The Annes

by Marion Ames Taggart

“Mayn’t I work for you? Oh, I can’t! Oh, Richard, let me marry you and work for you!” she begged.

“The forbidden subject so soon!” Richard held up a rebuking hand. “There is no work; I shall not work for a long time. The play is done; your play that you made. Don’t you think we would better send for Wilberforce?”

“Oh, yes; surely he must come! Will you send for him, or shall I?” Anne cried, eagerly.

“I’ll telegraph him when I go into the house,” said Richard. “Go now, and try to rest, dear. It has been a cruel afternoon for you. Why not go to Joan Paul and get her to take you in? You should not be alone in a boarding-house. And, Anne, one last word! You spoke of forgiving you a few moments ago; surely you know that there is not the least thing to forgive? You have been so true, so fine, so kind that all my life I shall have you before my eyes, the ideal woman who quite simply, at any cost, does what is right, not what is pleasantest, easiest. That is rare, my child, in man or woman, and I’m grateful to have known you. And remember, Anne, the sooner I hear that you are happy, the sooner I shall throw off my sense of guilt for having been so dull as to accept your mercy upon a blind man.”

Richard bent and took Anne’s hands in his, laying them, palms upward, in his own hands. He kissed first one then the other cold little palm and closed the fingers over the kisses, as one plays with a child.

“That is your freedom, in your own hands, dear, and good-bye,” he said.

He went unsteadily up the path, stooping, then remembered, and straightened himself, throwing back his head. Anne watched him go, her hands upon her knees, her fingers still closed tight over the palms in which Richard had deposited his tender dismissal and farewell. When he had gone she sat for a few moments with bowed head and closed eyes. Then she, too, arose and left the lovely garden by its low side gate. She went miserably to her room on her return to the boarding-house. She threw herself on her bed and lay staring out of the window, disregarding the summons to dinner. There was but one definite thought in her mind. Now, whatever happened, she must never marry Kit. When he learned that Richard had refused to let her fulfil her promise to him, of course Kit would jubilantly come to carry her off. But Anne felt that for her and Kit to be happy when Richard was lonely and wretched would be past bearing. She was not capable of reasoning now; her very muscles seemed to ache with pity for Richard and with groundless self-reproach. She had no desire to summon Joan; she was one with little Anne in a desire to do penance.

Little Anne, like most children of her type, had a retroactive conscience; it was especially likely to bother her at night.

This night as bedtime approached she reflected that she had gone to see Mr. Latham without consulting her mother, and that she had told him something that her mother had forbidden her to mention to any one. To be sure the actuating cause of her going was an addition to the events of that morning when Anne and Kit had met in her home; the conversation at Joan’s had seemed to her to free her from the obligation of silence, had imposed an obligation to speak; but now, at night, the more she considered, the surer she became that it had been wrong to go to Mr. Latham to set him right without her mother’s consent. It was done past mending, to be sure, but little Anne was well-trained in the duty of confessing her faults. Therefore, as the summer dusk deepened, she crept into her mother’s arms and with heavy sighs told the story of her afternoon.

She had not been prepared for her mother’s extreme perturbation over the tale. Mrs. Berkley became tense with excitement and asked so many questions as to the effect of it upon Mr. Latham that after little Anne had described how gay she had found him; how tired and still he seemed when she had left him; all that he had said, exactly what little Anne had said to him, the child was too sleepy to feel properly contrite. Her mother told her that she had done wrong to take upon herself interference in older people’s affairs, especially to disobey her mother, but little Anne went to bed forgiven and made peaceful by her mother’s kiss. She fell asleep instantly, infolded by the sense of a world in which everything came right.