Annie made up a bed for Idella on a wide, old-fashioned lounge in her room,
and put her away in it, swathed in a night-gown which she found among
the survivals of her own childish clothing in that old chest of drawers.
When she woke in the morning she looked across at the little creature,
with a tender sense of possession and protection suffusing her troubled
recollections of the night before. Idella stirred, stretched herself with
a long sigh, and then sat up and stared round the strange place as if she
were still in a dream.
“Would you like to come in here with me?” Annie suggested from her bed.
The child pushed back her hair with her little hands, and after waiting to
realise the situation to the limit of her small experience, she said, with
a smile that showed her pretty teeth, “Yes.”
“Then come.”
Idella tumbled out of bed, pulling up the nightgown, which was too long for
her, and softly thumped across the carpet. Annie leaned over and lifted her
up, and pressed the little face to her own, and felt the play of the quick,
light breath over her cheek.
“Would you like to stay with me--live with me--Idella?” she asked.
The child turned her face away, and hid a roguish smile in the pillow. “I
don't know.”
“Would you like to be my little girl?”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“Because--because”--she seemed to search her mind--“because your
night-gowns are too long.”
“Oh, is that all? That's no reason. Think of something else.”
Idella rubbed her face hard on the pillow. “You dress up cats.”
She lifted her face, and looked with eyes of laughing malice into Annie's,
and Annie pushed her face against Idella's neck and cried, “You're a
rogue!”
The little one screamed with laughter and gurgled: “Oh, you tickle! You
tickle!”
They had a childish romp, prolonged through the details of Idella's washing
and dressing, and Annie tried to lose, in her frolic with the child, the
anxieties that had beset her waking; she succeeded in confusing them with
one another in one dull, indefinite pain.
She wondered when Mr. Peck would come for Idella, but they were still at
their belated breakfast when Mrs. Bolton came in to say that Bolton had met
the minister on his way up, and had asked him if Idella might not stay the
week out with them.
“I don' know but he done more'n he'd ought.
“But she can be with us the rest part, when you've got done with her.”
“I haven't begun to get done with her,” said Annie. “I'm glad Mr. Bolton
asked.”
After breakfast Bolton himself appeared, to ask if Idella might go up to
the orchard with him. Idella ran out of the room and came back with her hat
on, and tugging to get into her shabby little sack. Annie helped her with
it, and Idella tucked her hand into Bolton's loose, hard fist, and gave it
a pull toward the door.
“Well, I don't see but what she's goin',” he said.
“Yes; you'd better ask her the next time if _I_ can go,” said Annie.
“Well, why don't you?” asked Bolton, humouring the joke. “I guess you'd
enjoy it about as well as any. We're just goin' for a basket of wind-falls
for pies. I guess we ain't a-goin' to be gone a great while.”
Annie watched them up the lane from the library window with a queer grudge
at heart; Bolton stiffly lumbering forward at an angle of forty-five
degrees, the child whirling and dancing at his side, and now before and now
after him.
At the sound of wheels on the gravel before the front door, Annie turned
away with such an imperative need of its being Dr. Morrell's buggy that it
was almost an intolerable disappointment to find it Mrs. Munger's phaeton.
Mrs. Munger burst in upon her in an excitement which somehow had an effect
of premeditation.
“Miss Kilburn, I wish to know what you think of Mr. and Mrs. Putney's
behaviour to me, and Mr. Peck's, in my own house, last night. They are
friends of yours, and I wish to know if you approve of it. I come to
you _as_ their friend, and I am sure you will feel as I do that my
hospitality has been abused. It was an outrage for Mr. Putney to get
intoxicated in my house; and for Mr. Peck to attack me as he did before
everybody, because Mr. Putney had taken advantage of his privileges, was
abominable. I am not a member of his church; and even if I were, he would
have had no right to speak so to me.”
Annie felt the blood fly to her head, and she waited a moment to regain her
coolness. “I wonder you came to ask me, Mrs. Munger, if you were so sure
that I agreed with you. I'm certainly Mr. and Mrs. Putney's friend, and
so far as admiring Mr. Peck's sincerity and goodness is concerned, I'm
_his_ friend. But I'm obliged to say that you're mistaken about the
rest.”
She folded her hands at her waist, and stood up very straight, looking
firmly at Mrs. Munger, who made a show of taking a new grip of her senses
as she sank unbidden into a chair.
“Why, what do you mean, Miss Kilburn?”
“It seems to me that I needn't say.”
“Why, but you must! You _must_, you know. I can't be _left_ so! I
must know where I _stand_! I must be sure of my _ground_! I can't
go on without understanding just how much you mean by my being mistaken.”
She looked Annie in the face with eyes superficially expressive of
indignant surprise, and Annie perceived that she wished to restore herself
in her own esteem by browbeating some one else into the affirmation of her
innocence.
“Well, if you must know, Mrs. Munger, I mean that you ought to have
remembered Mr. Putney's infirmity, and that it was cruel to put temptation
in his way. Everybody knows that he can't resist it, and that he is making
such a hard fight to keep out of it. And then, if you press me for an
opinion, I must say that you were not justifiable in asking Mr. Peck to
take part in a social entertainment when we had explicitly dropped that
part of the affair.”
Mrs. Munger had not pressed Annie for an opinion on this point at all; but
in their interest in it they both ignored the fact. Mrs. Munger tacitly
admitted her position in retorting, “He needn't have stayed.”
“You made him stay--you remember how--and he couldn't have got away without
being rude.”
“And you think he wasn't rude to scold me before my guests?”
“He told you the truth. He didn't wish to say anything, but you forced him
to speak, just as you have forced me.”
“Forced _you_? Miss Kilburn!”
“Yes. I don't at all agree with Mr. Peck in many things, but he is a good
man, and last night he spoke the truth. I shouldn't be speaking it if I
didn't tell you I thought so.”
“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, rising.
“After this you can't expect me to have anything to do with the Social
Union; you couldn't _wish_ me to, if that's your opinion of my
character.”
“I haven't expressed any opinion of your character, Mrs. Munger, if you'll
remember, please; and as for the Social Union, I shall have nothing further
to do with it myself.”
Annie drew herself up a little higher, and silently waited for her visitor
to go.
But Mrs. Munger remained.
“I don't believe Mrs. Putney herself would say what you have said,” she
remarked, after an embarrassing moment. “If it were really so I should be
willing to make any reparation--to acknowledge it. Will you go with me to
Mrs. Putney's? I have my phaeton here, and--”
“I shouldn't dream of going to Mrs. Putney's with you.”
Mrs. Munger urged, with the effect of invincible argument: “I've been down
in the village, and I've talked to a good many about it--some of them
hadn't heard of it before--and I must say, Miss Kilburn, that people
generally take a very different view of it from what you do. They think
that my hospitality has been shamefully abused. Mr. Gates said he should
think I would have Mr. Putney arrested. But I don't care for all that. What
I wish is to prove to you that I am right; and if I can go with you to call
on Mrs. Putney, I shall not care what any one else says. Will you come?”
“Certainly not,” cried Annie.
They both stood a moment, and in this moment Dr. Morrell drove up, and
dropped his hitching-weight beyond Mrs. Munger's phaeton.
As he entered she said: “We will let Dr. Morrell decide. I've been asking
Miss Kilburn to go with me to Mrs. Putney's. I think it would be a graceful
and proper thing for me to do, to express my sympathy and interest, and to
hear what Mrs. Putney really has to say. Don't _you_ think I ought to
go to see her, doctor?”
The doctor laughed. “I can't prescribe in matters of social duty. But what
do you want to see Mrs. Putney for?”
“What for? Why, doctor, on account of Mr. Putney--what took place last
night.”
“Yes? What was that?”
“What was _that_? Why, his strange behaviour--his--his intoxication.”
“Was he intoxicated? Did you think so?”
“Why, you were there, doctor. Didn't you think so?”
Annie looked at him with as much astonishment as Mrs. Munger.
The doctor laughed again. “You can't always tell when Putney's joking; he's
a great joker. Perhaps he was hoaxing.”
“Oh doctor, do you think he _could_ have been?” said Mrs. Munger, with
clasped hands. “It would make me the happiest woman in the world! I'd
forgive him all he's made me suffer. But _you're_ joking _now_,
doctor?”
“You can't tell when people are joking. If I'm not, does it follow that I'm
really intoxicated?”
“Oh, but that's nonsense, Dr. Morrell. That's mere--what do you call
it?--chop logic. But I don't mind it. I grasp at a straw.” Mrs. Munger
grasped at a straw of the mind, to show how. “But what _do_ you mean?”
“Well, Mrs. Putney wasn't intoxicated last night, but she's not well this
morning. I'm afraid she couldn't see you.”
“Just as you _say_, doctor,” cried Mrs. Munger, with mounting
cheerfulness. “I _wish_ I knew just how much you meant, and how
little.” She moved closer to the doctor, and bent a look of candid fondness
upon him. “But I know you're trying to mystify me.”
She pursued him with questions which he easily parried, smiling and
laughing. At the end she left him to Annie, with adieux that were almost
radiant. “Anyhow, I shall take the benefit of the doubt, and if Mr. Putney
was hoaxing, I shall not give myself away. _Do_ find out what he
means, Miss Kilburn, won't you?” She took hold of Annie's unoffered hand,
and pressed it in a double leathern grasp, and ran out of the room with a
lightness of spirit which her physical bulk imperfectly expressed.