Ann Boyd: A Novel

by Will N. Harben

Virginia nodded mutely and then continued her recital. Jane Hemingway's knees bent under her as she stood holding to the bedpost, and she slowly sank to the floor a few feet away. With a low, moaning sound like a suffering dumb brute, she crawled on her hands and knees to her daughter and mutely clutched the girl's cold, bare ankles. "You say he locked you in his bedroom!" she said, in a rasping whisper. "Locked you—actually locked you in! Oh, Lord have mercy!"

"Then, after a long wait," the girl went on, "in which I was praying only for the money, mother—the money to save your life and put you out of agony—I heard steps, first on the stairs and then at the door. Somebody touched the latch. The door held fast. Then the key was turned, and as I sat there with covered face, now with the dread of death upon me for the first time, somebody came in and stood over me."

"The scoundrel! The beast!" Jane's hands slipped from their hold on the girl's ankles and fell; her head and shoulders sank till her brow touched the floor.

"A hand was laid on my head," Virginia went on. "I heard a voice—"

"The fiend from hell!" Jane raised her haggard face and glaring eyes. "Don't, don't tell me that he dared to—"

"It was Mrs. Boyd, mother—Ann Boyd," said Virginia.

"Ann Boyd!" Jane groaned. "I see it now; she was at the bottom of it; it was all her doing. That was her plot. Ah, God, I see it now!"

"You are mistaken," the girl said. "She had accidentally overheard my agreement to go there, and came for no other reason than to save me, mother—to save me."

"To save you?" Jane raised herself on her two hands like a four-footed animal looking up from its food. "Save your" she repeated, with the helpless glare of insanity in her blearing eyes.

"Yes, to save me. She was acting on impulse, an impulse for good that she was even then fighting against. When she heard of that appointment she actually gloated over it, but, mother, she found herself unequal to it. As the time which had been set drew near, she plunged out into the night and got there only a few minutes before—"