doctor. “I hoped he was going to stay. It’s always a pity when such a man lets his sympathies use him instead of using them. But we must always judge that kind of crank leniently, if he doesn’t involve other people in his er
ase.”
She knew that he was shielding and trying to spare her, and she felt inexpressibly degraded by the terms of his forbearance. She could not accept, and she had not the strength to refuse it; and Putney said: “I’ve not seen anything to make me doubt his sanity; but I must say the present racket shakes my faith in his common-sense, and I rather held by that, you know. But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be if she were a man — excuse me, Annie — is ever absolutely right. I suppose the truth is a constitutional thing, and you can’t separate it from the personal consciousness, and so you get it coloured and heated by personality when you get it fresh. That is, we can see what the absolute truth was, but never what it is.”
Putney amused himself in speculating on these lines with more or less reference to Mr. Peck, and did not notice that the doctor and Annie gave him only a silent assent. “As to misleading any one else, Mr. Peck’s following in his new religion seems to be confined to the Savors, as I understand. They are going with him to help him set up a sort of cooperative boarding-house. Well, I don’t know where we shall get a hotter gospeller than Brother Peck. Poor old fellow! I hope he’ll get along better in Fall River. It is something to be out of reach of Gerrish.”
The doctor asked, “When is he going?”
“Why, he’s gone by this time, I suppose,” said Putney. “I tried to get him to think about it overnight, but he wouldn’t. He’s anxious to go and get back, so as to preach his last sermon here Sunday, and he’s taken the 9.10, if he hasn’t changed his mind.” Putney looked at his watch.
“Let’s hope he hasn’t,” said Dr. Morrell.
“Which?” asked Putney.
“Changed his mind. I’m sorry he’s coming back.”
Annie knew that he was talking at her, though he spoke to Putney; but she was powerless to protest.
XXVIII.
They went away together, leaving her to her despair, which had passed into a sort of torpor by the following night, when Dr. Morrell came again, out of what she knew must be mere humanity; he could not respect her any longer. He told her, as if for her comfort, that Putney had gone to the depot to meet Mr. Peck, who was expected back in the eight-o’clock train, and was to labour with him all night long if necessary to get him to change, or at least postpone, his purpose. The feeling in his favour was growing. Putney hoped to put it so strongly to him as a proof of duty that he could not resist it.
Annie listened comfortlessly. Whatever happened, nothing could take away the shame of her weakness now. She even wished, feebly, vaguely, that she might be forced to keep her word.
A sound of running on the gravel-walk outside and a sharp pull at the door-bell seemed to jerk them both to their feet.
Some one stepped into the hall panting, and the face of William Savor showed itself at the door of the room where they stood. “Doc — Doctor Morrell, come — come quick! There’s been an accident — at — the depot. Mr. — Peck—” He panted out the story, and Annie saw rather than heard how the minister tried to cross the track from his train, where it had halted short of the station, and the flying express from the other quarter caught him from his feet, and dropped the bleeding fragment that still held his life beside the rail a hundred yards away, and then kept on in brute ignorance into the night.
“Where is he? Where have you got him?” the doctor demanded of Savor.
“At my house.”
The doctor ran out of the house, and she heard his buggy whirl away, followed by the fainter sound of Savor’s feet as he followed running, after he had stopped to repeat his story to the Boltons. Annie turned to the farmer. “Mr. Bolton, get the carry-all. I must go.”
“And me too,” said his wife.
“Why, no, Pauliny; I guess you better stay. I guess it’ll come out all right in the end,” Bolton began. “I guess William has exaggerated some may be. Anyrate, who’s goin’ to look after the little girl if you come?”
“I am,” Mrs. Bolton snapped back. “She’s goin’ with me.”
“Of course she is. Be quick, Mr. Bolton!” Annie called from the stairs, which she had already mounted half-way.
She caught up the child, limp with sleep, from its crib, and began to dress it. Idella cried, and fought away the hands that tormented her, and made herself now very stiff and now very lax; but Annie and Mrs. Bolton together prevailed against her, and she was dressed, and had fallen asleep again in her clothes while the women were putting on their hats and sacks, and Bolton was driving up to the door with the carry-all.
“Why, I can see,” he said, when he got out to help them in, “just how William’s got his idee about it. His wife’s an excitable kind of a woman, and she’s sent him off lickety-split after the doctor without looking to see what the matter was. There hain’t never been anybody hurt at our depot, and it don’t stand to reason—”
“Oliver Bolton, will you hush that noise?” shrieked his wife. “If the world was burnin’ up you’d say it was nothing but a chimbley on fire som’er’s.”
“Well, well, Pauliny, have it your own way, have it your own way,” said Bolton. “I ain’t sayin’ but what there’s somethin’ in William’s story; but you’ll see’t he’s exaggerated. Git up!”
“Well, do hurry, and do be still!” said his wife.
“Yes, yes. It’s all right, Pauliny; all right. Soon’s I’m out the lane, you’ll see’t I’ll drive fast enough.”
Mrs. Bolton kept a grim silence, against which her husband’s babble of optimism played like heat-lightning on a night sky.
Idella woke with the rush of cold air, and in the dark and strangeness began to cry, and wailed heart-breakingly between her fits of louder sobbing, and then fell asleep again before they reached the house where her father lay dying.
They had put him in the best bed in Mrs. Savor’s little guest-room, and when Annie entered, the minister was apologising to her for spoiling it.
“Now don’t you say one word, Mr. Peck,” she answered him. “It’s all right. I ruthah see you layin’ there just’s you be than plenty of folks that—” She stopped for want of an apt comparison, and at sight of Annie she said, as if he were a child whose mind was wandering: “Well, I declare, if here ain’t Miss Kilburn come to see you, Mr. Peck! And Mis’ Bolton! Well, the land!”
Mrs. Savor came and shook hands with them, and in her character of hostess urged them forward from the door, where they had halted. “Want to see Mr. Peck? Well, he’s real comf’table now; ain’t he, Dr. Morrell? We got him all fixed up nicely, and he ain’t in a bit o’ pain. It’s his spine that’s hurt, so’t he don’t feel nothin’; but he’s just as clear in his mind as what you or I be. Ain’t he, doctor?”
“He’s not suffering,” said Dr. Morrell, to whom Annie’s eye wandered from Mrs. Savor, and there was something in his manner that made her think the minister was not badly hurt. She went forward with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton, and after they had both taken the limp hand that lay outside the covering, she touched it too. It returned no pressure, but his large, wan eyes looked at her with such gentle dignity and intelligence that she began to frame in her mind an excuse for what seemed almost an intrusion.
“We were afraid you were hurt badly, and we thought — we thought you might like to see Idella — and so — we came. She is in the next room.”
“Thank you,” said the minister. “I presume that I am dying; the doctor tells me that I have but a few hours to live.”
Mrs. Savor protested, “Oh, I guess you ain’t a-goin’ to die this time, Mr. Peck.” Annie looked from Dr. Morrell to Putney, who stood with him on the other side of the bed, and experienced a shock from their gravity without yet being able to accept the fact it implied. “There’s plenty of folks,” continued Mrs. Savor, “hurt worse’n what you be that’s alive to-day and as well as ever they was.”
Bolton seized his chance. “It’s just what I said to Pauliny, comin’ along. ‘You’ll see,’ said I, ‘Mr. Peck’ll be out as spry as any of us before a great whil
e.’ That’s the way I felt about it from the start.”
“All you got to do is to keep up courage,” said Mrs. Savor.
“That’s so; that’s half the battle,” said Bolton.
There were numbers of people in the room and at the door of the next. Annie saw Colonel Marvin and Jack Wilmington. She heard afterward that he was going to take the same train to Boston with Mr. Peck, and had helped to bring him to the Savors’ house. The stationmaster was there, and some other railroad employes.
The doctor leaned across the bed and lifted slightly the arm that lay there, taking the wrist between his thumb and finger. “I think we had better let Mr. Peck rest a while,” he said to the company generally, “We’re doing him no good.”
The people began to go; some of them said, “Well, good night!” as if they would meet again in the morning. They all made the pretence that it was a slight matter, and treated the wounded man as if he were a child. He did not humour the pretence, but said “Good-bye” in return for their “Good night” with a quiet patience.
Mrs. Savor hastened after her retreating guests. “I ain’t a-goin’ to let you go without a sup of coffee,” she said. “I want you should all stay and git some, and I don’t believe but what a little of it would do Mr. Peck good.”
The surface of her lugubrious nature was broken up, and whatever was kindly and cheerful in its depths floated to the top; she was almost gay in the demand which the calamity made upon her. Annie knew that she must have seen and helped to soothe the horror of mutilation which she could not even let her fancy figure, and she followed her foolish bustle and chatter with respectful awe.
“Rebecca’ll have it right off the stove in half a minute now,” Mrs. Savor concluded; and from a further room came the cheerful click of cups, and then a wandering whiff of the coffee; life in its vulgar kindliness touched and made friends with death, claiming it a part of nature too.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 345
