The evening after the funeral Annie took Idella, with the child's clothes
and toys in a bundle, and Bolton drove them down Over the Track to the
Savors'. She had thought it all out, and she perceived that whatever the
minister's final intention might have been, she was bound by the purpose
he had expressed to her, and must give up the child. For fear she might be
acting from the false conscientiousness of which she was beginning to have
some notion in herself, she put the case to Mrs. Bolton. She knew what she
must do in any event, but it was a comfort to be stayed so firmly in her
duty by Mrs. Bolton, who did not spare some doubts of Mrs. Savor's fitness
for the charge, and reflected a subdued censure even upon the judgment of
Mr. Peck himself, as she bustled about and helped Annie get Idella and her
belongings ready. The child watched the preparations with suspicion. At the
end, when she was dressed, and Annie tried to lift her into the carriage,
she broke out in sudden rebellion; she cried, she shrieked, she fought; the
two good women who were obeying the dead minister's behest were obliged to
descend to the foolish lies of the nursery; they told her she was going on
a visit to the Savors, who would take her on the cars with them, and then
bring her back to Aunt Annie's house. Before they could reconcile her to
this fabled prospect they had to give it verisimilitude by taking off her
everyday clothes and putting on her best dress.
She did not like Mrs. Savor's house when she came to it, nor Mrs. Savor,
who stopped, all blowzed and work-deranged from trying to put it in order
after the death in it, and gave Idella a motherly welcome. Annie fancied a
certain surprise in her manner, and her own ideal of duty was put to proof
by Mrs. Savor's owning that she had not expected Annie to bring Idella to
her right away.
“If I had not done it at once, I never could have done it,” Annie
explained.
“Well, I presume it's a cross,” said Mrs. Savor, “and I don't feel right to
take her. If it wa'n't for what her father--”
“'Sh!” Annie said, with a significant glance.
“It's an ugly house!” screamed the child. “I want to go back to my Aunt
Annie's house. I want to go on the cars.”
“Yes, yes,” answered Mrs. Savor, blindly groping to share in whatever cheat
had been practised on the child, “just as soon as the cars starts. Here,
William, you take her out and show her the pretty coop you be'n makin' the
pigeons, to keep the cats out.”
They got rid of her with Savor's connivance for the moment, and Annie
hastened to escape.
“We had to tell her she was going a journey, or we never could have got her
into the carriage,” she explained, feeling like a thief.
“Yes, yes. It's all right,” said Mrs. Savor. “I see you'd be'n putting up
some kind of job on her the minute she mentioned the cars. Don't you fret
any, Miss Kilburn. Rebecca and me'll get along with her, you needn't be
afraid.”
Annie could not look at the empty crib where it stood in its alcove when
she went to bed; and she cried upon her own pillow with heart-sickness for
the child, and with a humiliating doubt of her own part in hurrying to
give it up without thought of Mrs. Savor's convenience. What had seemed so
noble, so exemplary, began to wear another colour; and she drowsed, worn
out at last by the swarming fears, shames, and despairs, which resolved
themselves into a fantastic medley of dream images. There was a cat
trying to get at the pigeons in the coop which Mr. Savor had carried
Idella to see. It clawed and miauled at the lattice-work of lath, and its
caterwauling became like the cry of a child, so like that it woke Annie
from her sleep, and still kept on. She lay shuddering a moment; it seemed
as if the dead minister's ghost flitted from the room, while the crying
defined and located itself more and more, till she knew it a child's wail
at the door of her house. Then she heard, “Aunt Annie! Aunt Annie!” and
soft, faint thumps as of a little fist upon the door panels.
She had no experience of more than one motion from her bed to the door,
which the same impulse flung open and let her crush to her breast the
little tumult of sobs and moans from the threshold.
“Oh, wicked, selfish, heartless wretch!” she stormed out over the child.
“But now I will never, never, never give you up! Oh, my poor little baby!
my darling! God has sent you back to me, and I will keep you, I don't care
what happens! What a cruel wretch I have been--oh, what a cruel wretch, my
pretty!--to tear you from your home! But now you shall never leave it; no
one shall take you away.” She gripped it in a succession of fierce hugs,
and mumbled it--face and neck, and little cold wet hands and feet--with her
kisses; and all the time she did not know the child was in its night-dress
like herself, or that her own feet were bare, and her drapery as scanty as
Idella's.
A sense of the fact evanescently gleamed upon her with the appearance
of Mrs. Bolton, lamp in hand, and the instantaneous appearance and
disappearance of her husband at the back door through which she emerged.
The two women spent the first moments of the lamp-light in making certain
that Idella was sound and whole in every part, and then in making uncertain
for ever how she came to be there. Whether she had wandered out in her
sleep, and found her way home with dream-led feet, or whether she had
watched till the house was quiet, and then stolen away, was what she could
not tell them, and must always remain a mystery.
“I don't believe but what Mr. Bolton had better go and wake up the Savors.
You got to keep her for the night, I presume, but they'd ought to know
where she is, and you can take her over there agin, come daylight.”
“_Mrs_. Bolton!” shouted Annie, in a voice so deep and hoarse that
it shook the heart of a woman who had never known fear of man. “If you
say such a thing to me--if you ever say such a thing again--I--I--I will
_hit_ you! Send Mr. Bolton for Idella's things--right away!”
* * * * *
“Land!” said Mrs. Savor, when Bolton, after a long conciliatory preamble,
explained that he did not believe Miss Kilburn felt a great deal like
giving the child up again. “_I_ don't want it without it's satisfied
to stay. I see last night it was just breakin' its heart for her, and I
told William when we first missed her this mornin', and he was in such a
pucker about her, I bet anything he was a mind to that the child had gone
back to Miss Kilburn's. That's just the words I used; didn't I, Rebecca?
I couldn't stand it to have no child _grievin'_ around.”
Beyond this sentimental reluctance, Mrs. Savor later confessed to Annie
herself that she was really accepting the charge of Idella in the same
spirit of self-sacrifice as that in which Annie was surrendering it, and
that she felt, when Mr. Peck first suggested it, that the child was better
off with Miss Kilburn; only she hated to say so. Her husband seemed to
think it would make up to her for the one they lost, but nothing could
really do that.