Annie Kilburn by W. D. Howells

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XXVI.

Annie knew from the light in the kitchen window that Mrs. Bolton, who had
not gone to the meeting, was there, and she inferred from the silence of
the house that Bolton had not yet come home. She went up to her room, and
after a glance at Idella asleep in her crib, she began to lay off her
things. Then she sat down provisionally by the open window, and looked out
into the still autumnal night. The air was soft and humid, with a scent of
smoke in it from remote forest fires. The village lights showed themselves
dimmed by the haze that thickened the moonless dark.

She heard steps on the gravel of the lane, and then two men talking, one
of whom she knew to be Bolton. In a little while the back entry door was
opened and shut, and after a brief murmur of voices in the library Mrs.
Bolton knocked on the door-jamb of the room where Annie sat.

"What is it, Mrs. Bolton?"

"You in bed yet?"

"No; I'm here by the window. What is it?"

"Well, I don't know but what you'll think it's pretty late for callers, but
Mr. Peck is down in the library. I guess he wants to speak with you about
Idella. I told him he better see _you_."

"I will come right down."

She followed Mrs. Bolton to the foot of the stairs, where she kept on to
the kitchen, while Annie turned into the library. Mr. Peck stood beside her
father's desk, resting one hand on it and holding his hat in the other.

"Won't you be seated, Mr. Peck?"

"I thank you. It's only for a moment. I am going away to-morrow, and I wish
to speak with you about Idella."

"Yes, certainly. But surely you are not going to leave Hatboro', Mr. Peck!
I hoped--we all did--that after what you had seen of the strong feeling in
your favour to-night you would reconsider your determination and stay with
us!" She went on impetuously. "You must know--you must understand now--how
much good you can do here--more than any one else--more than you could do
anywhere else. I don't believe that you realise how much depends upon your
staying here. You can't stop the dissensions by going away; it will only
make them worse. You saw how Colonel Marvin and Mr. Wilmington were with
you; and Mr. Gates--all classes. I oughtn't to speak--to attempt to teach
you your duty; I'm not of your church; and I can only tell you how it seems
to me: that you never can find another place where your principles--your
views--"

He waited for her to go on; but she really had nothing more to say, and he
began: "I am not hoping for another charge elsewhere, at least not for the
present; but I am satisfied that my usefulness here is at an end, and I do
not think that my going away will make matters worse. Whether I go or stay,
the dissensions will continue. At any rate, I believe that there are those
who need help more, and whom I can help more, in another field--"

"Yes," she broke in, with a woman's relevancy to the immediate point,
"there is nothing to do here."

He went on as if she had not spoken: "I am going to Fall River to-morrow,
where I have heard that there is work for me--"

"In the mills!" she exclaimed, recurring in thought to what he had once
said of his work in them. "Surely you don't mean that!" The sight, the
smell, the tumult of the work she had seen that day in the mill with Lyra
came upon her with all their offence. "To throw away all that you have
learnt, all that you have become to others!"

"I am less and less confident that I have become anything useful to others
in turning aside from the life of toil and presuming to attempt the
guidance of those who remained in it. But I don't mean work in the mills,"
he continued, "or not at first, or not unless it seems necessary to my work
with those who work in them. I have a plan--or if it hardly deserves that
name, a design--of being useful to them in such ways as my own experience
of their life in the past shall show me in the light of what I shall see
among them now. I needn't trouble you with it."

"Oh yes!" she interposed.

"I do not expect to preach at once, but only to teach in one of the public
schools, where I have heard of a vacancy, and--and--perhaps otherwise. With
those whose lives are made up of hard work there must be room for willing
and peaceful service. And if it should be necessary that I should work in
the mills in order to render this, then I will do so; but at present I
have another way in view--a social way that shall bring me into immediate
relations with the people." She still tried to argue with him, to prove him
wrong in going away, but they both ended where they began. He would not or
could not explain himself further. At last he said: "But I did not come to
urge this matter. I have no wish to impose my will, my theory, upon any
one, even my own child."

"Oh yes--Idella!" Annie broke in anxiously. "You will leave her with me,
Mr. Peck, won't you? You don't know how much I'm attached to her. I see her
faults, and I shall not spoil her. Leave her with me at least till you see
your way clear to having her with you, and then I will send her to you."

A trouble showed itself in his face, ordinarily so impassive, and he seemed
at a loss how to answer her; but he said: "I--appreciate your kindness to
her, but I shall not ask you to be at the inconvenience longer than till
to-morrow. I have arranged with another to take her until I am settled, and
then bring her to me."

Annie sat intensely searching his face, with her lips parted to speak.
"_Another!_" she said, and the wounded feeling, the resentment of his
insensibility to her good-will, that mingled in her heart, must have made
itself felt in her voice, for he went on reluctantly--

"It is a family in which she will be brought up to work and to be helpful
to herself. They will join me with her. You know the mother--she has lost
her own child--Mrs. Savor."

At the name, Annie's spirit fell; the tears started from her eyes. "Yes,
she must have her. It is just--it is the only expiation. Don't you remember
that it was I who sent Mrs. Savor's baby to the sea-shore, where it died?"

"No; I had forgotten," said the minister, aghast. "I am sorry--"

"It doesn't matter," said Annie lifelessly; "it had to be." After a pause,
she asked quietly, "If Mrs. Savor is going to work in the mills, how can
she make a home for the child?"

"She is not going into the mills," he answered. "She will keep house for
us all, and we hope to have others who are without homes of their own join
us in paying the expenses and doing the work, so that all may share its
comfort without gain to any one upon their necessity of food and shelter."

She did not heed his explanation, but suddenly entreated: "Let me go with
you. I will not be a trouble to you, and I will help as well as I can. I
can't give the child up! Why--why"--the thought, crazy as it would have
once seemed, was now such a happy solution of the trouble that she smiled
hopefully--"why shouldn't I go with Mr. and Mrs. Savor, and help to make a
home for Idella there? You will need money to begin your work; I will give
you mine. I will give it up--I will give it all up. I will give it to any
good object that you approve; or you may have it, to do what you think best
with; and I will go with Idella and I will work in the mills there--or
anything."

He shook his head, and for the first time in their acquaintance he seemed
to feel compassion for her. "It isn't possible. I couldn't take your money;
I shouldn't know what to do with it."

"You know what to do with your own," she broke in. "You do good with that!"

"I'm afraid I do harm with it too," he returned. "It's only a little, but
little as it has been, I can no longer meet the responsibility it brings."

"But if you took my money," she urged, "you could devote your life to
preaching the truth, to writing and publishing books, and all that; and so
could others: don't you see?"

He shook his head. "Perhaps others; but I have done with preaching for the
present. Later I may have something to say. Now I feel sure of nothing, not
even of what I've been saying here."

"Will you send for Idella? When she goes with the Savors I will come too!"

He looked at her sorrowfully. "I think you are a good woman, and you mean
what you say. But I am sorry you say it, if any words of mine have caused
you to say it, for I know you cannot do it. Even for me it is hard to go
back to those associations, and for you they would be impossible."

"You will see," she returned, with exaltation. "I will take Idella to the
Savors' to-morrow--or no; I'll have them come here!"

He stood looking at her in perplexity. At last he asked, "Could I see the
child?"

"Certainly!" said Annie, with the lofty passion that possessed her, and she
led him up into the chamber where Idella lay sleeping in Annie's own crib.

He stood beside it, gazing long at the little one, from whose eyes he
shaded the lamp. Then he said, "I thank you," and turned away.

She followed him down-stairs, and at the door she said: "You think I will
not come; but I will come. Don't you believe that?"

He turned sadly from her. "You might come, but you couldn't stay. You don't
know what it is; you can't imagine it, and you couldn't bear it."

"I will come, and I will stay," she answered; and when he was gone she
fell into one of those intense reveries of hers--a rapture in which she
prefigured what should happen in that new life before her. At its end
Mr. Peck stood beside her grave, reading the lesson of her work to the
multitude of grateful and loving poor who thronged to pay the last tribute
to her memory. Putney was there with his wife, and Lyra regretful of her
lightness, and Mrs. Munger repentant of her mendacities. They talked
together in awe-stricken murmurs of the noble career just ended. She heard
their voices, and then she began to ask herself what they would really say
of her proposing to go to Fall River with the Savors and be a mill-hand.

XXVII.

Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the
tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet
her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till
morning.

The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion
that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions,
all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had
heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.

She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast,
and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one
silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the
sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her
revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was
like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her
pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been
purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them
the more obligatory.

She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the
time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs.
Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from
the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance
which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.

She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was
inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things
she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies
gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy
of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.

By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell's custom to come
nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her
from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for
him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she
wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck;
and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound
of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her
even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her
that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and
persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter
of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her:
his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own
constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed
nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror
of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.

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 erase."

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.

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