Doctor Hathern's daughters

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Yes.”

“Then, why didn’t you tell me, and not let me prate about Jack as I did, showing how much I cared for him?”

“Just because you did show me how much you cared for him,” Annie replied, roused at last to defend herself. “I tried to tell you two or three times in Washington, but could not. It did not seem just the thing to parade my happiness before you then, and tell you I had won the lover you jilted and whom I was sure you hoped to win back.”

Annie was speaking very plainly, and without looking at Fan went on: “There was another reason,—a stronger one. I knew how Jack had loved you, and jealousy, perhaps, or some other ignoble feeling, whispered to me that now you were free, he might turn to you again, and this has been the mainspring of my silence, which I regret exceedingly. I might have written it to you, and did begin one or two letters, but tore them up, saying to myself, “I’ll give Jack a chance to see her, and if after that he wavers ever so little towards me I shall know it and give him up.” I could not share a divided love. I must have all of Jack, or none. When you came home you were full of him and so sure of him that I could not tell you. If I had known you were going to write to him as you did, I should have mustered courage and stopped it. I did not know until it was too late, and, like a coward, I waited to let Jack decide for himself.”

“Which he has with a vengeance,” Fanny interposed. “You ought to have heard him talk to me till I could have crept on my knees out of his sight, I felt so small and ashamed. It was kind, perhaps, to take such heroic measures to cure me, but not like the old Jack whom I could twist around my little finger. He isn’t that Jack at all. I couldn’t twist him now. I should be afraid of him. I was afraid of him, as I sat listening to him, but never respected him so much in my life. I have had one man of whom I stood in fear. I don’t want another. You are welcome to him. He would have come home with me, but I told him to wait till I’d had it out with you. I’ve had it out. It’s the only mean thing I ever knew you do, but I forgive you and hope you will be happy. Of course you will, but Jack will be the master. I shouldn’t like that. You will. If I were you I would take off that brown thing which is so unbecoming. Put on a white gown this hot night. You are lovely in white. Jack is coming, and you want to look your best.”

Fan’s anger and resentment were wearing off. She had played her game and lost it, and as she had once said in an emergency, there was no use crying for spilled milk, she wouldn’t cry now. Jack was still Jack, and Annie was Annie, and she could not afford to quarrel with them. They were engaged, and she would do what she could to further their happiness, and would begin by improving Annie’s personal appearance. The brown gown annoyed her, and she made Annie put on a white one and fixed her hair more as she wore her own and fastened a rose at her neck and kissed her, saying as she held her off for inspection, “All you need is a little style to make you a beauty, but just as you are any man might be proud of you and glad that you were his. Jack is, I know. I believe I hear him. He has come early. Go down and have the first cooing over before I get there. Tell him the eagle has not harmed his dove. Go.”

She pushed Annie from the room, and then falling upon the bed, with her face down and her hands clinched, she lay there a long time, fighting the hardest battle of her life, while below stairs the cooing went on and Annie was nestled in Jack’s arms, with her head upon his breast, while he chided her for not having told Fanny and saved her from so much mortification. But he covered her mouth with kisses while he chided, and she knew he was not angry. “We must be married very soon now,” he said energetically, as if afraid that Fanny might carry him off bodily if he waited. He had nothing, however, to fear from Fanny, who, having fought her fight and conquered, was quite herself when she at last came down to the supper which had waited so long that Phyllis’s turban stood higher than Fanny had seen it before since she came home. Fanny had made Annie as attractive as possible, and then had twisted her own hair into a fashion very unbecoming to her. She had not worn her widow’s cap since she came to Lovering, but she brought out one now, and perching it on the top of her head surveyed herself in the mirror with a grim kind of satisfaction. She could scarcely have told why she did this, unless it were from some Quixotic idea not to overshadow Annie in Jack’s eyes. She did not yet understand how wholly she had lost his love and how absolutely Annie had won it. Jack was not much given to noticing one’s dress unless it were very pronounced. He had thought Annie uncommonly pretty when he came suddenly upon her watering a lily by the door, but he did not think of associating her prettiness with her dress or the arrangement of her hair. She was Annie,—his Annie,—whom he had not seen for weeks, and he kept her at his side until Phyllis asked if they was “never gwine to be done wid dat ar an’ come to supper.”

With the sound of Phyllis’s voice there came also the soft trail of Fanny’s long dress on the stairs. There was a good deal of dignity in her manner as she entered the room and took her seat at the table, meeting with a smile Annie’s look of surprise at the cap on her head and the way in which she had twisted her hair back from her high forehead.

“Lord save us, what has de chile done to alter her like dat ar,” came from under Phyllis’s breath, while even Jack wondered what had changed her so, and finally-attributed it to the cap, which seemed so out of place on her.

Fanny did most of the talking, and when supper was over went to her room, leaving Jack and Annie alone, as she knew they wished to be. She was not one to do anything by the halves. She had given Jack up to her sister and she meant to make the best of it, and as to her the best seemed to be to remove herself from their way she very soon found Lovering quite too hot for comfort, and decided to go to the White Sulphur Springs with Marie.