Annie Kilburn by W. D. Howells

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"You could have let him stay till he had found a suitable place," said Miss
Kilburn.

"Oh, I wa'n't goin' to do _that_," said Bolton. "But I'm 'bliged to
you just the same."

They came up in sight of the old square house, standing back a good
distance from the road, with a broad sweep of grass sloping down before it
into a little valley, and rising again to the wall fencing the grounds from
the street. The wall was overhung there by a company of magnificent elms,
which turned and formed one side of the avenue leading to the house. Their
tops met and mixed somewhat incongruously with those of the stiff dark
maples which more densely shaded the other side of the lane.

Bolton drove into their gloom, and then out into the wide sunny space at
the side of the house where Miss Kilburn had alighted so often with her
father. Bolton's dog, grown now so very old as to be weak-minded, barked
crazily at his master, and then, recognising him, broke into an imbecile
whimper, and went back and coiled his rheumatism up in the sun on a warm
stone before the door. Mrs. Bolton had to step over him as she came out,
formally supporting her right elbow with her left hand as she offered the
other in greeting to Miss Kilburn, with a look of question at her husband.

Miss Kilburn intercepted the look, and began to laugh.

All was unchanged, and all so strange; it seemed as if her father must both
get down with her from the carriage and come to meet her from the house.
Her glance involuntarily took in the familiar masses and details; the
patches of short tough grass mixed with decaying chips and small weeds
underfoot, and the spacious June sky overhead; the fine network and
blisters of the cracking and warping white paint on the clapboarding, and
the hills beyond the bulks of the village houses and trees; the woodshed
stretching with its low board arches to the barn, and the milk-pans tilted
to sun against the underpinning of the L, and Mrs. Bolton's pot plants in
the kitchen window.

"Did you think I could be hard about such a thing as that? It was perfectly
right. O Mrs. Bolton!" She stopped laughing and began to cry; she put away
Mrs. Bolton's carefully offered hand, she threw herself upon the bony
structure of her bosom, and buried her face sobbing in the leathery folds
of her neck.

Mrs. Bolton suffered her embrace above the old dog, who fled with a cry of
rheumatic apprehension from the sweep of Miss Kilburn's skirts, and then
came back and snuffed at them in a vain effort to recall her.

"Well, go in and lay down by the stove," said Mrs. Bolton, with a divided
interest, while she beat Miss Kilburn's back with her bony palm in sign of
sympathy. But the dog went off up the lane, and stood there by the pasture
bars, barking abstractedly at intervals.

IV.

Miss Kilburn found that the house had been well aired for her coming, but
an old earthy and mouldy smell, which it took days and nights of open doors
and windows to drive out, stole back again with the first turn of rainy
weather. She had fires built on the hearths and in the stoves, and after
opening her trunks and scattering her dresses on beds and chairs, she spent
most of the first week outside of the house, wandering about the fields and
orchards to adjust herself anew to the estranged features of the place.
The house she found lower-ceiled and smaller than she remembered it. The
Boltons had kept it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy
smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust
anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone.
But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which
repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice
of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks
of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches of the woodwork; but
she was not sure that they had not been there eleven years before; and
there were darnings in the carpets and curtains, which affected her with
the same mixture of novelty and familiarity. Certain stale smells about the
place (minor smells as compared with the prevalent odour) confused her; she
could not decide whether she remembered them of old, or was reminded of the
odours she used to catch in passing the pantry on the steamer.

Her father had never been sure that he would not return any next year or
month, and the house had always been ready to receive them. In his study
everything was as he left it. His daughter looked for signs of Mr. Peck's
occupation, but there were none; Mrs. Bolton explained that she had put
him in a table from her own sitting-room to write at. The Judge's desk was
untouched, and his heavy wooden arm-chair stood pulled up to it as if he
were in it. The ranks of law-books, in their yellow sheepskin, with their
red titles above and their black titles below, were in the order he had
taught Mrs. Bolton to replace them in after dusting; the stuffed owl on a
shelf above the mantel looked down with a clear solemnity in its gum-copal
eyes, and Mrs. Bolton took it from its perch to show Miss Kilburn that
there was not a moth on it, nor the sign of a moth.

Miss Kilburn experienced here that refusal of the old associations to take
the form of welcome which she had already felt in the earth and sky and air
outside; in everything there was a sense of impassable separation. Her dead
father was no nearer in his wonted place than the trees of the orchard, or
the outline of the well-known hills, or the pink of the familiar sunsets.
In her rummaging about the house she pulled open a chest of drawers which
used to stand in the room where she slept when a child. It was full of her
own childish clothing, a little girl's linen and muslin; and she thought
with a throe of despair that she could as well hope to get hack into these
outgrown garments, which the helpless piety of Mrs. Bolton had kept from
the rag-bag, as to think of re-entering the relations of the life so long
left off.

It surprised her to find how cold the Boltons were; she had remembered them
as always very kind and willing; but she was so used now to the ways of
the Italians and their showy affection, it was hard for her to realise
that people could be both kind and cold. The Boltons seemed ashamed of
their feelings, and hid them; it was the same in some degree with all the
villagers when she began to meet them, and the fact slowly worked back into
her consciousness, wounding its way in. People did not come to see her at
once. They waited, as they told her, till she got settled, before they
called, and then they did not appear very glad to have her back.

But this was not altogether the effect of their temperament. The Kilburns
had made a long summer always in Hatboro', and they had always talked of it
as home; but they had never passed a whole year there since Judge Kilburn
first went to Congress, and they were not regarded as full neighbours
or permanent citizens. Miss Kilburn, however, kept up her childhood
friendships, and she and some of the ladies called one another by their
Christian names, but they believed that she met people in Washington whom
she liked better; the winters she spent there certainly weakened the ties
between them, and when it came to those eleven years in Rome, the letters
they exchanged grew rarer and rarer, till they stopped altogether. Some of
the girls went away; some died; others became dead and absent to her in
their marriages and household cares.

After waiting for one another, three of them came together to see her one
day. They all kissed her, after a questioning glance at her face and dress,
as if they wanted to see whether she had grown proud or too fashionable.
But they were themselves apparently much better dressed, and certainly more
richly dressed. In a place like Hatboro', where there is no dinner-giving,
and evening parties are few, the best dress is a street costume, which
may be worn for calls and shopping, and for church and all public
entertainments. The well-to-do ladies make an effect of outdoor fashion, in
which the poorest shop hand has her part; and in their turn they share her
indoor simplicity. These old friends of Annie's wore bonnets and frocks of
the latest style and costly material.

They let her make the advances, receiving them with blank passivity,
or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their
self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her
when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her how thin she was,
but promised her that Hatboro' air would bring her up. At the same time
they feigned humility in regard to everything about Hatboro' but the air;
they laughed when she said she intended now to make it her home the whole
year round, and said they guessed she would be tired of it long before
fall; there were plenty of summer folks that passed the winter as long as
the June weather lasted. As they grew more secure of themselves, or less
afraid of one another in her presence, their voices rose; they laughed
loudly at nothing, and they yelled in a nervous chorus at times, each
trying to make herself heard above the others.

She asked them about the social life in the village, and they told her that
a good many new people had really settled there, but they did not know
whether she would like them; they were not the old Hatboro' style. Annie
showed them some of the things she had brought home, especially Roman
views, and they said now she ought to give an evening in the church parlour
with them.

"You'll have to come to our church, Annie," said Mrs. Putney. "The
Unitarian doesn't have preaching once in a month, and Mr. Peck is very
liberal."

"He's 'most _too_ liberal for some," said Emmeline Gerrish. Of the
three she had grown the stoutest, and from being a slight, light-minded
girl, she had become a heavy matron, habitually censorious in her speech.
She did not mean any more by it, however, than she did by her girlish
frivolity, and if she was not supported in her severity, she was apt to
break down and disown it with a giggle, as she now did.

"Well, I don't know about his being _too_ liberal," said Mrs.
Wilmington, a large red-haired blonde, with a lazy laugh. "He makes you
feel that you're a pretty miserable sinner." She made a grimace of humorous
disgust.

"Mr. Gerrish says that's just the trouble," Mrs. Gerrish broke in. "Mr.
Peck don't put stress enough on the promises. That's what Mr. Gerrish says.
You must have been surprised, Annie," she added, "to find that he'd been
staying in your house."

"I was glad Mrs. Bolton invited him," answered Annie sincerely, but not
instantly.

The ladies waited, with an exchange of glances, for her reply, as if they
had talked the matter over beforehand, and had agreed to find out just how
Annie Kilburn felt about it.

"Oh, I guess he paid his board," said Mrs. Wilmington, jocosely rejecting
the implication that he had been the guest of the Boltons.

"I don't see what he expects to do with that little girl of his, without
any mother, that way," said Mrs. Gerrish. "He ought to get married."

"Perhaps he will, when he's waited a proper time," suggested Mrs. Putney
demurely.

"Well, his wife's been the same as dead ever since the child was born. I
don't know what you call a proper time, Ellen," argued Mrs. Gerrish.

"I presume a minister feels differently about such things," Mrs. Wilmington
remarked indolently.

"I don't see why a minister should feel any different from anybody else,"
said Mrs. Gerrish. "It's his duty to do it on his child's account. I don't
see why he don't have the remains brought to Hatboro', anyway."

They debated this point at some length, and they seemed to forget Annie.
She listened with more interest than her concern in the last resting-place
of the minister's dead wife really inspired. These old friends of hers
seemed to have lost the sensitiveness of their girlhood without having
gained tenderness in its place. They treated the affair with a nakedness
that shocked her. In the country and in small towns people come face
to face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing,
household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial,
and whether the corpse appeared natural. But ever so much kindness goes
with their disillusion; they are blunted, but not embittered.

They ended by recalling Annie to mind, and Mrs. Putney said: "I suppose you
haven't been to the cemetery yet? I They've got it all fixed up since you
went away--drives laid out, and paths cut through, and everything. A good
many have put up family tombs, and they've taken away the old iron fences
round the lots, and put granite curbing. They mow the grass all the time.
It's a perfect garden." Mrs. Putney was a small woman, already beginning
to wrinkle. She had married a man whom Annie remembered as a mischievous
little boy, with a sharp tongue and a nervous temperament; her father had
always liked him when he came about the house, but Annie had lost sight of
him in the years that make small boys and girls large ones, and he was at
college when she went abroad. She had an impression of something unhappy in
her friend's marriage.

"I think it's _too_ much fixed up myself," said Mrs. Gerrish. She
turned suddenly to Annie: "You going to have your father fetched home?"

The other ladies started a little at the question and looked at Annie; it
was not that they were shocked, but they wanted to see whether she would
not be so.

"No," she said briefly. She added, helplessly, "It wasn't his wish."

"I should have thought he would have liked to be buried alongside of your
mother," said Mrs. Gerrish. "But the Judge always _was_ a little
peculiar. I presume you can have the name and the date put on the monument
just the same."

Annie flushed at this intimate comment and suggestion from a woman whom as
a girl she had never admitted to familiarity with her, but had tolerated
her because she was such a harmless simpleton, and hung upon other girls
whom she liked better. The word monument cowed her, however. She was afraid
they might begin to talk about the soldiers' monument. She answered
hastily, and began to ask them about their families.

Mrs. Wilmington, who had no children, and Mrs. Putney, who had one, spoke
of Mrs. Gerrish's large family. She had four children, and she refused the
praises of her friends for them, though she celebrated them herself. "You
ought to have seen the two little girls that Ellen lost, Annie," she said.
"Ellen Putney, I don't see how you ever got over that. Those two lovely,
healthy children gone, and poor little Winthrop left! I always did say it
was too hard."

She had married a clerk in the principal dry-goods store, who had prospered
rapidly, and was now one of the first business men of the place, and had an
ambition to be a leading citizen. She believed in his fitness to deal with
the questions of religion and education which he took part in, and was
always quoting Mr. Gerrish. She called him Mr. Gerrish so much that other
people began to call him so too. But Mrs. Putney's husband held out against
it, and had the habit of returning the little man's ceremonious salutations
with an easy, "Hello, Billy," "Good morning, Billy." It was his theory that
this was good for Gerrish, who might otherwise have forgotten when
everybody called him Billy. He was one of the old Putneys; and he was a
lawyer by profession.

Mrs. Wilmington's husband had come to Hatboro' since Annie's long absence
began; he had capital, and he had started a stocking-mill in Hatboro'.
He was much older than his wife, whom he had married after a protracted
widowerhood. She had one of the best houses and the most richly furnished
in Hatboro'. She and Mrs. Putney saw Mrs. Gerrish at rare intervals, and in
observance of some notable fact of their girlish friendship like the
present.

In pursuance of the subject of children, Mrs. Gerrish said that she
sometimes had a notion to offer to take Mr. Peck's little girl herself till
he could get fixed somehow, but Mr. Gerrish would not let her. Mr. Gerrish
said Mr. Peck had better get married himself if he wanted a step-mother for
his little girl. Mr. Gerrish was peculiar about keeping a family to itself.

"Well, you'll think _we've_ come to board with you _too_," said
Mrs. Putney, in reference to Mr. Peck.

The ladies all rose, and having got upon their feet, began to shout and
laugh again--like girls, they implied.

They stayed and talked a long time after rising, with the same note of
unsparing personality in their talk. Where there are few public interests
and few events, as in such places, there can be no small-talk, nothing of
the careless touch-and-go of larger societies. Every one knows all the
others, and knows the worst of them. People are not unkind; they are
mutually and freely helpful; but they have only themselves to occupy their
minds. Annie's friends had also to distinguish themselves to her from the
rest of the villagers, and it was easiest to do this by an attitude of
criticism mingled with large allowance. They ended a dissection of the
community by saying that they believed there was no place like Hatboro',
after all.

In the contagion of their perfunctory gaiety Annie began to scream and
laugh too, as she followed them to the door, and stood talking to them
while they got into Mrs. Wilmington's extension-top carry-all. She answered
with deafening promises, when they put their bonnets out of the carry-all
and called back to her to be sure to come soon to see them soon.

V.

Mrs. Bolton made no advances with Annie toward the discussion of her
friends; but when Annie asked about their families, she answered with the
incisive directness of a country-bred woman. She delivered her judgments as
she went about her work, the morning after the ladies' visit, while Annie
sat before the breakfast-table, which she had given her leave to clear. As
she passed in and out from the dining-room to the kitchen she kept talking;
she raised her voice in the further room, and lowered it when she drew near
again. She wore a dismal calico wrapper, which made no compromise with the
gauntness of her figure; her reddish-brown hair, which grew in a fringe
below her crown, was plaited into small tags or tails, pulled up and tied
across the top of her head, the bare surfaces of which were curiously
mottled with the dye which she sometimes put on her hair. Behind, this
was gathered up into a small knob pierced with a single hair-pin; the
arrangement left Mrs. Bolton's visage to the unrestricted expression of
character. She did not let it express toward Annie any expectation of the
confidential relations that are supposed to exist between people who have
been a long time master and servant. She had never recognised her relations
with the Kilburns in these terms. She was a mature Yankee single woman,
of confirmed self-respect, when she first came as house-keeper to Judge
Kilburn, twenty years ago, and she had not changed her nature in changing
her condition by her marriage with Oliver Bolton; she was childless, unless
his comparative youth conferred a sort of adoptive maternity upon her.

Annie went into her father's study, where she had lit the fire in the
Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the
night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its
face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but
toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her
window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching
and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of
the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean
boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled
maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the
storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a
northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down
before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day
before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young
girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise.
Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot
of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She
perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been;
and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the
distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the
natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as
hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she
could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had
always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain,
in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased
to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of
the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken
down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a
half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can
endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.

There is no condition of life that is wholly acceptable, but none that is
not tolerable when once it establishes itself; and while Annie Kilburn
had never consented to be an old maid, she had become one without great
suffering. At thirty-one she could not call herself anything else; she
often called herself an old maid, with the mental reservation that she was
not one. She was merely unmarried; she might marry any time. Now, when she
assured herself of this, as she had done many times before, she suddenly
wondered if she should ever marry; she wondered if she had seemed to her
friends yesterday like a person who would never marry. Did one carry such
a thing in one's looks? Perhaps they, idealised her; they had not seen her
since she was twenty, and perhaps they still thought of her as a young
girl. It now seemed to her as if she had left her youth in Rome, as in Rome
it had seemed to her that she should find it again in Hatboro'. A pang of
aimless, unlocalised homesickness passed through her; she realised that she
was alone in the world. She rose to escape the pang, and went to the window
of the parlour which looked toward the street, where she saw the figure of
a young man draped in a long indiarubber gossamer coat fluttering in the
wind that pushed him along as he tacked on a southerly course; he bowed
and twisted his head to escape the lash of the rain. She watched him till
he turned into the lane leading to the house, and then, at a discreeter
distance, she watched him through the window at the other corner, making
his way up to the front door in the teeth of the gale. He seemed to have a
bundle under his arm, and as he stepped into the shelter of the portico,
and freed his arm to ring, she discovered that it was a bundle of books.
Whether Mrs. Bolton did not hear the bell, or whether she heard it and
decided that it would be absurd to leave her work for it, when Miss
Kilburn, who was so much nearer, could answer it, she did not come, even at
a second ring, and Annie was forced to go to the door herself, or leave the
poor man dripping in the cold wind outside.

She had made up her mind, at sight of the books, that he was a canvasser
for some subscription book, such as used to come in her father's time, but
when she opened to him he took off his hat with a great deal of manner, and
said "Miss Kilburn?" with so much insinuation of gentle disinterestedness,
that it flashed upon her that it might be Mr. Peck.

"Yes," she said, with confusion, while the flash of conjecture faded away.

"Mr. Brandreth," said her visitor, whom she now saw to be much younger than
Mr. Peck could be. He looked not much more than twenty-two or twenty-three;
his damp hair waved and curled upon his temples and forehead, and his blue
eyes lightened from a beardless and freshly shaven face. "I called this
morning because I felt sure of finding you at home."

He smiled at his reference to the weather, and Annie smiled too as she
again answered, "Yes?" She did not want his books, but she liked something
that was cheerful and enthusiastic in him; she added, "Won't you step into
the study?"

"Thanks, yes," said the young man, flinging off his gossamer, and hanging
it up to drip into the pan of the hat rack. He gathered up his books from
the chair where he had laid them, and held them at his waist with both
hands, while he bowed her precedence beside the study door.

"I don't know," he began, "but I ought to apologise for coming on a day
like this, when you were not expecting to be interrupted."

"Oh no; I'm not at all busy. But you must have had courage to brave a storm
like this."

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