Ann Boyd: A Novel

by Will N. Harben

"You don't care for me, you know you don't," he was saying. "You were simply born with all your beauty and sweetness to drag me down to despair. You make me desperate with your maddening reserve and icy coldness, when all this hot fire is raging in me."

"That's what makes me afraid of you," Virginia said, softly. "I admit I like to be with you, my life is so lonely, but you always say such extravagant things and want to—to catch hold of me, and kiss me, and—"

"Well, how can I help myself, when you are what you are?" Chester exclaimed, with a laugh. "I don't want to act a lie to you, and stand and court you like a long-faced Methodist parson, who begins and ends his love-making with prayer. Life is too beautiful and lovely to turn it into a funeral service from beginning to end. Let's be happy, little girl; let's laugh and be merry and thank our stars we are alive."

"I won't thank my stars if I don't go on home." And Virginia laughed sweetly for the first time.

"Yes, I suppose we had better walk on," Langdon admitted, "but I'm not going out into the open road with you till I've had that kiss. No, you needn't pull away, dear—I'm going to have it."

The grim eavesdropper heard Virginia sharply protesting; there was a struggle, a tiny, smothered scream, and then something waked in the breast of Ann Boyd that lifted her above her sordid self. It was the enraged impulse to dart forward and with her strong, toil-hardened hands clutch the young man by the throat and drag him down to the ground and hold him there till the flames she knew so well had gone out of his face. Something like a prayer sprang to her lips—a prayer for help, and then, in a flush of shame, the slow-gained habit of years came back to her; she was taking another view—this time down a darkened vista.

"It's no business of mine," she muttered. "It's only the way things are evened up. After all, where would be the justice in one woman suffering from a thing for a lifetime and another going scot free, and that one, too, the daughter of the one person that has deliberately made a life miserable? No, siree! My pretty child, take care of yourself, I'm not your mother. If she would let me alone for one minute, maybe her eyes would be open to her own interests."

Laughing pleasantly over having obtained his kiss by sheer force, Langdon, holding Virginia's reluctant hand, led her out into an open space, and the watcher caught a plain view of the girl's profile, and the sight twisted her thoughts into quite another channel. For a moment she stood as if rooted to the ground behind the bushes which had shielded her. "That girl is going to be a hard one to fool," she muttered. "I can see that from her high forehead and firm chin. Now, it really would be a joke on me if—if Jane Hemingway's offspring was to avoid the pitfall I fell into, with all the head I've got. Then, I reckon, Jane could talk; that, I reckon, would prove her right in so bitterly denouncing me; but will the girl stand the pressure? If she intends to, she's made a bad beginning. Meeting a chap like that on the sly isn't the best way to be rid of him, nor that kiss; which she let him have without a scratch or loss of a hair on his side, is another bad indication. Well, the game's on. Me 'n' Jane is on the track neck to neck with the wire and bandstand ahead. If the angels are watching this sport, them in the highest seats may shed tears, but it will be fun to the other sort. I'm reckless. I don't much care which side I amuse; the whole thing come up of its own accord, and the Lord of Creation hasn't done as much for my spiritual condition as the Prince of Darkness. I may be a she-devil, but I was made one by circumstances as naturally as a foul weed is made to grow high and strong by the manure around its root. And yet, I reckon, there must be some dregs of good left in my cup, for I felt like strangling that scamp a minute ago. But that may have been because I forgot and thought he was his daddy, and the girl was me on the brink of that chasm twenty years wide and deeper than the mystery of the grave of mankind. I don't know much, but I know I'm going to fight Jane Hemingway as long as I live. I know I'm going to do that, for I know she will keep her nose to my trail, and I wouldn't be human if I didn't hit back."

The lovers had moved on; their voices were growing faint in the shadowy distance. The gray dusk had fallen in almost palpable folds over the landscape. The nearest mountain was lost like the sight of land at sea. She walked on to her cow that was standing bellowing to her calf in the stable-lot. Laying her hand on the animal's back, Ann said: "I'm not going to milch you to-night, Sooky; I'm going to let your baby have all he wants if it fills him till he can't walk. I'm going to be better to you—you poor, dumb brute—than I am to Jane Hemingway."

Lowering the time-worn and smooth bars, she let the cow in to her young, and then, closing the opening, she went into her kitchen and sat down before the fire and pushed out her water-soaked feet to the flames to dry them.