Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the
tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet
her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till
morning.
The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion
that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions,
all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had
heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.
She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast,
and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one
silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the
sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her
revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was
like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her
pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been
purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them
the more obligatory.
She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the
time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs.
Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from
the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance
which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.
She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was
inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things
she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies
gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy
of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.
By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell's custom to come
nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her
from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for
him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she
wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck;
and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound
of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her
even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her
that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and
persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter
of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her:
his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own
constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed
nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror
of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.
She let Mrs. Bolton go to the door, and she did not rise to meet the
doctor; she saw from his smile that he knew he had a moral rather than a
physical trouble to deal with, but she did not relax the severity of her
glare in sympathy, as she was tempted from some infinite remoteness to do.
When he said, “You're not well,” she whispered solemnly back, “Not at all.”
He did not pursue his inquiry into her condition, but said, with an
irrelevant cheerfulness that piqued her, “I was coming here this evening
at any rate, and I got your message on the way up from my office.”
“You are very kind,” she said, a little more audibly.
“I wanted to tell you,” he went on, “of what a time Putney and I have had
to-day working up public sentiment for Mr. Peck, so as to keep him here.”
Annie did not change her position, but the expression of her glance
changed.
“We've been round in the enemy's camp, everywhere; and I've committed
Gerrish himself to an armed neutrality. That wasn't difficult. The
difficulty was in another quarter--with Mr. Peck himself. He's more opposed
than any one else to his stay in Hatboro'. You know he intended going away
this morning?”
“Did he?” Annie asked dishonestly. The question obliged her to say
something.
“Yes. He came to Putney before breakfast to thank him and take leave of
him, and to tell him of the plan he had for--Imagine what!”
“I don't know,” said Annie, hoarsely, after an effort, as if the untruth
would not come easily. “I am worse than Mrs. Munger,” she thought.
“For going to Fall River to teach school among the mill-hands' children!
And to open a night-school for the hands themselves.”
The doctor waited for her sensation, and in its absence he looked so
disappointed that she was forced to say, “To teach school?”
Then he went on briskly again. “Yes. Putney laboured with him on his knees,
so to speak, and got him to postpone his going till to-morrow morning; and
then he came to me for help. We enlisted Mrs. Wilmington in the cause, and
we've spent the day working up the Peck sentiment to a fever-heat. It's
been a very queer campaign; three Gentiles toiling for a saint against
the elect, and bringing them all over at last. We've got a paper, signed
by a large majority of the members of the church--the church, not the
society--asking Mr. Peck to remain; and Putney's gone to him with the
paper, and he's coming round here to report Mr. Peck's decision. We all
agreed that it wouldn't do to say anything about his plan for the future,
and I fancy some of his people signed our petition under the impression
that they were keeping a valuable man out of another pulpit.”
Annie accompanied the doctor's words, which she took in to the last
syllable, with a symphony of conjecture as to how the change in Mr. Peck's
plans, if they prevailed with him, would affect her, and the doctor had
not ceased to speak before she perceived that it would be deliverance
perfect and complete, however inglorious. But the tacit drama so vividly
preoccupied her with its minor questions of how to descend to this escape
with dignity that still she did not speak, and he took up the word again.
“I confess I've had my misgivings about Mr. Peck, and about his final
usefulness in a community like this. In spite of all that Putney can say of
his hard-headedness, I'm afraid that he's a good deal of a dreamer. But I
gave way to Putney, and I hope you'll appreciate what I've done for your
favourite.”
“You are very good,” she said, in mechanical acknowledgment: her mind was
set so strenuously to break from her dishonest reticence that she did not
know really what she was saying. “Why--why do you call him a dreamer?” She
cast about in that direction at random.
“Why? Well, for one thing, the reason he gave Putney for giving up his
luxuries here: that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay
in the world, he must share them. It seems to me that I might as well
say that as long as there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I
must share them. Then he has a queer notion that he can go back and find
instruction in the working-men--that they alone have the light and the
truth, and know the meaning of life. I don't say anything against them. My
observation and my experience is that if others were as good as they are in
the ratio of their advantages, Mr. Peck needn't go to them for his ideal.
But their conditions warp and dull them; they see things askew, and they
don't see them clearly. I might as well expose myself to the small-pox in
hopes of treating my fellow-sufferers more intelligently.”
She could not perceive where his analogies rang false; they only
overwhelmed her with a deeper sense of her own folly.
“But I don't know,” he went on, “that a dreamer is such a desperate
character, if you can only keep him from trying to realise his dreams; and
if Mr. Peck consents to stay in Hatboro', perhaps we can manage it.” He
drew his chair a little toward the lounge where she reclined, and asked,
with the kindliness that was both personal and professional, “What seems to
be the matter?”
She started up. “There is nothing--nothing that medicine can help. Why do
you call him my favourite?” she demanded violently. “But you have wasted
your time. If he had made up his mind to what you say, he would never give
it up--never in the world!” she added hysterically. “If you've interfered
between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly
any one had any duty, you've done a very unwarrantable thing.” She was
aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words
themselves, but she hurried on: “I am going with him. He was here last
night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep
the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the
mills; and I shall not care what people think, if it's right--”
She stopped and weakly dropped back on the lounge, and hid her face in the
pillow.
“I really don't understand.” The doctor began, with a physician's
carefulness, to unwind the coil she had flung down to him. “Are the Savors
going, and the child?”
“He will give her the child for the one they lost--you know how! And they
will take it with them.”
“But you--what have you--”
“I must have the child too! I can't give it up, and I shall go with them.
There's no other way. You don't know. I've given him my word, and there is
no hope!”
“He asked you,” said the doctor, to make sure he had heard aright--“he
asked you--advised you--to go to work in a cotton-mill?”
“No;” she lifted her face to confront him. “He told me _not_ to go;
but I said I would.”
They sat staring at each other in a silence which neither of them broke,
and which promised to last indefinitely. They were still in their daze when
Putney's voice came through the open hall door.
“Hello! hello! hello! Hello, Central! _Can't_ I make you hear, any
one?” His steps advanced into the hall, and he put his head in at the
library doorway. “Thought you'd be here,” he said, nodding at the doctor.
“Well, doctor, Brother Peck's beaten us again. He's going.”
“Going?” the doctor echoed.
“Yes. It's no use. I put the whole case before him, and I argued it with a
force of logic that would have fetched the twelfth man with eleven stubborn
fellows against him on a jury; but it didn't fetch Brother Peck. He was
very appreciative and grateful, but he believes he's got a call to give up
the ministry, for the present at least. Well, there's some consolation in
supposing he may know best, after all. It seemed to us that he had a great
opportunity in Hatboro', but if he turns his back on it, perhaps it's a
sign he wasn't equal to it. The doctor told you what we've been up to,
Annie?”
“Yes,” she answered faintly, from the depths of the labyrinth in which she
was plunged again.
“I'm sorry for your news about him,” said the doctor. “I hoped he was
going to stay. It's always a pity when such a man lets his sympathies use
him instead of using them. But we must always judge that kind of crank
leniently, if he doesn't involve other people in his erase.”
She knew that he was shielding and trying to spare her, and she felt
inexpressibly degraded by the terms of his forbearance. She could not
accept, and she had not the strength to refuse it; and Putney said: “I've
not seen anything to make me doubt his sanity; but I must say the present
racket shakes my faith in his common-sense, and I rather held by that, you
know. But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be
if she were a man--excuse me, Annie--is ever absolutely right. I suppose
the truth is a constitutional thing, and you can't separate it from
the personal consciousness, and so you get it coloured and heated by
personality when you get it fresh. That is, we can see what the absolute
truth was, but never what it is.”
Putney amused himself in speculating on these lines with more or less
reference to Mr. Peck, and did not notice that the doctor and Annie gave
him only a silent assent. “As to misleading any one else, Mr. Peck's
following in his new religion seems to be confined to the Savors, as
I understand. They are going with him to help him set up a sort of
cooperative boarding-house. Well, I don't know where we shall get a hotter
gospeller than Brother Peck. Poor old fellow! I hope he'll get along better
in Fall River. It is something to be out of reach of Gerrish.”
The doctor asked, “When is he going?”
“Why, he's gone by this time, I suppose,” said Putney. “I tried to get him
to think about it overnight, but he wouldn't. He's anxious to go and get
back, so as to preach his last sermon here Sunday, and he's taken the 9.10,
if he hasn't changed his mind.” Putney looked at his watch.
“Let's hope he hasn't,” said Dr. Morrell.
“Which?” asked Putney.
“Changed his mind. I'm sorry he's coming back.”
Annie knew that he was talking at her, though he spoke to Putney; but she
was powerless to protest.