This incident with David Brown and the getting possession of his chart
was the one stimulant that helped Ann to endure this long day of
inactivity. It was like a small thimbleful of wine to one who longed for
a generous draught; there was nothing else to do but to wait, alert for
all chances that might help her. Evening closed in; the sisters were
left alone. Christa returned indolently to lounging upon the bed and
reading her novel. If Ann had had less strength, she would have paced
the floor of the outer room in impatience; as it was she sat still by
the table which held the beer and stitched her seam diligently. About
eight o'clock she heard Toyner's step.
Was he going to haunt the house again in order to keep her from going
out of it?
He came up to the door and came in.
She was preparing herself to act just as if she did not know who had
come, and did not take much notice of him; but when he came up and she
looked at his face in the lamp-light, she saw written in it the struggle
that he had gone through. Its exact nature and detail she was incapable
of conceiving, but one glance proved to her its reality. She was struck
by the consciousness of meeting an element in life which was wholly new
to her. When such a thing forces itself upon our attention, however
indefinite and unexpressed may be our thought, it is an experience never
to be forgotten. Ann fought against her conviction. She began at once,
as intelligent humanity always does, to explain away what she did not
understand, supposing by that means that she could do away with its
existence.
"I think you are ill, Bart," she said quickly. "It looks to me as if you
were in for a bout of chills; and enough to give it to you too, hanging
about in the woods all night."
He drew a chair close to the table and sat down beside her.
"There isn't any chills in the swamps about here," he said; "they are as
wholesome as dry land is." She saw by this that he had no intention of
upbraiding her with his fall, or of proclaiming the object of his visit.
She wanted to rouse him into telling her something.
"I heard them saying something about you to-day that I didn't believe a
bit. I heard you were in the saloon drinking."
He took hold of the end of her seam, passed his finger along it as if
examining the fabric and the stitches. "I took one glass," he said,
with the curious quiet gravity which lay to-night like a spell upon all
his words and actions.
"Well," she said cheerily, "I don't believe in a man making a slave of
himself, not to take a glass when he wants it just because he sometimes
makes a beast of himself by taking more than he ought."
"If you choose to think black is white, Ann, it will not make it that
way."
"That's true," she replied compliantly; "and you've got more call to
know than I have, for I've never 'been there.'"
"God forbid!" he said with sudden intensity. All the habits of thought
of the last year put strength into his words. "If I thought you ever
could be 'there,' Ann, it's nothing to say that I'd die to save you from
it."
She let her thought dwell for a moment upon the picture of herself as a
drunkard which had caused such intense feeling in him. "I am not worth
his caring what becomes of me in that way," she thought to herself. It
was the first time it ever occurred to her to think that she was
unworthy of the love he had for her; but at the same moment she felt a
shadow extinguish the rays of hope she had begun to feel, for she
believed, as Bart did, that his piety was in direct opposition to the
help he might otherwise give her. She had begun to hope that piety had
loosened its grasp upon him for the time.
"I don't know what's to become of us, Christa and me," she said
despairingly; "if we don't take to drink it will be a wonder, everybody
turning the cold shoulder on us."
This was not her true thought at all. She knew herself to be quite
incapable of the future she suggested, but the theme was excellently
adapted to work upon his feelings.
"I'm going away to-night, Ann," he said; "perhaps I won't see you again
for a long time; but you know all that you said you would promise last
night----"
Her heart began to beat so sharply against her side with sudden hope,
and perhaps another feeling to which she gave no name, that her answer
was breathless. "Yes," she said eagerly, "if----"
He went on gravely: "I am going to start to-night in a row-boat for The
Mills. You can tell me where your father is, and on my way I'll do all I
can to help him to get away. It won't be much use perhaps. It is most
likely that he will only get away from this locality to be arrested in
another, but all that one man can do to help him I will do; but you'll
have to give me the promise first, and I'll trust you to keep it."
Ann said nothing. The immediate weight of agonised care for her father's
life was lifted off her; but she had a strange feeling that the man who
had taken her responsibility had taken upon him its suffering too in a
deeper sense than she could understand. It flashed across her, not
clearly but indistinctly, that the chief element in her suffering had
been the shame of defying law and propriety rather than let her father
undergo a just penalty. In some way or other this had been all
transferred to Bart, and in the glimmering understanding of his
character which was growing within her, she perceived that he had it in
him to suffer under it far more intensely than she had suffered. It was
very strange that just when she obtained the promise she wanted from him
she would have been glad to set him free from it!
Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always been a good-natured
and generous person, and she experienced a strong impulse of this good
nature and generosity just now, but it was only for a moment, and she
stifled it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father must be
relieved, of course, from his horrid situation; and, after all, Bart
could help him quite easily, more easily than any other man in the world
could, and then come back and go on with his life as before. Questions
of conscience had never, so far, clouded Ann's mental horizon. A
moment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear to
her that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making the
sacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in her
heart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberally
sketched the night before, and only the fact that there was something
about Bart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that that
something might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, made
her submissively adhere to it.
"Christa and I will sign the pledge. We will give up dancing and wearing
finery. We will stop being friends with worldly people, and we will go
to church and meetings, and try to like them." Ann repeated her vow.
Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled her sales of beer
and wrote the vow twice on two pages of his note-book; at the bottom he
added, "God helping me." Ann signed them both, he keeping one and giving
her the other.
This contract on Ann's part had many of the elements of faith in it--a
wonderful audacity of faith in her own power to revolutionise her life
and control her sister's, and all the unreasoning child-likeness of
faith which could launch itself boldly into an unknown future without
any knowledge of what life would be like there.
On the part of Toyner the contract showed the power that certain habits
of thought, although exercised only for a few months, had over him. Good
people are fond of talk about the weakness of good habits compared with
the strength of bad ones. But, given the same time to the formation of
each, the habits which a man counts good must be stronger than those
which he counts evil, because the inner belief of his mind is in unity
with them. Toyner believed to-night that he was in open revolt against a
rule of life which he had found himself unable to adhere to, and against
the God who had ordained it; but, all the same, it was this rule, and
faith in the God which he had approached by means of it, that actuated
him during this conference with Ann. As a man who had given up hope for
himself might desire salvation for his child, so he gravely and gently
set her feet in what he was accustomed to regard as the path of life
before he himself left it.