"Never mind," said Ann, an absent look in her strong face. "I believe I'd rather not hear any more of it; it don't make one bit of difference one way or another."
"Why, Ann, surely you won't entertain hard feelings, now that they all feel so bad. If you could only 'a' been there, you would—"
"Oh, it isn't that," Ann sighed, and with her closed hand she pounded her heavy knee restlessly. "You see, Mary—oh, I don't know—but, well, I can't possibly be any way but the way the Lord made me, and to save my life I can't feel grateful. They all just seem to me like a lot of spoilt children that laugh or cry over whatever comes up. Somehow a testimonial from a congregation like that, after a lifetime of beating me and covering me with slime, seems more like an insult than a compliment. They think they can besmirch the best part of my life, and then rub it off in a minute with good intentions and a few words. Why, it was the same sort of whim that made them all follow Jane Hemingway like sheep after a leader. I don't hate 'em, you understand, but what they do or say simply don't alter my feelings a speck. I have known all along that I had the right kind of—character, and to listen to their sniffling testimony on the subject would seem to me like—well, like insulting my own womanhood."
"You are a powerful strange creature, Ann," Mrs. Waycroft said, reflectively, "but, I reckon, if you hadn't been that way you wouldn't be such a wonderful woman in so many ways. I was holding something back for the last, but I reckon you'll sniff at that more than what I've already told you. Ann, when I got home, and had just set down to eat a snack before running over to you, who should come to my back gate and call me out except Jane herself. She stood leaning against the fence like the walk had nearly done her up, and she refused to come in and set down. She said she wanted me to do her a favor. She said she knew I was at meeting and heard what she said, but that she wanted me to come to you for her. As God is my final Judge, I never felt such pity for a poor rotten shred of humanity in all my life. She looked like she was trying to cry, but was too dry inside to do anything but wheeze; her very eyes seemed to be literally on fire; she looked like a crazy person talking rationally. She said she wanted me to tell you how sorry and broke up she was, that she'd pay back that hundred dollars if she had to deed away her dead body to some medical college. She said she could do anything on earth to make amends except go to you face to face and apologize—she'd walk from door to door all over the country, she said, and tell her tale of shame, but she couldn't say it to you. She said she had tried for weeks to do it, but she knew she'd never have the moral strength."
"She talked that way?" Ann said, looking steadily out into the sunshine through the open doorway.
"Yes; and I reckon you have as little patience with her message as you have with the balance," said the visitor.
"No, she's different, Mary," Ann declared. "Jane Hemingway is another proposition altogether. She's fought a long, fierce fight, and God Almighty's forces have whipped her clean out. She was a worthy foe, and I respect her more now than I ever did. She was different from the rest. She had a cause. She had something to fight about. She loved Joe Boyd with all the heart she ever had, and when I married him she couldn't—simply couldn't—let it rest. She held on like a bull-dog with his teeth clamped to bone. She's beat; I won't wait for her to come to me; I may take a notion and go to her."
[XL]
It was a crisp, clear day in December. Langdon Chester had gone to Darley to attend to the banking of a considerable amount of money which his father had received for cotton on the market. It happened to be the one day in the year in which the town was visited by a mammoth circus, and the streets were overflowing with mountain people eager to witness the grand street-parade, the balloon ascension, the side-shows, and, lastly, the chief performance under the big tent. From the quaint old Johnston House, along Main Street to the grain warehouses and the throbbing and wheezing cotton compress, half a mile distant, the street was filled with people afoot, in carts, wagons, and buggies, or on horseback. All this joy and activity made little impression on Langdon Chester. His face was thin and sallow, and he was extremely nervous. His last conversation with Virginia and her positive refusal to consider his proposal of marriage had left him without a hope and more desperate than his best friend could have imagined possible to a man of his supposedly callous temperament. And a strange fatality seemed to be dogging his footsteps and linking him to the matter which he had valiantly attempted to lay aside, for everywhere he went he heard laudatory remarks about Luke King and his marvellous success and strength of character. In the group of lawyers seated in the warm sunshine in front of Trabue's little one-storied brick office on the street leading to the court-house, it was a topic of more interest than any gossip about the circus. It was Squire Tomlinson's opinion, and he had been to the legislature in Atlanta, and associated intimately with politicians from all sections of the state, that King was a man who, if he wished it, could become the governor of Georgia as easy as falling off a log, or even a senator of the United States. The common people wanted him, the squire declared; they had worshipped him ever since his first editorial war-whoop against the oppression of the political ring, the all-devouring trusts, and the corrupt Northern money-power. The squire, blunt man that he was, caught sight of Langdon among his listeners and playfully made an illustration out of him. "There's a chap, gentlemen, the son of a good old friend of mine. Now, what did money, aristocratic parentage, family brains, and military honors do for him? He was sent to the best college in the state, with plenty of spending-money at his command, and is still hanging onto the strap of his daddy's pocket-book—satisfied like we all were in the good old days when each of us had a little nigger to come and put on our shoes for us and bring hot coffee and waffles to the bed after we'd tripped the merry toe on somebody's farm all night. Oh, you needn't frown, Langdon; you know it's the truth. He's still a chip off the old block, gentlemen, while his barefoot neighbor, a scion of po' white stock, cooked his brain before a cabin pine-knot fire in studying, like Abe Lincoln did, and finally went forth to conquer the world, and is conquering it as fast as a dog can trot. It's enough, gentlemen, to make us all take our boys from school, give 'em a good paddling, and put 'em at hard toil in the field."
"Thank you for the implied compliment, Squire," Langdon said, angrily. "You are frank enough about it, anyway."