He might have said enough. Good land! if I had been there I could have told him lots of things to say.
He might have said, “It is pretty late in the day to ask me to give her up when she is right inside my heart and soul, and I should have to tear ’em both open to git her out. It is pretty late in the day to interfere when you have seen Anna and I playmates from childhood. When you’ve seen us grow up side by side, all through our happy youth to manhood and womanhood. When you’ve encouraged us to be together at all times and all places, trusted her to my care hundreds and hundreds of times all these years. Have looked on calmly and seen, for you must have seen, how our hearts wuz growing together, how our lives wuz gittin’ completely bound up in one another. After you have sot quietly and allowed all this, now because a richer, more fashionable suitor asks for Anna you think you will take her away from me, from the one that holds her by the divine right of love, and give her to one she does not belong to. It shows either a criminal carelessness on your part, a criminal neglect, or worse.”
That’s about the way I should have talked if I had been Tom Willis. But he didn’t, he jest walked out and shet the door, not slammin’ it, or nothin’, and—and kep’ right on livin’. Never made no threats about killin’ himself, never boasted, as might be spozed he would, it is so common under the same circumstances, that he had got sick of her, and, in fact, wuz so popular among the wimmen that he had to slight some on ’em now and then, no, Tom never said anything of all this, but jest kep’ right on with his work in a manly, stiddy way, growin’ kinder pale and still for a spell, but at last sort o’ brightenin’ up and havin’ a new and steadfaster light in his eyes, and a more resolved look on his fine forward.
He see Anna every Sunday in church, and, though he obeyed her mother and didn’t give her any outward attention, yet there is a stiddy attention of the soul that a woman can’t misunderstand when it is wroppin’ her completely round and round. There is a language of the eyes beyend Tamer Ann Smith to parse; it wuzn’t in her grammar at all. And if she couldn’t parse it, it wuzn’t likely that she could stop it. No, she might as well try to stop the vivid language of the skies when the hidden forces of nature speaks out in sheets of flame.
Tom’s eyes, as they met Anna’s in the old meetin’ house, held hull love poems, glowin’ stories of deathless devotion and faith in her. And Anna read ’em, she alone held the key to the divine unwritten language; the love in her own heart could alone translate the love in his.
Well, it had run along so for more than a year, and Anna wuz twenty and Tom wuz twenty-three; Tom workin’ hard and beginnin’ to be spoke of as a young lawyer who would rise in the world. And Anna stayin’ to home and tryin’ to be dutiful (duty made hard by naggin’). Havin’ to use Von Crank well under her mother’s eyes and freezin’ him in lonely moments, froze one minute by Anna and thawed out the next by Tamer Ann, and kep’ kinder soft and sloshy all the time by his love for Anna, Von Crank wuzn’t to be envied much more than Tom.
But Tamer Ann (for he had acted up to his high station as a Poltroon, and kinder relied on Tamer Ann to bring Anna round when he knew in his heart that she detested him) kep’ tellin’ him all the time that she would be all right in time, it wuz only a girl’s shyness, etc., etc. So he kep’ on comin’, and Anna kep’ on shunnin’ him all she could, and Tamer Ann kep’ on naggin’, and so it went on. Hamen and John didn’t seem to pay so much attention to this domestic side show, for all their leisure moments, when they wuz in the house, would be took up foolin’ Jack, tellin’ him strange stories, drawin’ him on to talk strange about ’em, and then laughin’ at him. And Jack would meach off, feelin’ all used up and humiliated, and they snickerin’, the fools! There wuz more sense in Jack’s little finger than in their hull long bodies, and so I told Josiah.
Oh, how it incensed me to see it, and the incense grew stronger every time I went there. Tamer Ann had got holt of a hull chest of old dime novels that had fell to her from a distant relative. He wuz jest sent to prison, bein’ a forger and a arson, and, as it wuz for life, why this chest fell onto his relations, and as the rest didn’t want the novels, why Tamer Ann got ’em.
This relation who owned ’em had had a large family who doted on the novels, but they had most on ’em been transported for life or hung, or sunthin’ of that sort. His wife had long before run away with another man, she had worshipped the novels while she lived in the house with ’em, but she had run clear away out of sight, so Tamer Ann got ’em, as I say, and oh! how she and Cicero gloated over ’em and devoured ’em. Anna didn’t care for them, good land! she had a romance in her own heart that took up all her time and tears, poor thing! Jack wuzn’t old enough for ’em. As for Hamen and his brother, they could tell their own lies, good land! they didn’t need the novels, so Tamer had the hull run on ’em herself, she and Cicero.