Anne: A Novel

by Constance Fenimore Woolson

For it was no freak of the Frenchwoman's; she had been too much pleased with his escort to forego it willingly. He was deeply hurt. And deeply surprised. Had he not followed her to ask her to be his wife? (This was not true, but for the moment he thought it was.) Was this a proper response?

Never before had he received such a rebuff, and after brooding over it an hour in the dismal car, it grew into an insult. His deeper feelings were aroused. Under his indolence he had a dominant pride, even arrogance of nature, which would have astonished many who thought they knew him. Whether his words had or had not been the result of impulse, now that they were spoken, they were worthy of at least respect. He grew more angry as the minutes passed, for he was so deeply hurt that he took refuge in anger. To be so thwarted and played upon—he, a man of the world—by a young girl; a young girl regarding whom, too, there had sprung up in his heart almost the only real faith of his life! He had believed in that face, had trusted those violet eyes, he did not know how unquestioningly until now. And then, feeling something very like moisture coming into his own eyes, he rose, angry over his weakness, went forward to the smoking car, lit a cigar, and savagely tried to think of other things. A pretty fool he was to be on a night train in the heart of Pennsylvania, going no one knew whither.

But, in spite of himself, his mind stole back to Anne. She was so different from the society women with whom he had always associated; she had so plainly loved him. Poor, remorseful, conscientious, struggling, faithful heart! Why had she fled from him? It did not occur to him that she was fleeing from herself.

He arrived at Valley City at eleven o'clock, and had the very room with gaudy carpet he had pictured to himself. The next morning, disgusted with everything and out of temper as he was, he yet so far postponed his return journey as to make inquiries concerning schools for girls—one in particular, in which a certain Mademoiselle Pitre had been teaching French and music for several years. The clerk thought it must be the "Young Ladies' Seminary." Heathcote took down the address of this establishment, ordered a carriage, and drove thither, inquiring at the door if Mademoiselle Pitre had arrived.

There was no such person there, the maid answered. No; he knew that she had not yet arrived. But when was she expected?

The maid (who admired the stranger) did not take it upon herself to deny his statement, but went away, and returned with the principal, Professor Adolphus Bittinger. Professor Bittinger was not acquainted with Mademoiselle Pitre. Their instructress in the French language was named Blanchard, and was already there. Heathcote then asked if there were any other young ladies' seminaries in Valley City, and was told (loftily) that there were not. No schools where French was taught? There might be, the professor thought, one or two small establishments for day scholars. The visitor wrote down the new addresses, and drove away to visit four day schools in succession, sending a ripple of curiosity down the benches, and exciting a flutter in the breasts of four French teachers, who came in person to answer the inquiries of monsieur. One of them, a veteran in the profession, who had spent her life in asking about the loaf made by the distant one-eyed relative of the baker, answered decidedly that there was no such person in Valley City. "Monsieur" was beginning to think so himself; but having now the fancy to exhaust all the possibilities, he visited the infant schools, and a private class, and at two o'clock returned to the hotel, having seen altogether about five hundred young Americans in frocks, from five years old to seventeen.

According to the statement of the little shop-keeper at Lancaster, mademoiselle had been teaching in Valley City for a number of years: there remained, then, the chance that she was in a private family as governess. Heathcote lingered in Valley City three days longer on this governess chance. He ate three more dinners in the comfortless dining-room, slept three more nights in the gaudy bedroom, and was at the railway station five times each day, to wit, at the hours when the trains arrived from the east. If they had waited at Stringhampton until he had had time to return to New York, they would be coming on now. But no one came. The fourth day opened with dull gray rain; the smoke of the manufactories hung over the valley like a pall. In the dining-room there was a sour odor of fresh paint, and from the window he could see only a line of hacks, the horses standing in the rain with drooping heads, while the drivers, in a row against an opposite wall, looked, in their long oil-skin coats, as though they were drawn up there in their black shrouds to be shot. In a fit of utter disgust he rang for his bill, ordered a carriage, and drove to the station: he would take the morning train for New York.

Yet when the carriage was dismissed, he let the express roll away without him, while he walked to and fro, waiting for an incoming train. The train was behind time; when it did come, there was no one among its passengers whom he had ever seen before. With an anathema upon his own folly, he took the day accommodation eastward. He would return to New York without any more senseless delays. And then at Stringhampton Junction he was the only person who alighted. His idea was to make inquiries there. He spent two hours of that afternoon in the rain, under a borrowed umbrella, and three alone in the waiting-room. No such persons as he described had been seen at Stringhampton, and as the settlement was small, and possessed of active curiosity, there remained no room for doubt. There was the chance that they had followed him to Valley City an hour later on a freight train with car attached, in which case he had missed them. And there was the other chance that they had gone northward by the branch road. But why should they go northward? They lived in Valley City, or near there; their tickets were marked "Valley City." The branch led to the Northern Line, by which one could reach Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, the wilderness, but not Valley City. The gentleman might go up as far as the Northern Line, and inquire of the station agent there, suggested the Stringhampton ticket-seller, who balanced a wooden tooth-pick in his mouth lightly, like a cigarette. But the gentleman, who had already been looking up the narrow line of wet rails under his umbrella for an hour, regarded the speaker menacingly, and turned away with the ironical comment in his own mind that the Northern Line and its station agent might be—what amounted to Calvinized—before he sought them.

The night express came thundering along at midnight. It bore away the visitor. Stringhampton saw him no more.

In the mean time Anne and her companion had ridden on during the night, and the younger woman had explained to the elder as well as she could the cause of her sudden action. "It was not right that I should hear or that he should speak such words."