WHAT OLDFIELD THOUGHT AND SAID
Thus it was that all the peace and beauty of those glorious midsummer days brought neither rest nor pleasure to Anne.
The quiet awakening of the tranquil world, soft as the tenderest trembling of a harp; the first musical tinkling that came murmuring up from the misty meadows with the earliest stirring of the flocks and herds; the gentle calling of the dumb creatures; the aerial flute notes wafted down the leafy arches of the dew-wet woods; the palest glory of the dawn coming for the perpetual refreshment of the earth; the final coronation of the Day King with the marshalling of his dazzling lances through the royal red and gold of the hilltops,—all these wonders of a marvellously beautiful world were to Anne but the dreaded daily summons to the renewal of a hopeless conflict.
It was like her never to think of sitting elsewhere than in the old place—at her husband's side by the open window—after beginning to play cards. It would have been utterly unlike her to have thought of doing anything else, to have considered for a moment what her neighbors might think or say. For hers was a nature condemned at its creation to a loneliness even greater than that in which every soul must forever dwell apart. All her life she had lived as one alone on a desert island. Now, under this supreme anguish of living, the amazed gaze of the whole world, its approval or its disapproval, would have been to her—had she thought of it—no more than the moaning of the winter wind through the graveyard cedars.
And yet, naturally enough, this utter unconsciousness upon Anne's part did not lessen in the least the shock which the entire community felt on seeing her—Anne Watson—of all women in all the world at the card-table by the open window, in view of everybody passing along the big road! Those who first saw the incredible sight could scarcely believe their own eyes. Those who first heard of it utterly refused to credit it until they had made a special trip up and down the big road, twice passing the window, in order to see and to make sure for themselves. And then, when there was no longer room for doubt or dispute, a sort of panic seized the good people of Oldfield. With this appalling backsliding of Anne Watson's the whole religious and social fabric seemed suddenly going to pieces.
Only Lynn Gordon and the doctor knew the truth. Lynn had not told his grandmother of Anne's visit nor of her request. His grandmother was not one to whom he would have spoken of anything which had touched him keenly or moved him deeply. And he had even not told Doris, whom he would most naturally have trusted, certain of being understood, certain, too, of sympathy for Anne. A feeling of delicate consideration for Anne, a sense that she had trusted him, only because she could not do otherwise, that she had opened her reserved heart to him, who was almost a stranger, only because she was forced to do it, under terrible necessity,—all these mingled feelings had a part in holding him silent. To the doctor alone he felt that he should give a full account of what had taken place. But when he tried to tell even him, Lynn unexpectedly found it very hard to make Anne's motives and position as clear to another person as he had felt them to be. He realized for the first time that she had somehow made him feel much more than she had been able to put into words. She had so few words—poor Anne—and the few that she had were meagre indeed. The impulsive, warm-hearted young fellow stammered, and reddened, and laughed at himself, in a manly embarrassment that was a pleasant thing to see, as he tried clumsily to put the matter before the doctor in its true light, and in a way to do justice to Anne. Fortunately the doctor understood at once, and might have understood had the young man said even less than he finally found to say. That friend of humanity had learned something of Anne's character during her husband's long illness. Two earnest natures, stripped for a shoulder to shoulder contest with death over a sick-bed, come as near, perhaps, to knowing one another as any two souls may ever approach. A doctor's very calling, moreover, must reveal to him—as hardly the confessional can reveal to another man—the winding mazes of the simplest, sincerest woman's conscience.
When the doctor went home after talking with Lynn, he tried to show his wife that there was no occasion for the widespread excitement over this unaccountable change in Anne. He hoped that an off-hand word to his wife might have some effect in settling the swirl of gossip which circled the village, faster and faster, with Anne's continued appearance at the card-table, as the continual casting of pebbles agitates a stagnant pool. But Mrs. Alexander, good, kind, charitable woman though she was, could only sigh and shake her head. She said that she had never understood Anne, but that she had always respected her sincerity, no matter how widely she herself might differ in opinion. But what could anybody think or say of Anne's sincerity now? The doctor's wife cast a shocked, frightened, glance at the Watson house. Such open, flagrant backsliding really was enough to make the lightning strike.
And Mrs. Alexander's view was the one held by most of the Oldfield ladies, all of whom took the incomprehensible affair much to heart. Only Miss Judy and Kitty Mills saw nothing to alarm, nothing to wonder at, nothing in the least unnatural in Anne's change of attitude. But then, Miss Judy was well known to believe that everybody always had some praiseworthy motive for everything, if others were only clear-sighted enough to perceive it. Her pure mind was a flawless crystal, reflecting every ray of light from many exquisite prisms, but sending nothing out of actual darkness. And no one ever regarded seriously the views of Kitty Mills, who was notoriously willing for every one to do precisely as he liked, as nearly as he could, without any explanation or any reason whatever, so that her opinion had the very slight value which usually pertains to the opinions of the easily pleased. All the other Oldfield ladies were too deeply shocked, too utterly amazed, to know what to think, or what to say, or what to do. They could only gather in solemn, excited conclave at one another's houses, and discuss the situation daily and almost hourly, with growing wonder and bated breath.
Sidney was, of course, the central figure in this, as in all other things vital to the life of the village. As much at a loss for once as the dullest, she held nevertheless to her high esteem for Anne, and in canvassing the strangeness of the latter's conduct from house to house, as she felt compelled to canvass it, she invariably spoke of her with great kindness, even while admitting that it would be hard for a Philadelphia lawyer to find out what Anne meant by whirling round like a weathercock. It is likely that Sidney took off her bonnet and let down her hair oftener, and shook it out harder, and twisted it up tighter, at this time, than at any other period of her entire professional career. She used, indeed, to stop all along the big road—anywhere—and hang her bonnet on the fence, while she shook her hair down and twisted it up again; and her knitting-needles flew faster than they had ever done before or ever did afterward. One day, as she happened to be entering the doctor's gate to keep an important engagement with Mrs. Alexander, she saw Miss Pettus standing before the Watson house, gazing at the window,—which had now become the stage of a mystery play,—and not only gazing, but staring as if some dreadful sight had suddenly turned her to stone. Sidney called to her, but she did not turn or respond in any way for some minutes; and when she finally joined Sidney and the doctor's wife on the latter's porch, where they were sitting, she was really pale from agitation and actually sputtering with excitement.
"Chips!" she gasped, sinking into a chair. "Poker chips. I saw 'em with my own eyes and heard 'em with my own ears! I give you both my sacred word as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church in good standing."
"Poker chips are neither here nor there," said Sidney, in the lofty, judicial tone which she had maintained throughout the controversy.
She eyed Miss Pettus, however, silently and a little severely, as she loosed several rounds of yarn from her big ball, and held them out and deliberately shook them apart at arm's length. It did not please her to hear of poker chips—or anything else of interest—through Miss Pettus or any other person. It was her own special and exclusive province to discover and distribute the news. She felt much as the editor of a great daily newspaper might feel if some casual passer-by should drop in to tell him of the day's greatest public event.
"Poker chips are neither here nor there," she repeated coolly, and almost contemptuously, as one looking to larger things. "No matter what Anne Watson does, and no matter how she does it, there's one thing that you may always be sure of, Miss Pettus, and that is—that she believes she is doing right."
"Who said she didn't?" retorted Miss Pettus. "Have I said anything about the right or wrong of it? I don't care anything about the right or wrong of card-playing. Some folks think one way and some another—and they may go on thinking so for all me. What I do say is that a body ought to stick to what she does believe, whatever it is, no matter whether she's a Methodist like me or a Christian like Anne."
"Well—'pon my word!" exclaimed Sidney, seeing a chance for reprisal, and furtively winking the eye next to the doctor's wife. "To hear you talk, Miss Pettus, folks would think there wasn't anybody but Methodists and Christians. Where, pray, do the rest of us come in? There's Jane there—a Cumberland Presbyterian, dyed blue in the wool. Yonder's Miss Judy, an Episcopalian of the highest latitude and the greatest longitude, and a-training Doris to be just like her. And here am I—a Baptist—a Baptist born and a Baptist bred—and a Whiskey Baptist at that."
"If I were you, Sidney Wendall," replied Miss Pettus, with offended dignity, "I wouldn't make fun of my own religion if I did make fun of every other earthly thing I came across. You know as well as I do, and as Jane here does, that there is no such thing as a Whiskey Baptist—and never was and never will be."
"No such thing as a Whiskey Baptist?" exclaimed Sidney, pretending to be wholly in earnest, and slyly winking again at the doctor's wife. "Then what, may I ask, would you have called my own father and his only brother—two church members in good and regular standing, and two as good and highly respected citizens as this Pennyroyal Region ever had, to boot? What else could you call them, I ask you, 'Mandy Pettus? Didn't they always pay their debts on the stroke of the town clock, and to a hundred cents on the dollar? Didn't they always vote the straight Democratic ticket for fifty years, without ever a scratch from end to end? Didn't they always get drunk on every county court day of their lives, and keep sober all the rest of the year? No Whiskey Baptists indeed!"
"What's all that tirade got to do with what I said about Anne's—and everybody's—being what they pretend to be?" fumed Miss Pettus. "That's what I said and what I'll keep on saying as long as I have the breath to speak my honest mind. And I'll say it about anybody, no matter who, just the same. Chopping and changing till a body don't know where to find you, looks to me just as bad in one denomination as another. And levity in those who ought to be serious-minded is levity to me wherever I find it. Now, look at our own circuit rider, only last Sunday! After that powerful sermon which warmed up the whole town, and shook the dry bones, what did he do?—right out of the pulpit, too,—but stop and hang over the fence like a schoolboy for a laughing confab with Kitty Mills! There she was, of course, standing out in the broiling sun with nothing but her apron thrown over her silly head, while you could hear old man Mills scolding her, the whole blessed time, at the top of his peevish voice. It was perfectly scandalous and nothing but scandalous to see such goings-on on the Lord's Day. Kitty was telling him about her late young turkeys getting out in that last hard rain and holding up their heads with their mouths wide open, till the last one of them drowned. As if there was anything uncommon or funny in that; as if everybody didn't know that young turkeys always did that whenever they got a chance. And the simpletons were both laughing as if they'd never heard such a joke, and as if it had been Monday instead of Sunday, and the circuit rider hadn't had any good work to do."
"Maybe he thinks that is a part of his good work," said the doctor's wife, gently. "Kitty Mills surely needs all the kindness she can get outside her own family, poor thing, though she doesn't seem to know it."
Sidney smiled at a sudden recollection. "I passed there yesterday, in the heat of the day, and saw her in the garden bending over and pulling the weeds out of her handful of vegetables. It made me real uneasy to look at her leaning down so long and steady, and her so short and stout, and I said so. But she only laughed till she cried, and declared there wasn't any danger except to her corset-boards. Then, when she could speak for laughing, she said she had saved almost enough to stick her bunch peas. And,—if you'll believe it,—Sam left the garden gate open last night, and the pigs got in and eat every one of 'em up."
"The corset-boards?" gasped Miss Pettus, in a tone of blank amazement, which implied, nevertheless, that she would not be in the least surprised at anything happening to Kitty Mills.
Sidney eyed Miss Pettus humorously, as she loosed more rounds of yarn from her big ball, holding it out again at arm's length; but there was no time for any reply had she thought it worth while to make one, for Mrs. Alexander's cook appeared in the doorway just at that moment, to say that supper was ready, and, following the hostess, the guest went to enjoy it without allowing it to grow cold. The table had been set on the back porch, which was on the side of the house that was most pleasant at that hour. And a truly pleasant place it was, with its whitewashed pillars, its cool green curtains of Madeira vine, so waxen of leaf and so frost-like in flower, and with its green and restful environment of grass and fruit trees. The table stood directly before the back door of the open passage. Sidney's seat faced the big road, and she had scarcely seated herself, when, chancing to glance up, she saw Lynn and Doris as they passed, going along the big road. She said nothing, however, of having seen them; she was always reserved about her own private affairs, and then she was still holding fast to her early determination to leave the young couple entirely free to follow the natural lead of their own hearts. But the glimpse of them reminded her of an uneasy suspicion that old lady Gordon was not so minded, a suspicion which had occurred to her that day for the first time. Now, therefore, with the unhesitating decision characteristic of her in all things, she resolved, then and there, to talk it over with Miss Judy as soon as she could get away from the supper table.
But it was never easy for Sidney to get away; a hostess, paying the stipulated price of a high-priced entertainer, rightfully expects to get the worth of her fee. No one knew this better than Sidney herself, and she accordingly so exerted her utmost ability, so put forth her most brilliant talent, that she fully made up for the shortened time; and the only regret upon the part of the hostess was that such a delightful entertainment should ever come to an end. Miss Pettus, also, was sorry to have Sidney go; and, now quite restored to good humor, she whispered to her, as they parted at the gate,—one going up the big road and one going down,—that she meant to send Kitty Mills a couple of young turkeys that very night, just to keep her from behaving so like a simpleton the next time the circuit rider went by, and just to make her see how shamefully she had behaved about that stubborn old dorminica.
Out into the dim, dusty highway Sidney now swung, with her long, free, fearless, independent step, which seemed to ask nothing of life and the world but to be allowed to go her own way; walking and knitting as fast as though the dusk had been daylight. Reaching Miss Judy's house she found the little sisters sitting happily side by side just within the open door of the unlighted passage, as they always were to be found at that time on the summer evenings. Miss Judy was talking in her soft, bright little way, which reminded the listener of the chirruping of a happy bird; and Miss Sophia was listening with enthralled interest between lapses of unconscious nodding. And now, as always when they talked together, both had the eager manner of having never before had a really satisfying opportunity to exchange vividly novel views and intensely interesting experiences, so that they hardly knew how to make enough of this truly delightful chance.
They were glad, nevertheless, to greet Sidney, as everybody always was; and Miss Judy said, as soon as Sidney had come within speaking distance, that Lynn and Doris had stopped for a moment to ask how she was feeling, and that she had told them she felt almost strong again,—nearly sure, indeed, of being able to give the tea-party on the coming Thursday.
"I am really mortified at not having given it before this time," she went on, blushing unseen in the gloaming. "It does seem too bad, this spoiling of lovely plans just on account of a foolish shortness of breath. It was such a disappointment to sister Sophia, not to have the tea-party while the blush roses were in bloom, for they match mother's best cups and saucers perfectly. And then came the cinnamon roses—they might have done fairly well, though they are not quite so delicate a shade, but they also have bloomed and faded long ago. Now the hundred-leaf roses will have to do—as I was just saying to sister Sophia when you came, Sidney—although their hearts are rather too dark to be as pretty as the others would have been. But we must give the tea-party anyway, blush roses or no blush roses, without any more delay, since I have thoughtlessly mentioned it to old lady Gordon, who never makes any allowances and who is rather critical."
"Oh, you told her, did you?" exclaimed Sidney. "Then that accounts for what I came to see you about."
"I felt that it was due to Doris that I should tell her; that she should know that only circumstances over which we had no control have so far prevented our paying the dear child the compliment of a formal introduction to society," said Miss Judy, with her pretty, comical, society air.
"Well, it explains what old Lady Gordon said to me without rhyme or reason when she met me on the big road yesterday—stopping her coach in the middle of the big road to do it, too,—something that she never took the trouble to think of before."
Sidney leaned forward and peered up and down the highway to make sure that no one was within hearing, and she listened for an instant to Miss Sophia's deep breathing in the still darkness of the passage.
"Now, mark my words, Miss Judy," she then said, in a guarded undertone. "That old Hessian means to interfere. She is going to make trouble. I feel it in my bones."
"Why?" cried Miss Judy, startled and bewildered. "What do you mean, Sidney? What did she say?"
"She said—without rhyme or reason, as I've told you—that her grandson was going away very soon to begin the practice of his profession, and that he hadn't any time to waste on any nonsense, like old women's silly tea-parties. She didn't call him by his name, either, as she always has called him heretofore. She called him 'my grandson,' in that high and mighty, stand-off-and-keep-your-place way that she knows how to put on, when she wants to and ain't too lazy. Now, mark my word, Miss Judy. Trouble's a-coming!"
"Oh, how could any one be unkind to that dear child," cried Miss Judy, almost in tears.
"I'd like to see anybody try it, while I'm 'round," said Sidney, with the fierceness that appears in the humblest barnyard hen when her chick is touched. "I'm all ready and a-waiting. Just let old lady Gordon so much as bat her eye and I'll give her goss. I'll tell her the Lord's truth, if she never heard it before. I'll tell her to her face that no Gordon that ever stepped ever was, or ever will be, fit to dust my Doris's shoes, so far as being good goes—or smart and good-looking either. This young Gordon is decent enough, I reckon, as young men go. And his father went pretty straight because he hadn't the spunk or the strength to go crooked. He was like a toad under a harrow, poor soul! He was so tame that he'd eat out of your hand. But even that old Hessian never harrowed or tamed the old man, who was a match for her. No-siree! Not while he had the strength to hop over a straw. Why, the whole woods were full of his wild colts."
"Ah, indeed! I never knew that the old gentleman ever had any interest in horses," Miss Judy murmured absently, almost tearfully, not thinking in the least of what she was saying.
"That was a long time ago," said Sidney hastily, remembering suddenly to whom she was speaking. "What the old folks were in their young days is neither here nor there. It makes no difference now. This young Gordon seems to be a fine young fellow, but, fine or coarse, all that I ask of that old Hessian, or of anybody, is to do as I do, and to let him and Doris alone, and not to meddle; just to give the two young things a fair field and no favor. And that's what she and everybody's got to do, too, or walk over Sidney Wendall's dead body."
"Don't—don't," entreated Miss Judy's soft voice, coming out of the quiet darkness with a tremulous gentleness, and telling of the tender tears in her blue eyes. "Let not your heart be troubled, dear friend. All will be well with the child. All is sure to come right at last, if we are but as patient and as trusting and as true and as faithful and as loving—above all as loving—as we should be. For love is now—as it was in the beginning, and ever shall be—the strongest thing in the world."