The next morning the weather was as balmy as spring. Ann had taken all
the coverings from her beds and hung them along the fence to catch the
purifying rays of the sun. Her rag-carpet was stretched out on the
ground ready to be beaten. She was occupied in sweeping the bare floor
of her sitting-room when a shadow fell across the threshold. Looking up,
she saw a tall, lean man, very ill-clad, his tattered hat in hand, his
shoes broken at the toes and showing the wearer's bare feet.
"It's me, Ann," Boyd said. "I couldn't stay away any longer. I hope you
won't drive me off, anyway, before I've got out what I come to say."
She turned pale as she leaned her broom against the wall and began to
roll her sleeves down her fat arms towards her wrists. "Well, I wasn't
looking for you," she managed to say.
"I reckon not, Ann," he returned, a certain wistful expression in his
voice and strangely softened face; "but I had to come. As I say--I had
to come and speak to you, anyway."
"Well, take a chair," she said, awkwardly. "I've got the windows up to
let the dust drive out, and I'll close them. It's powerful draughty. I
don't feel it, working like I am, but you might, coming in from the
outside."
He advanced to one of the straight-backed chairs which he remembered so
well, and laid an unsteady hand on it, but he did not draw it towards
him nor sit down. Instead, his great, hungry eyes followed her
movements, as she bustled from one window to another, like those of a
patient, offending dog.
"Well, why don't you sit down?" She had turned back to him, and stood
eying his poor aspect with strange misgivings and pity. In her comfort
and luxury, he, with his evidences of poverty and despair, struck a
strangely discordant note.
He drew the chair nearer, and with quivering knees she saw him sink into
it, with firmness at the beginning and then with the sudden collapse of
an invalid. She went to a window and looked out. Not seeing his horse
hitched near by, she came back to him.
"Where did you hitch?" she asked, her voice losing firmness.
"I didn't have no horse," he said; "I walked, Ann. Lawson was hauling
wood with the horse. He wouldn't have let me take it, anyway. He's got
awfully contrary here lately. Me 'n' him don't get along at all."
"Do you mean to tell me--do you mean to tell me you walked all that way,
in them shoes without bottoms, and--and you looking like you've just got
up from a long sick spell?"
"I made it all right, Ann, stopping to rest on the way." A touch of
color seemed to have risen into his wan cheeks. "I had to come
to-day--as I did awhile back--to do my duty, as I saw it. In fact, this
seems even more my duty. Ann, Jane Hemingway came over to Gilmer awhile
back. She come straight to my house, and, my God, Ann, she come and told
me she'd been at the bottom of all our trouble. She set right in and
acknowledged that she lied; she said she'd been lying all along for
spite, because she hated you."
"And loved you," Ann interposed, quickly. "Yes, she came back here, so
I've been told, and stood up in meeting and said she'd been to see you,
and she confessed it all in public. I can't find it in my heart to be
hard with her, Joe. She was only obeying her laws of nature, as you have
obeyed yours and I have mine, and--and as our offspring is now obeying
hers. Tell me the straight truth, Joe. I reckon Nettie still feels
strange towards me."
Joe Boyd's mild eyes wavered and sought the fire beyond the toes of his
ragged shoes.
"Tell me the truth, Joe," Ann demanded. "I'm entitled to that, anyway."
"She's always been a queer creature," Boyd faltered, evasively, without
looking up, and she saw him nervously laving his bony hands in the
sheer, unsuggestive emptiness about him. "But you mustn't think it's
just _you_ she's against, Ann. She's plumb gone back on me, too. The
money you furnished cleared the place of debt and bought her wedding
outfit, and she got her man; but not long back she found out where the
means come from, and--"
Ann's lips tightened in the pause that ensued. Her face was set like a
grotesque mask of stone. She leaned over the fire and pushed a fallen
ember back under the steaming logs with a poker.
"She couldn't stomach that, I reckon?" Ann said, in assumed calmness.
"Well, it made her mad at me. I won't tell you all she done or said,
Ann. It wouldn't do no good. I'm responsible for what she is, I reckon.
She might have growed up different if she'd had the watchful care of--of
a mother. What she is, is what any female will become under the care of
a shiftless man like I am."
"No, you are wrong, Joe," Ann said. "Why it is so I don't intend to
explain, but Nettie would have been like she is under all circumstances.
Money and plenty of everything might have glazed her character over, but
down at bottom she'd have been what she is. Adversity generally brings
out all the good that's in a person; the reason it hasn't fetched it out
in her is because it isn't there, nor never has been. You say you and
her don't get on well?"
"Not now," he said. "She just as good as driv me from home yesterday.
She told me point-blank that there wasn't room for me, and that when the
baby comes they would be more crowded and pinched than ever. She
actually sent Lawson to the Ordinary at Springtown to see if there was a
place on the poor-farm vacant. When I dropped onto that, Ann, I come
off. For all I know, they may have some paper for vagrancy ready to
serve on me. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm not going back to
them two, never while there is a lingering breath left in my body."
"The poor-farm!" Ann said, half to herself. "To think that she would
consent to that, and you her father."
"I think his folks is behind it, Ann. They've got a reason for wanting
to get rid of me."
"A reason, you say?" Ann was staring at him steadily.
Joe Boyd's embarrassment of a moment before returned. He twisted his
hands together again. "Yes; it's like this, Ann," he went on, awkwardly:
"a short time back Lawson's mother and father got onto the fact that you
were in good circumstances, and it made the biggest change in them you
ever heard of. They talked it all over the settlement. They are hard up,
and they couldn't talk of anything but how much you was worth, and what
you had your money invested in, and the like. After they got onto that,
they never--never paid no attention to what had been--been
circulated--your money covered all that as completely as a ten-foot
snow. Instead of turning up their noses, as Nettie was afraid they would
do, it only made them brag about how well their boy had done, and what a
fool I was. They tried all sorts of ways to get Nettie interested in
some scheme to attract your attention, but Nettie would just cry and
take on and refuse to come over here or to write to you."
"I understand"--Ann stroked her compressed lips with an unsteady
hand--"I understand. I've never been a natural mother to her; she
couldn't come to me like that. But you say they turned against you."
"Yes. You see, the Lawsons got an idea--the old woman did, in
particular, from something she'd picked up--that it was _me_ that stood
between you and Nettie. They thought you and me had had such a serious
falling-out that a proud woman like you never would have anything to do
with Nettie as long as I was about, and that the best thing was to shove
me off so the reconciliation would work faster. The truth is, they said
that would please you."
"I see, I see," Ann said. "And they set about putting you at the
poor-farm."
"Yes; they seemed to think that was as good a place as any. And they
could get all the proof necessary to put me there, for I hadn't a cent
to my name nor a whole rag to my back; and, Ann, for the last three
months I haven't been able to do a lick o' work. I've had a strange sort
of hurting all down my left side, and my right ankle seems affected in
the same way."
Ann Boyd suddenly turned away. Through the window she had seen the wind
blowing one of her sheets from the fence, and she went out and put it in
place. He limped out into the sunlight and stood at the little, sagging
gate a few yards from her. Something of his old dignity and gallantry of
manner was on him: he still held his hat in his hand, his thin,
iron-gray hair exposed to the warm rays of the sun.
"Well, I'd better be going, Ann," he said. "There is no telling when
somebody might come along and see me here, and start the talk you hate
so much. I come all the way here to tell you how low and mean I feel for
taking Jane Hemingway's word instead of yours, and how plumb sorry I am.
You and me may never meet again this side of the Seat of Judgment, and
I'll say this if I never speak again. Ann, the only days of perfect
happiness I ever had was here with you, and, if all of it was to do over
again, I'd suffer torture by fire rather than believe you anything but
an angel from heaven. Oh, Ann, it was just my poor, weak inferiority to
you that made me misjudge you. If I'd ever been a _real_ man--a man
worthy of a woman like you--I'd have snapped my fingers at all that was
said, but I was obeying my laws, as you say. I simply wasn't deep enough
nor high enough to do you justice."
He drew the little gate ajar and dragged his tired feet through the
opening. The fence was now between them. She looked down the road. A
woman under a sun-bonnet and little shawl was coming towards them. By a
strange fatality it was Jane Hemingway, but she was not to pass directly
by them, as her path homeward turned sharply to the left a hundred yards
below. They both recognized her.
"I don't know fully what you mean, Joe," Ann said, softly, "but if you
mean by what you just said that you'd be willing now to--to come
back--if _that's_ what you mean, I'd have something to say that maybe,
in justice to myself, I ought to say."
"_Would_ I come back? Would I? Oh, Ann, how could you doubt that, when
you see how miserable and sorry I feel. God knows I'd never feel worthy
of you; but if you would--if you only could--let me stay, I--"
"I couldn't consent to _that_, Joe--that's the point," Ann answered,
firmly. "Anything else on earth but _that_. I expect to provide for
Nettie in a substantial way, and I expect to have a lawyer make it one
of the main conditions that her income depends on her good treatment of
you as long as you and she live. I expect to do that, but the other
matter is different. A woman of my stamp has her pride and her rights,
Joe. I've been through a lot, but I can endure just so much and no more.
If--if you _did_ come back, and we was married over again, it would go
out to the world that you had taken _me_ back, and I couldn't stand
that. My very womanhood rises up and cries out against that in a voice
that rings clear to the end of truth and justice and woman's eternal
rights. Joe, I'm too big and pure in _myself_ to let the world say a man
who was--was--I'm going to say it--was little enough to doubt my word
for the best part of my days had at last taken _me_ back--taken me back
when my lonely life's sun was on the decline. No, no, never; for the
sake of unborn girl infants who may have to meet what I fell under when
I was too young to know the difference between the smile of hell and the
smile of heaven, I say No! We'd better live out our days in loneliness
apart--you frail and uncared for, and me on here without a friend or
companion--than to sanction such a baleful thing as that."
"Then I'll tell you what you let _me_ do," Boyd said, with a flare of
his old youthful adoration in his face. "Let me get down on my knees,
Ann, and crawl with my nose in the dust to everybody that we ever knew
and tell them that I'd begged and begged for mercy, and at last Ann had
taken _me_ back, weak and broken as I am--weak, ashamed, and unworthy,
but back with her in the place I lost through my own narrowness and
cowardice. Let me do that, Ann--oh, let me do that! I can't go away. I'd
die without you. I've loved you all, all these years and had you in my
mind night and day."
Ann was looking at the ground. The blood had mounted red and warm into
her face. Suddenly she glanced down the road. Jane Hemingway was just
turning into the path leading to her home; her eyes were fastened on
them. She paused and stood staring.
"Poor thing!" Ann said, her moist, glad eyes fixed upon Jane. "She is as
sorry and repentant as she can be. Her only hope right now, Joe, is that
we'll make it up. She used to love you, too, Joe. You are the only man
she ever did love. Let's wave our hands to her so she will understand
that--we have come to an understanding."
"Oh, Ann, do you mean--" But Ann, with a flushed, happy face, was waving
her hand at her old enemy. As for Boyd, he lowered his head to the fence
and sobbed.