The following Sunday afternoon Mrs. Waycroft hastened over to Ann
Boyd's. She walked very rapidly across the fields and through the woods
rather than by the longer main road. She found Ann in her best dress
seated in her dining-room reading Luke King's paper, which had come the
day before. She looked up and smiled and nodded to the visitor.
"I just wish you'd listen to this," she said, enthusiastically. "And
when you've heard it, if you don't think that boy is a genius you'll
miss it by a big jump. On my word, such editorials as this will do more
good than all the preaching in Christendom. I've read it four times. Sit
down and listen."
"No, you've got to listen to me," said the visitor. "That can wait; it's
down in black and white, while mine is fairly busting me wide open. Ann,
do you know what took place at meeting this morning?"
"Why, no, how could I? You know I said I'd never darken that door again,
after that low-lived coward--"
"Stop, Ann, and listen!" Mrs. Waycroft panted, as she sank into a chair
and leaned forward. "You know I go seldom myself, but by some chance I
went this morning. I always feel like doing the best I can towards the
end of a year. Well, I had hardly got my seat and Brother Bazemore had
just got up to make some announcements, when who should come in but Jane
Hemingway. Instead of stopping at her usual place, nigh the stove, she
walked clean up to the altar-railing and stood as stiff as a post,
gazing at the preacher. He was busy with his notes and didn't see her at
first, though every eye in the house was fixed on her in wonder, for she
was as white as a sheet, and so thin and weak that it looked like the
lightest wind would blow her away. 'Brother Bazemore,' she said, loud
enough to be heard, in her shrill voice, clean out to the horse-rack, 'I
want to say something, and I want to say it out before all of you.'"
"Huh!" Ann grunted--"huh!"
"Well, he looked good surprised," Mrs. Waycroft went on, "but you know
he's kind o' resentful if folks don't show consideration for his
convenience, so he looked down at her over his specks and said:
"'Well, sister, I reckon the best time for that will be after preaching,
and then them that want to stay can do so and feel that they got what
they waited for.'
"'But I can't wait,' said she. 'What I've got to say must be said now,
while I'm plumb in the notion. If I waited I might back out, and I don't
want to do it.'
"Well, he give in; and, Ann, she turned around facing us all and took
off her bonnet and swung it about like a flag. She was as nigh dead in
looks as any corpse I ever saw. And since you was born, Ann, you never
heard the like. Folks was so interested that they stared as if their
eyes was popping out of their sockets. She said she'd come to confess to
crime--that's the way she put it--_crime!_ She said she'd been passing
for half a lifetime in this community as a Christian woman, when in
actuality she had been linked body and soul to the devil. Right there
she gulped and stood with her old head down; then she looked at us like
a crazy person and went on. She said away back when she was a girl she'd
been jealous of a certain girl, and that she'd hounded that girl through
a long life. She had made it her particular business to stir up strife
against that woman by toting lies from one person to another. She turned
sort o' sideways to the preacher and said: 'Brother Bazemore, what I
told you Ann Boyd said about you that time was all made up--a lie out of
whole cloth. I told you that to make you denounce her in public, and you
did. I kept telling her neighbors things to make 'em hate her, and they
did. I told her husband a whole string of deliberate lies that made him
leave her and take her child away. I spent half my life at this thing,
to have it end like this: Men and women, the woman that I was doing all
that against was the one who came up with the money that saved my
worthless life and tried to hide it from me and the rest of the world.
She not only done that, but she done me even a greater favor. I won't
say what that was, but nobody but an angel from heaven, robed in the
flesh of earth, could have done that, for it was the very thing she had
every right to want to see visited on me. That act would have paid me
back in my own coin, and she wanted to count out the money, but she was
too much of heaven to go through it. Instead of striking at me, she
saved me suffering that would have dragged me to the dust in shame. I've
come here to say all this because I want to do her justice, if I can,
while the breath of life is in me. I've just got back from Gilmer, where
I went and met the man whose life I wrecked--her husband. I told him the
truth, hoping that I could do him some good in atonement, but the poor,
worn-out man seemed too utterly crushed to forgive me.'"
"Joe--she went to Joe!" Ann gasped, finding her voice. "Now, I reckon,
he believes me. And to think that Jane Hemingway would say all that--do
all that! It don't seem reasonable. But you say she actually--"
"Of course she did," broke in the narrator. "And when she was through
she marched straight down the middle aisle and stalked outside. Half the
folks got up and went to the windows and watched her tottering along the
road; and then Brother Bazemore called 'em back and made 'em sit down.
He said, in his cold-blooded way, hemming and hawing, that the whole
community had been too severe, and that the best way to get the thing
settled and smooth-running again was to agree on some sort of public
testimonial. Ann, I reckon fully ten men yelled out that they would
second the motion. I never in all my life saw such excitement. Folks was
actually crying, and this one and that one was telling kind things you
had done to them. Then they all got around me, Ann, and they made a lots
over me, saying I was the only one who had acted right, and that I must
ask you to forgive them. That was the motion Bazemore put and carried by
a vote of rising. Half of them was so anxious to have their votes
counted that they climbed up on the benches and waved their hats and
bonnets and shawls, and yelled out, 'Here! here!' Bazemore dismissed
without preaching; it looked like he thought nothing he could say, in
any regular line, would count in such a tumult. And after meeting dozens
of 'em slid up to me and snatched my hands and told me to speak a good
word for them; they kept it up even after I'd got outside, some of 'em
walking part of the way with me and sending messages. Wait till I catch
my breath, and I'll tell you who spoke and what each one said, as well
as I can."
"Never mind," said Ann, an absent look in her strong face. "I believe
I'd rather not hear any more of it; it don't make one bit of difference
one way or another."
"Why, Ann, surely you won't entertain hard feelings, now that they all
feel so bad. If you could only 'a' been there, you would--"
"Oh, it isn't that," Ann sighed, and with her closed hand she pounded
her heavy knee restlessly. "You see, Mary--oh, I don't know--but, well,
I can't possibly be any way but the way the Lord made me, and to save my
life I can't feel grateful. They all just seem to me like a lot of
spoilt children that laugh or cry over whatever comes up. Somehow a
testimonial from a congregation like that, after a lifetime of beating
me and covering me with slime, seems more like an insult than a
compliment. They think they can besmirch the best part of my life, and
then rub it off in a minute with good intentions and a few words. Why,
it was the same sort of whim that made them all follow Jane Hemingway
like sheep after a leader. I don't hate 'em, you understand, but what
they do or say simply don't alter my feelings a speck. I have known all
along that I had the right kind of--character, and to listen to their
sniffling testimony on the subject would seem to me like--well, like
insulting my own womanhood."
"You are a powerful strange creature, Ann," Mrs. Waycroft said,
reflectively, "but, I reckon, if you hadn't been that way you wouldn't
be such a wonderful woman in so many ways. I was holding something back
for the last, but I reckon you'll sniff at that more than what I've
already told you. Ann, when I got home, and had just set down to eat a
snack before running over to you, who should come to my back gate and
call me out except Jane herself. She stood leaning against the fence
like the walk had nearly done her up, and she refused to come in and set
down. She said she wanted me to do her a favor. She said she knew I was
at meeting and heard what she said, but that she wanted me to come to
you for her. As God is my final Judge, I never felt such pity for a poor
rotten shred of humanity in all my life. She looked like she was trying
to cry, but was too dry inside to do anything but wheeze; her very eyes
seemed to be literally on fire; she looked like a crazy person talking
rationally. She said she wanted me to tell you how sorry and broke up
she was, that she'd pay back that hundred dollars if she had to deed
away her dead body to some medical college. She said she could do
anything on earth to make amends _except_ go to you face to face and
apologize--she'd walk from door to door all over the country, she said,
and tell her tale of shame, but she couldn't say it to you. She said she
had tried for weeks to do it, but she knew she'd never have the moral
strength."
"She talked that way?" Ann said, looking steadily out into the sunshine
through the open doorway.
"Yes; and I reckon you have as little patience with her message as you
have with the balance," said the visitor.
"No, she's different, Mary," Ann declared. "Jane Hemingway is another
proposition altogether. She's fought a long, fierce fight, and God
Almighty's forces have whipped her clean out. She was a worthy foe, and
I respect her more now than I ever did. She was different from the rest.
_She_ had a cause. _She_ had something to fight about. She loved Joe
Boyd with all the heart she ever had, and when I married him she
couldn't--simply couldn't--let it rest. She held on like a bull-dog with
his teeth clamped to bone. She's beat; I won't wait for her to come to
me; I may take a notion and go to her."