other side, but Baird reached in and lifted her, held her up, as he had
once before, long enough to look steadily into her troubled eyes.
Then he set her down. "Come this way--I'll take my answer, whatever it's
to be, here--not in the middle of the road."
He guided her to the spot he had chosen. "We'll fight it out here," he
said in the same controlled way, though his eyes were alight.
Ann complied in silence, not confusedly, absently rather, as if too
completely engrossed by her thoughts either to speak or to object. She
sat with hands lax and eyes vague.
Baird studied her, trying to determine just how to begin: by telling her
the truth about himself first of all, he decided, though he longed to
set that aside until he had captured the one all-important thing.
He began abruptly. "Judith told me about your father and mother, the
whole history, and I hoped that was the reason you had sent me
away--that you thought it would matter to me.... I can match you history
for history: my father and mother found each other much as yours did, in
spite of their different religions, which was quite as insurmountable a
difficulty as Edward and your mother faced. My mother was a Jewess and
my father an Irish Catholic. They lived together two years, and then,
because I had come, they went before a justice of the peace and gave me
my father's name. To their way of thinking they weren't a bit more
married than they had ever been. Love had married them and they had
clung to each other in spite of everything. I've often thought, when
I've seen the children a loveless marriage has brought into the world,
that I've had the best of it--that those children must be wanting in
some way. I never fully realized how much the mere legality of a
marriage means to people like your people until I listened to Judith
this afternoon.... So, you see, Ann, it doesn't matter to me. It matters
a good deal more to me that you've suffered because of the narrow
prejudices of your people. You told the collie, when you hugged and
kissed him, in the barn, that first day I talked to you, that he and Ben
were the only ones that loved you. You have gone hungry and
thirsty--that's been the trouble with you."
Ann's vagueness had slipped from her; she was quivering from head to
foot. "I know it!" she said. "I'm always wanting to be loved an' trying
to make people love me, and it's led to fearful trouble. It drove Garvin
mad and it took my father--away--from me--" Her voice failed her.
Baird put his arm about her, bent and kissed her hands. "Don't think
about all that, Ann. You love me--I _know_ you do--there's nothing
between us now."
But she held him off. "Yes, there is!... Let me tell you: I let Garvin
love me--I thought for a time that I loved him. But it was just that I
wanted so badly for somebody to love me, an' I know now that the way I
felt to him was like I would have felt if I had known he was my father's
brother--just that I was fond of him an' sorry for him. I had to tell
him so and--" She broke off with a shudder, then went on with head hung.
"I've felt differently to you.... Back at the time you kissed me--I
loved it. When you used to come an' talk to me, even then I liked
you--sitting close by me--even while I was worrying over Garvin an' not
knowing what to do, an' at the same time caring more for Edward than for
any one else in the world, just _feeling_ that he was my father, an' not
knowin' why I loved him so much. That night you met me on the spring
house path and asked me if I was engaged to anybody, I told you I'd
rather you stayed away, because I was angry at myself for feelin' to you
the way I did. I felt _hateful_ caring for three men at the same time,
like I was doing. Then when I read your letters this summer--"
Baird was not to be denied any longer. He pulled her hands from his
shoulders, drew her forcibly into his arms, and lifting her bowed head,
found her lips.
He kissed away resistance, her efforts to speak, plead and demanded
until he won response, arms that circled his neck and clasped him, and
then her long and passionate kiss. Even when her arms slid from his neck
and her head dropped back against his shoulder, he held her imprisoned.
He put back her fallen hair and kissed her brow and her cheek and her
throat, until the chill of something striven for and still unpossessed
touched him.
He looked down at her. "What is it?" he asked. "You love me--why aren't
you happy?"
Her eyes were brimming with tears. "I do love you--but--"
She tried to free herself, and he let her go, for he was sobered by the
pallor that had replaced the hot flush in her cheeks. "What's the
difficulty, Ann--tell me!" he demanded. "It's not going to make any
difference, whatever it is--but tell me."
"It's something I can't tell, but it may bring disgrace on me an' that
will be disgrace on you--if I let you marry me."
"It's nothing you have done--I know that!" Baird said quickly. "What
other people have done doesn't matter to me.... You mean the true
inwardness of all that tragedy last spring?... Why, Ann, I've always
known that half that story hadn't been told."
"I was the cause of it all.... Any day it may come out who I am and
worse things than that for you to bear. That was the reason I made you
go away an' wouldn't answer your letters."
"Westmore and Penniman pride--there it is again!" Baird said. "I don't
want your secret, dear. I think there's not much you could tell me that
I haven't already guessed--in spite of Ben." He circled her with his
arms. "Do you think that anything could drive me away from you
now--after that kiss of yours?... Tell me again that you love me! Tell
me!"
Her answer was a drooping glance and her slow smile, which Baird stole
from her lips. "Ann, you're here in my arms and I'm holding you close,
but I've a queer feeling that I'm clasping something that may slip away
any moment--it makes me want to hold you tighter. It won't be like that
by and by--when you're all mine?"
"I don't know," she said slowly. "I'll always be wanting to be loved an'
not thinkin' so much about whether I'm lovin' or not.... I know it was
like heaven when Edward told me he was my father and how much he loved
me. I'd been wanting to be loved like that--all my life--"
Baird pondered her answer for a moment.... She had not pretended; she
had told the truth about herself; the woman in her answered to the man
in him, but there was, deep in her, a capacity for loving that he had
not yet touched. It was guarded by hesitancy, elusiveness, and, not
selfishness exactly, nor timidity, but an indefinable inaccessibility
that was simply Ann. Judith was more forceful and less complex....
Perhaps if Ann had striven over him as he had striven over her, the
thing he wanted to grasp would be his. Edward had come nearer to the
indefinable thing than he had.... And yet, it was her inaccessible
quality that had drawn him, and that made him hold her the tighter now.
Baird remembered something Ben had written: "... I ain't no wise judge
of women, but I've noticed that some of them is just naturally
giving-hearted, and some has to grow up to it. The kind that has to grow
up to it generally loves most to be loved. They seems to grow up to
loving by being loved, that is, if they're loved the right way." Ben had
defined Ann very accurately.... But how was he to discover the right way
of loving her? Certainly not until he possessed her.
Baird looked down at Ann. "Probably it's your nature not to give much,
and I love to struggle for all I get. You're all quivering nerves, a
mixture of snow and sunshine, and I've no nerves to speak of--I'm all
fight. I think we're suited to each other." He spoke decidedly. "Ann,
they're sending me to Europe; I'm going day after to-morrow--will you go
with me? Will you marry me to-morrow, and come away from all this?"
She was silent for a long time. "I'd rather wait--till you come back,"
she said finally.
It was the answer he expected. She was very true to herself, and he
liked it. "I'll be gone for a good many months," he said quietly. "What
will you do while I'm gone--stay here?"
"I--they want me to go to school.... I can't stay here. My father wanted
me to be educated--I'm so ignorant. He told me he meant to make a
wonderful woman of me. That I would grow to be a more charmin' an'
wonderful woman than Judith.... But those things he thought because he
loved me so much." She spoke bleakly.
"You'll be a deal more wonderful than Judith, because you have a quality
she doesn't possess," Baird said. "Do you want to go to school, Ann?"
There was actual terror in her reply. "No. They'd all be
strangers--there's nobody would care anything about me."
There it was, her one great need, the thing upon which he must build.
Baird kissed her breath away. "You sweet reluctant thing! Do you think
I'd go away without you!" His voice suddenly deepened. "Ann, you want to
be loved and I want to love. I've been _hungry_ for you, literally
starved. I _want_ you--you can't understand how much I want you. You'll
travel, and you can study, and I'll be satisfied just to study you....
Come with me, Ann!"
"An' you don't mind taking me and trouble both together--for there may
be big trouble?'
"I've told you--I'll take anything, so you come with it."
The dusk had gathered rapidly; close as they were to each other, their
faces had grown indistinct. Ann's answer was groping hands lifted to
him, a pressure of slim fingers on his neck. But when he tried to kiss
her she bent her head, smothering his caresses with her hair. "I must
say 'yes' my own way," she objected.
"Well--say it your way," Baird whispered, husky from emotion.
She lifted her face and brushed his cheek with her lashes. "A
butterfly's kiss," she said with soft gaiety.
"You've pretty ways--dangerous ways--" Baird said chokingly. "I'll love
you too much--that'll be the trouble." He strove for control. "Ann--do
you remember what you said to the stars, the night I didn't know my own
heart--when you told me what love was?"
"Yes, I remember."
"Repeat it, won't you--I want to hear you say it."
Ann's slurred syllables again made music of it: "Love is wantin'
somebody for all your own--so badly you feel sure you can't live without
them ... an' at the same time bein' such good friends with them that you
care more about makin' them happy than being happy yourself."
"There's a bit of the Golden Rule in that," Baird said. "That's what
makes it difficult. Do you think we can live up to it, Ann?"
Ann answered him to the best of her ability.... Years later she answered
the same question with a better understanding.
CONCLUSION
Is it permissible to steal a fragment from later history in order to
elucidate what has gone before? It is a responsibility the fictional
historian must sometimes take.
Judith and Ann and Baird are of the present. Life has woven them into
subsequent history, drawing from a skein as tangled as was the skein of
thirteen years ago. The fragment I pilfer is the conclusion of a letter
from Judith to Ann, penned in our day, and part of another story:
"I have written you a few facts, Ann. I have one more thing to
tell you, something that reaches back beyond these years of
mutual antagonism.... The day after Nickolas Baird married you,
Coats Penniman came to see me, and told me the following: that
Sue had found certain letters of Garvin's to you which gave him
the erroneous impression that Garvin had wronged you. Then he
went, hot from reading them, to the Mine Banks, thinking he
would find you with Garvin. That he met Garvin at the first
ore-pit and accused him, and that Garvin denied it. That he
gave Garvin the lie and they drew their pistols, that they
fired, and that Garvin wounded him in the shoulder, disabling
his pistol arm. That Garvin had leveled to fire again, when,
suddenly, Edward appeared and tried to hold Garvin back, and
that Garvin's pistol went off. Coats thought the shot had gone
wild until he saw Edward drop. He said that Garvin laughed
wildly then and ran back into the Banks.
"Coats said that Edward had passed instantly. He realized then
some of the complications that were certain to follow, and that
he went directly home, and that Sue drove him into the city,
where he had his wound dressed.
"Coats said that he had had no intention of shirking his
responsibility, that he had simply waited for events to shape
themselves, and that what followed made any action on his part
unnecessary, but that he had determined to come to me with his
confession as soon as he felt that your future was assured. He
told me to proceed against him if I thought fit, that he would
face any charge I made. I thought I had paid my last debt to
Westmore, but I was mistaken; I told Coats to take his secret
back with him and keep it.
"And I have kept it until to-day. Now I turn it over to you,
together with my confession: for the sake of my family's good
name, I did the thing that saved you from disgrace; I saved one
brother at, what seemed to me, a lesser expense to the other.
"Take what I have told you and add it to your already full
experience of lives inextricably tangled because of you.
Wherever you have cast your net, you have brought in a heavy
haul.... JUDITH."
And from Ann's reply also a fragment:
"... and what you have told me is not new to me. Coats told me
long ago, while I still lay ill. Coats told me, and dear old
Ben told me all he knew--I made them tell me, for I knew that
my father had never forsaken me--_of his own free will_.
"And, Judith, I also know just why you have written all this to
me. Throughout these years it has been a Westmore pitted
against a nobody's child. But I feel no bitterness, only an
immense interest, for out of it all has grown a wonderful
thing.... ANN."
THE END