The night at Mrs. Munger’s came back to Annie from the immeasurable remoteness into which all the past had lapsed. She looked up at Dr. Morrell across the bed.
“Would you like to speak with Mr. Peck?” he asked officially. “Better do it now,” he said, with one of his short nods.
Putney came and set her a chair. She would have liked to fall on her knees beside the bed; but she took the chair, and drew the minister’s hand into hers, stretching her arm above his head on the pillow. He lay like some poor little wounded boy, like Putney’s Winthrop; the mother that is in every woman’s heart gushed out of hers in pity upon him, mixed with filial reverence. She had thought that she should confess her baseness to him, and ask his forgiveness, and offer to fulfil with the people he had chosen for the guardians of his child that interrupted purpose of his. But in the presence of death, so august, so simple, all the concerns of life seemed trivial, and she found herself without words. She sobbed over the poor hand she held. He turned his eyes upon her and tried to speak, but his lips only let out a moaning, shuddering sound, inarticulate of all that she hoped or feared he might prophesy to shape her future.
Life alone has any message for life, but from the beginning of time it has put its ear to the cold lips that must for ever remain dumb.
XXIX.
The evening after the funeral Annie took Idella, with the child’s clothes and toys in a bundle, and Bolton drove them down Over the Track to the Savors’. She had thought it all out, and she perceived that whatever the minister’s final intention might have been, she was bound by the purpose he had expressed to her, and must give up the child. For fear she might be acting from the false conscientiousness of which she was beginning to have some notion in herself, she put the case to Mrs. Bolton. She knew what she must do in any event, but it was a comfort to be stayed so firmly in her duty by Mrs. Bolton, who did not spare some doubts of Mrs. Savor’s fitness for the charge, and reflected a subdued censure even upon the judgment of Mr. Peck himself, as she bustled about and helped Annie get Idella and her belongings ready. The child watched the preparations with suspicion. At the end, when she was dressed, and Annie tried to lift her into the carriage, she broke out in sudden rebellion; she cried, she shrieked, she fought; the two good women who were obeying the dead minister’s behest were obliged to descend to the foolish lies of the nursery; they told her she was going on a visit to the Savors, who would take her on the cars with them, and then bring her back to Aunt Annie’s house. Before they could reconcile her to this fabled prospect they had to give it verisimilitude by taking off her everyday clothes and putting on her best dress.
She did not like Mrs. Savor’s house when she came to it, nor Mrs. Savor, who stopped, all blowzed and work-deranged from trying to put it in order after the death in it, and gave Idella a motherly welcome. Annie fancied a certain surprise in her manner, and her own ideal of duty was put to proof by Mrs. Savor’s owning that she had not expected Annie to bring Idella to her right away.
“If I had not done it at once, I never could have done it,” Annie explained.
“Well, I presume it’s a cross,” said Mrs. Savor, “and I don’t feel right to take her. If it wa’n’t for what her father—”
“‘Sh!” Annie said, with a significant glance.
“It’s an ugly house!” screamed the child. “I want to go back to my Aunt Annie’s house. I want to go on the cars.”
“Yes, yes,” answered Mrs. Savor, blindly groping to share in whatever cheat had been practised on the child, “just as soon as the cars starts. Here, William, you take her out and show her the pretty coop you be’n makin’ the pigeons, to keep the cats out.”
They got rid of her with Savor’s connivance for the moment, and Annie hastened to escape.
“We had to tell her she was going a journey, or we never could have got her into the carriage,” she explained, feeling like a thief.
“Yes, yes. It’s all right,” said Mrs. Savor. “I see you’d be’n putting up some kind of job on her the minute she mentioned the cars. Don’t you fret any, Miss Kilburn. Rebecca and me’ll get along with her, you needn’t be afraid.”
Annie could not look at the empty crib where it stood in its alcove when she went to bed; and she cried upon her own pillow with heart-sickness for the child, and with a humiliating doubt of her own part in hurrying to give it up without thought of Mrs. Savor’s convenience. What had seemed so noble, so exemplary, began to wear another colour; and she drowsed, worn out at last by the swarming fears, shames, and despairs, which resolved themselves into a fantastic medley of dream images. There was a cat trying to get at the pigeons in the coop which Mr. Savor had carried Idella to see. It clawed and miauled at the lattice-work of lath, and its caterwauling became like the cry of a child, so like that it woke Annie from her sleep, and still kept on. She lay shuddering a moment; it seemed as if the dead minister’s ghost flitted from the room, while the crying defined and located itself more and more, till she knew it a child’s wail at the door of her house. Then she heard, “Aunt Annie! Aunt Annie!” and soft, faint thumps as of a little fist upon the door panels.
She had no experience of more than one motion from her bed to the door, which the same impulse flung open and let her crush to her breast the little tumult of sobs and moans from the threshold.
“Oh, wicked, selfish, heartless wretch!” she stormed out over the child. “But now I will never, never, never give you up! Oh, my poor little baby! my darling! God has sent you back to me, and I will keep you, I don’t care what happens! What a cruel wretch I have been — oh, what a cruel wretch, my pretty! — to tear you from your home! But now you shall never leave it; no one shall take you away.” She gripped it in a succession of fierce hugs, and mumbled it — face and neck, and little cold wet hands and feet — with her kisses; and all the time she did not know the child was in its night-dress like herself, or that her own feet were bare, and her drapery as scanty as Idella’s.
A sense of the fact evanescently gleamed upon her with the appearance of Mrs. Bolton, lamp in hand, and the instantaneous appearance and disappearance of her husband at the back door through which she emerged. The two women spent the first moments of the lamp-light in making certain that Idella was sound and whole in every part, and then in making uncertain for ever how she came to be there. Whether she had wandered out in her sleep, and found her way home with dream-led feet, or whether she had watched till the house was quiet, and then stolen away, was what she could not tell them, and must always remain a mystery.
“I don’t believe but what Mr. Bolton had better go and wake up the Savors. You got to keep her for the night, I presume, but they’d ought to know where she is, and you can take her over there agin, come daylight.”
“Mrs. Bolton!” shouted Annie, in a voice so deep and hoarse that it shook the heart of a woman who had never known fear of man. “If you say such a thing to me — if you ever say such a thing again — I — I — I will hit you! Send Mr. Bolton for Idella’s things — right away!”
“Land!” said Mrs. Savor, when Bolton, after a long conciliatory preamble, explained that he did not believe Miss Kilburn felt a great deal like giving the child up again. “I don’t want it without it’s satisfied to stay. I see last night it was just breakin’ its heart for her, and I told William when we first missed her this mornin’, and he was in such a pucker about her, I bet anything he was a mind to that the child had gone back to Miss Kilburn’s. That’s just the words I used; didn’t I, Rebecca? I couldn’t stand it to have no child grievin’ around.”
Beyond this sentimental reluctance, Mrs. Savor later confessed to Annie herself that she was really accepting the charge of Idella in the same spirit of self-sacrifice as that in which Annie was surrendering it, and that she felt, when Mr. Peck first suggested it, that the child was better off with Miss Kilburn; only she hated to say so. Her husband seemed to think it would make up to her for the one they lost, but nothing could really do that.
XXX.
In a reverie of rare vividness following her recovery of the minister’s child, Annie Kilburn dramatised an escape from all the failures and humiliations of her life in Hatboro’. She took Idella with her and went back to Rome, accomplishing the whole affair so smoothly and rapidly that she wondered at herself for not having thought of such a simple solution of her difficulties before. She even began to put some little things together for her flight, while she explained to old friends in the American colony that Idella was the orphan child of a country minister, which she had adopted. That old lady who had found her motives in returning to Hatboro’ insufficient questioned her sharply why she had adopted the minister’s child, and did not find her answers satisfactory. They were such as also failed to pacify inquiry in Hatboro’, where Annie remained, in spite of her reverie; but people accepted the fact, and accounted for it in their own way, and approved it, even though they could not quite approve her.
The dramatic impressiveness of the minister’s death won him undisputed favour, yet it failed to establish unity in his society. Supply after supply filled his pulpit, but the people found them all unsatisfactory when they remembered his preaching, and could not make up their minds to any one of them. They were more divided than ever, except upon the point of regretting Mr. Peck. But they distinguished, in honouring his memory. They revered his goodness and his wisdom, but they regarded his conduct of life as unpractical. They said there never was a more inspired teacher, but it was impossible to follow him, and he could not himself have kept the course he had marked out. They said, now that he was beyond recall, no one else could have built up the church in Hatboro’ as he could, if he could only have let impracticable theories alone. Mr. Gerrish called many people to witness that this was what he had always said. He contended that it was the spirit of the gospel which you were to follow. He said that if Mr. Peck had gone to teaching among the mill hands, he would have been sick of it inside of six weeks; but he was a good Christian man, and no one wished less than Mr. Gerrish to reproach him for what was, after all, more an error of the head than the heart. His critics had it their own way in this, for he had not lived to offer that full exposition of his theory and justification of his purpose which he had been expected to give on the Sunday after he was killed; and his death was in no wise exegetic. It said no more to his people than it had said to Annie; it was a mere casualty; and his past life, broken and unfulfilled, with only its intimations and intentions of performance, alone remained.
When people learned, as they could hardly help doing from Mrs. Savor’s volubility, what his plan with regard to Idella had been, they instanced that in proof of the injuriousness of his idealism as applied to real life; and they held that she had been remanded in that strange way to Miss Kilburn’s charge for some purpose which she must not attempt to cross. As the minister had been thwarted in another intent by death, it was a sign that he was wrong in this too, and that she could do better by the child than he had proposed.
This was the sum of popular opinion; and it was further the opinion of Mrs. Gerrish, who gave more attention to the case than many others, that Annie had first taken the child because she hoped to get Mr. Peck, when she found she could not get Dr. Morrell; and that she would have been very glad to be rid of it if she had known how, but that she would have to keep it now for shame’s sake.
For shame’s sake certainly, Annie would have done several other things, and chief of these would have been never to see Dr. Morrell again. She believed that he not only knew the folly she had confessed to him, but that he had divined the cowardice and meanness in which she had repented it, and she felt intolerably disgraced before the thought of him. She had imagined mainly because of him that escape to Rome which never has yet been effected, though it might have been attempted if Idella had not wakened ill from the sleep she sobbed herself into when she found herself safe in Annie’s crib again.
She had taken a heavy cold, and she moped lifelessly about during the day, and drowsed early again in the troubled cough-broken slumber.
“That child ought to have the doctor,” said Mrs. Bolton, with the grim impartiality in which she masked her interference.
“Well,” said Annie helplessly.
At the end of the lung fever which followed, “It was a narrow chance,” said the doctor one morning; “but now I needn’t come any more unless you send for me.”
Annie stood at the door, where he spoke with his hand on the dash-board of his buggy before getting into it.
She answered with one of those impulses that come from something deeper than intention. “I will send for you, then — to tell you how generous you are,” and in the look with which she spoke she uttered the full meaning that her words withheld.
He flushed for pleasure of conscious desert, but he had to laugh and turn it off lightly. “I don’t think I could come for that. But I’ll look in to see Idella unprofessionally.”
He drove away, and she remained at her door looking up at the summer blue sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such glimpses do. Of her high intentions, nothing had resulted. An inexorable centrifugality had thrown her off at every point where she tried to cling. Nothing of what was established and regulated had desired her intervention; a few accidents and irregularities had alone accepted it. But now she felt that nothing withal had been lost; a magnitude, a serenity, a tolerance, intimated itself in the universal frame of things, where her failure, her recreancy, her folly, seemed for the moment to come into true perspective, and to show venial and unimportant, to be limited to itself, and to be even good in its effect of humbling her to patience with all imperfection and shortcoming, even her own. She was aware of the cessation of a struggle that has never since renewed itself with the old intensity; her wishes, her propensities, ceased in that degree to represent evil in conflict with the portion of good in her; they seemed so mixed and interwoven with the good that they could no longer be antagonised; for the moment they seemed in their way even wiser and better, and ever after to be the nature out of which good as well as evil might come.
As she remained standing there, Mr. Brandreth came round the corner of the house, looking very bright and happy.
“Miss Kilburn,” he said abruptly, “I want you to congratulate me. I’m engaged to Miss Chapley.”
“Are you indeed, Mr. Brandreth? I do congratulate you with all my heart. She is a lovely girl.”
“Yes, it’s all right now,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I’ve come to tell you the first one, because you seemed to take an interest in it when I told you of the trouble about the Juliet. We hadn’t come to any understanding before that, but that seemed to bring us both to the point, and — and we’re engaged. Mother and I are going to New York for the winter; we think she can risk it; and at any rate she won’t be separated from me; and we shall be back in our little home next May. You know that I’m to be with Mr. Chapley in his business?”
“Why, no! This is great news, Mr. Brandreth! I don’t know what to say.”
“You’re very kind,” said the young man, and for the third or fourth time he wrung her hand. “It isn’t a partnership, of course; but he thinks I can be of use to him.”
“I know you can!” Annie adventured.
“We are very busy getting ready — nearly everybody else is gone — and mother sent her kindest regards — you know she don’t make calls — and I just ran up to tell you. Well, good-bye!”
“Good-bye! Give my love to your mother, and to your-to Miss Chapley.”
“I will.” He hurried off, and then came running back. “Oh, I forgot! About the Social Union fund. You know we’ve got about two hundred dollars from the the
atricals, but the matter seems to have stopped there, and some of us think there’d better be some other disposition of the money. Have you any suggestion to make?”
“No, none.”
“Then I’ll tell you. It’s proposed to devote the money to beautifying the grounds around the soldiers’ monument. They ought to be fenced and planted with flowers — turned into a little public garden. Everybody appreciates the interest you took in the Union, and we hoped you’d be pleased with that disposition of the money.”
“It is very kind,” said Annie, with a meek submission that must have made him believe she was deeply touched.
“As I’m not to be here this winter,” he continued, “we thought we had better leave the whole matter in your hands, and the money has been deposited in the bank subject to your order. It was Mrs. Munger’s idea. I don’t think she’s ever felt just right about that evening of the dramatics, don’t you know. Good-bye!”
He ran off to escape her thanks for this proof of confidence in her taste and judgment, and he was gone beyond her protest before she emerged from her daze into a full sense of the absurdity of the situation.
“Well, it’s a very simple matter to let the money lie in the bank,” said Dr. Morrell, who came that evening to make his first unprofessional visit, and received with pure amusement the account of the affair, which she gave him with a strong infusion of vexation.
“The way I was involved in this odious Social Union business from the first, and now have it left on my hands in the end, is maddening. Why, I can’t get rid of it!” she replied.
“Then, perhaps,” he comfortably suggested, “it’s a sign you’re not intended to get rid of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you go on,” he irresponsibly adventured further, “and establish a Social Union?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 346
