trembling of a harp; the first musical tinkling that came murmuring up
from the misty meadows with the earliest stirring of the flocks and
herds; the gentle calling of the dumb creatures; the aerial flute notes
wafted down the leafy arches of the dew-wet woods; the palest glory of
the dawn coming for the perpetual refreshment of the earth; the final
coronation of the Day King with the marshalling of his dazzling lances
through the royal red and gold of the hilltops,--all these wonders of a
marvellously beautiful world were to Anne but the dreaded daily summons
to the renewal of a hopeless conflict.
It was like her never to think of sitting elsewhere than in the old
place--at her husband's side by the open window--after beginning to play
cards. It would have been utterly unlike her to have thought of doing
anything else, to have considered for a moment what her neighbors might
think or say. For hers was a nature condemned at its creation to a
loneliness even greater than that in which every soul must forever dwell
apart. All her life she had lived as one alone on a desert island. Now,
under this supreme anguish of living, the amazed gaze of the whole
world, its approval or its disapproval, would have been to her--had she
thought of it--no more than the moaning of the winter wind through the
graveyard cedars.
And yet, naturally enough, this utter unconsciousness upon Anne's part
did not lessen in the least the shock which the entire community felt on
seeing her--Anne Watson--of all women in all the world at the card-table
by the open window, in view of everybody passing along the big road!
Those who first saw the incredible sight could scarcely believe their
own eyes. Those who first heard of it utterly refused to credit it until
they had made a special trip up and down the big road, twice passing the
window, in order to see and to make sure for themselves. And then, when
there was no longer room for doubt or dispute, a sort of panic seized
the good people of Oldfield. With this appalling backsliding of Anne
Watson's the whole religious and social fabric seemed suddenly going to
pieces.
Only Lynn Gordon and the doctor knew the truth. Lynn had not told his
grandmother of Anne's visit nor of her request. His grandmother was not
one to whom he would have spoken of anything which had touched him
keenly or moved him deeply. And he had even not told Doris, whom he
would most naturally have trusted, certain of being understood, certain,
too, of sympathy for Anne. A feeling of delicate consideration for Anne,
a sense that she had trusted him, only because she could not do
otherwise, that she had opened her reserved heart to him, who was almost
a stranger, only because she was forced to do it, under terrible
necessity,--all these mingled feelings had a part in holding him silent.
To the doctor alone he felt that he should give a full account of what
had taken place. But when he tried to tell even him, Lynn unexpectedly
found it very hard to make Anne's motives and position as clear to
another person as he had felt them to be. He realized for the first time
that she had somehow made him feel much more than she had been able to
put into words. She had so few words--poor Anne--and the few that she
had were meagre indeed. The impulsive, warm-hearted young fellow
stammered, and reddened, and laughed at himself, in a manly
embarrassment that was a pleasant thing to see, as he tried clumsily to
put the matter before the doctor in its true light, and in a way to do
justice to Anne. Fortunately the doctor understood at once, and might
have understood had the young man said even less than he finally found
to say. That friend of humanity had learned something of Anne's
character during her husband's long illness. Two earnest natures,
stripped for a shoulder to shoulder contest with death over a sick-bed,
come as near, perhaps, to knowing one another as any two souls may ever
approach. A doctor's very calling, moreover, must reveal to him--as
hardly the confessional can reveal to another man--the winding mazes of
the simplest, sincerest woman's conscience.
When the doctor went home after talking with Lynn, he tried to show his
wife that there was no occasion for the widespread excitement over this
unaccountable change in Anne. He hoped that an off-hand word to his wife
might have some effect in settling the swirl of gossip which circled the
village, faster and faster, with Anne's continued appearance at the
card-table, as the continual casting of pebbles agitates a stagnant
pool. But Mrs. Alexander, good, kind, charitable woman though she was,
could only sigh and shake her head. She said that she had never
understood Anne, but that she had always respected her sincerity, no
matter how widely she herself might differ in opinion. But what could
anybody think or say of Anne's sincerity now? The doctor's wife cast a
shocked, frightened, glance at the Watson house. Such open, flagrant
backsliding really was enough to make the lightning strike.
And Mrs. Alexander's view was the one held by most of the Oldfield
ladies, all of whom took the incomprehensible affair much to heart. Only
Miss Judy and Kitty Mills saw nothing to alarm, nothing to wonder at,
nothing in the least unnatural in Anne's change of attitude. But then,
Miss Judy was well known to believe that everybody always had some
praiseworthy motive for everything, if others were only clear-sighted
enough to perceive it. Her pure mind was a flawless crystal, reflecting
every ray of light from many exquisite prisms, but sending nothing out
of actual darkness. And no one ever regarded seriously the views of
Kitty Mills, who was notoriously willing for every one to do precisely
as he liked, as nearly as he could, without any explanation or any
reason whatever, so that her opinion had the very slight value which
usually pertains to the opinions of the easily pleased. All the other
Oldfield ladies were too deeply shocked, too utterly amazed, to know
what to think, or what to say, or what to do. They could only gather in
solemn, excited conclave at one another's houses, and discuss the
situation daily and almost hourly, with growing wonder and bated breath.
Sidney was, of course, the central figure in this, as in all other
things vital to the life of the village. As much at a loss for once as
the dullest, she held nevertheless to her high esteem for Anne, and in
canvassing the strangeness of the latter's conduct from house to house,
as she felt compelled to canvass it, she invariably spoke of her with
great kindness, even while admitting that it would be hard for a
Philadelphia lawyer to find out what Anne meant by whirling round like a
weathercock. It is likely that Sidney took off her bonnet and let down
her hair oftener, and shook it out harder, and twisted it up tighter, at
this time, than at any other period of her entire professional career.
She used, indeed, to stop all along the big road--anywhere--and hang her
bonnet on the fence, while she shook her hair down and twisted it up
again; and her knitting-needles flew faster than they had ever done
before or ever did afterward. One day, as she happened to be entering
the doctor's gate to keep an important engagement with Mrs. Alexander,
she saw Miss Pettus standing before the Watson house, gazing at the
window,--which had now become the stage of a mystery play,--and not only
gazing, but staring as if some dreadful sight had suddenly turned her to
stone. Sidney called to her, but she did not turn or respond in any way
for some minutes; and when she finally joined Sidney and the doctor's
wife on the latter's porch, where they were sitting, she was really pale
from agitation and actually sputtering with excitement.
"Chips!" she gasped, sinking into a chair. "Poker chips. I saw 'em with
my own eyes and heard 'em with my own ears! I give you both my sacred
word as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church in good standing."
"Poker chips are neither here nor there," said Sidney, in the lofty,
judicial tone which she had maintained throughout the controversy.
She eyed Miss Pettus, however, silently and a little severely, as she
loosed several rounds of yarn from her big ball, and held them out and
deliberately shook them apart at arm's length. It did not please her to
hear of poker chips--or anything else of interest--through Miss Pettus
or any other person. It was her own special and exclusive province to
discover and distribute the news. She felt much as the editor of a great
daily newspaper might feel if some casual passer-by should drop in to
tell him of the day's greatest public event.
"Poker chips are neither here nor there," she repeated coolly, and
almost contemptuously, as one looking to larger things. "No matter what
Anne Watson does, and no matter how she does it, there's one thing that
you may always be sure of, Miss Pettus, and that is--that she believes
she is doing right."
"Who said she didn't?" retorted Miss Pettus. "Have I said anything about
the right or wrong of it? I don't care anything about the right or wrong
of card-playing. Some folks think one way and some another--and they may
go on thinking so for all me. What I do say is that a body ought to
stick to what she does believe, whatever it is, no matter whether she's
a Methodist like me or a Christian like Anne."
"Well--'pon my word!" exclaimed Sidney, seeing a chance for reprisal,
and furtively winking the eye next to the doctor's wife. "To hear you
talk, Miss Pettus, folks would think there wasn't anybody but Methodists
and Christians. Where, pray, do the rest of us come in? There's Jane
there--a Cumberland Presbyterian, dyed blue in the wool. Yonder's Miss
Judy, an Episcopalian of the highest latitude and the greatest
longitude, and a-training Doris to be just like her. And here am I--a
Baptist--a Baptist born and a Baptist bred--and a Whiskey Baptist at
that."
"If I were you, Sidney Wendall," replied Miss Pettus, with offended
dignity, "I wouldn't make fun of my own religion if I did make fun of
every other earthly thing I came across. You know as well as I do, and
as Jane here does, that there is no such thing as a Whiskey Baptist--and
never was and never will be."
"No such thing as a Whiskey Baptist?" exclaimed Sidney, pretending to be
wholly in earnest, and slyly winking again at the doctor's wife. "Then
what, may I ask, would you have called my own father and his only
brother--two church members in good and regular standing, and two as
good and highly respected citizens as this Pennyroyal Region ever had,
to boot? What else could you call them, I ask you, 'Mandy Pettus? Didn't
they always pay their debts on the stroke of the town clock, and to a
hundred cents on the dollar? Didn't they always vote the straight
Democratic ticket for fifty years, without ever a scratch from end to
end? Didn't they always get drunk on every county court day of their
lives, and keep sober all the rest of the year? No Whiskey Baptists
indeed!"
"What's all that tirade got to do with what I said about Anne's--and
everybody's--being what they pretend to be?" fumed Miss Pettus. "That's
what I said and what I'll keep on saying as long as I have the breath to
speak my honest mind. And I'll say it about anybody, no matter who, just
the same. Chopping and changing till a body don't know where to find
you, looks to me just as bad in one denomination as another. And levity
in those who ought to be serious-minded is levity to me wherever I find
it. Now, look at our own circuit rider, only last Sunday! After that
powerful sermon which warmed up the whole town, and shook the dry bones,
what did he do?--right out of the pulpit, too,--but stop and hang over
the fence like a schoolboy for a laughing confab with Kitty Mills! There
she was, of course, standing out in the broiling sun with nothing but
her apron thrown over her silly head, while you could hear old man Mills
scolding her, the whole blessed time, at the top of his peevish voice.
It was perfectly scandalous and nothing but scandalous to see such
goings-on on the Lord's Day. Kitty was telling him about her late young
turkeys getting out in that last hard rain and holding up their heads
with their mouths wide open, till the last one of them drowned. As if
there was anything uncommon or funny in that; as if everybody didn't
know that young turkeys always did that whenever they got a chance. And
the simpletons were both laughing as if they'd never heard such a joke,
and as if it had been Monday instead of Sunday, and the circuit rider
hadn't had any good work to do."
"Maybe he thinks that is a part of his good work," said the doctor's
wife, gently. "Kitty Mills surely needs all the kindness she can get
outside her own family, poor thing, though she doesn't seem to know it."
Sidney smiled at a sudden recollection. "I passed there yesterday, in
the heat of the day, and saw her in the garden bending over and pulling
the weeds out of her handful of vegetables. It made me real uneasy to
look at her leaning down so long and steady, and her so short and stout,
and I said so. But she only laughed till she cried, and declared there
wasn't any danger except to her corset-boards. Then, when she could
speak for laughing, she said she had saved almost enough to stick her
bunch peas. And,--if you'll believe it,--Sam left the garden gate open
last night, and the pigs got in and eat every one of 'em up."
"The corset-boards?" gasped Miss Pettus, in a tone of blank amazement,
which implied, nevertheless, that she would not be in the least
surprised at anything happening to Kitty Mills.
Sidney eyed Miss Pettus humorously, as she loosed more rounds of yarn
from her big ball, holding it out again at arm's length; but there was
no time for any reply had she thought it worth while to make one, for
Mrs. Alexander's cook appeared in the doorway just at that moment, to
say that supper was ready, and, following the hostess, the guest went to
enjoy it without allowing it to grow cold. The table had been set on the
back porch, which was on the side of the house that was most pleasant at
that hour. And a truly pleasant place it was, with its whitewashed
pillars, its cool green curtains of Madeira vine, so waxen of leaf and
so frost-like in flower, and with its green and restful environment of
grass and fruit trees. The table stood directly before the back door of
the open passage. Sidney's seat faced the big road, and she had scarcely
seated herself, when, chancing to glance up, she saw Lynn and Doris as
they passed, going along the big road. She said nothing, however, of
having seen them; she was always reserved about her own private affairs,
and then she was still holding fast to her early determination to leave
the young couple entirely free to follow the natural lead of their own
hearts. But the glimpse of them reminded her of an uneasy suspicion that
old lady Gordon was not so minded, a suspicion which had occurred to her
that day for the first time. Now, therefore, with the unhesitating
decision characteristic of her in all things, she resolved, then and
there, to talk it over with Miss Judy as soon as she could get away from
the supper table.
But it was never easy for Sidney to get away; a hostess, paying the
stipulated price of a high-priced entertainer, rightfully expects to get
the worth of her fee. No one knew this better than Sidney herself, and
she accordingly so exerted her utmost ability, so put forth her most
brilliant talent, that she fully made up for the shortened time; and the
only regret upon the part of the hostess was that such a delightful
entertainment should ever come to an end. Miss Pettus, also, was sorry
to have Sidney go; and, now quite restored to good humor, she whispered
to her, as they parted at the gate,--one going up the big road and one
going down,--that she meant to send Kitty Mills a couple of young
turkeys that very night, just to keep her from behaving so like a
simpleton the next time the circuit rider went by, and just to make her
see how shamefully she had behaved about that stubborn old dorminica.
Out into the dim, dusty highway Sidney now swung, with her long, free,
fearless, independent step, which seemed to ask nothing of life and the
world but to be allowed to go her own way; walking and knitting as fast
as though the dusk had been daylight. Reaching Miss Judy's house she
found the little sisters sitting happily side by side just within the
open door of the unlighted passage, as they always were to be found at
that time on the summer evenings. Miss Judy was talking in her soft,
bright little way, which reminded the listener of the chirruping of a
happy bird; and Miss Sophia was listening with enthralled interest
between lapses of unconscious nodding. And now, as always when they
talked together, both had the eager manner of having never before had a
really satisfying opportunity to exchange vividly novel views and
intensely interesting experiences, so that they hardly knew how to make
enough of this truly delightful chance.
They were glad, nevertheless, to greet Sidney, as everybody always was;
and Miss Judy said, as soon as Sidney had come within speaking distance,
that Lynn and Doris had stopped for a moment to ask how she was feeling,
and that she had told them she felt almost strong again,--nearly sure,
indeed, of being able to give the tea-party on the coming Thursday.
"I am really mortified at not having given it before this time," she
went on, blushing unseen in the gloaming. "It does seem too bad, this
spoiling of lovely plans just on account of a foolish shortness of
breath. It was such a disappointment to sister Sophia, not to have the
tea-party while the blush roses were in bloom, for they match mother's
best cups and saucers perfectly. And then came the cinnamon roses--they
might have done fairly well, though they are not quite so delicate a
shade, but they also have bloomed and faded long ago. Now the
hundred-leaf roses will have to do--as I was just saying to sister
Sophia when you came, Sidney--although their hearts are rather too dark
to be as pretty as the others would have been. But we must give the
tea-party anyway, blush roses or no blush roses, without any more delay,
since I have thoughtlessly mentioned it to old lady Gordon, who never
makes any allowances and who is rather critical."
"Oh, you told her, did you?" exclaimed Sidney. "Then that accounts for
what I came to see you about."
"I felt that it was due to Doris that I should tell her; that she should
know that only circumstances over which we had no control have so far
prevented our paying the dear child the compliment of a formal
introduction to society," said Miss Judy, with her pretty, comical,
society air.
"Well, it explains what old Lady Gordon said to me without rhyme or
reason when she met me on the big road yesterday--stopping her coach in
the middle of the big road to do it, too,--something that she never took
the trouble to think of before."
Sidney leaned forward and peered up and down the highway to make sure
that no one was within hearing, and she listened for an instant to Miss
Sophia's deep breathing in the still darkness of the passage.
"Now, mark my words, Miss Judy," she then said, in a guarded undertone.
"That old Hessian means to interfere. She is going to make trouble. I
feel it in my bones."
"Why?" cried Miss Judy, startled and bewildered. "What do you mean,
Sidney? What did she say?"
"She said--without rhyme or reason, as I've told you--that her grandson
was going away very soon to begin the practice of his profession, and
that he hadn't any time to waste on any nonsense, like old women's silly
tea-parties. She didn't call him by his name, either, as she always has
called him heretofore. She called him 'my grandson,' in that high and
mighty, stand-off-and-keep-your-place way that she knows how to put on,
when she wants to and ain't too lazy. Now, mark my word, Miss Judy.
Trouble's a-coming!"
"Oh, how could any one be unkind to that dear child," cried Miss Judy,
almost in tears.
"I'd like to see anybody try it, while I'm 'round," said Sidney, with
the fierceness that appears in the humblest barnyard hen when her chick
is touched. "I'm all ready and a-waiting. Just let old lady Gordon so
much as bat her eye and I'll give her goss. I'll tell her the Lord's
truth, if she never heard it before. I'll tell her to her face that no
Gordon that ever stepped ever was, or ever will be, fit to dust my
Doris's shoes, so far as being good goes--or smart and good-looking
either. This young Gordon is decent enough, I reckon, as young men go.
And his father went pretty straight because he hadn't the spunk or the
strength to go crooked. He was like a toad under a harrow, poor soul! He
was so tame that he'd eat out of your hand. But even that old Hessian
never harrowed or tamed the old man, who was a match for her. No-siree!
Not while he had the strength to hop over a straw. Why, the whole woods
were full of his wild colts."
"Ah, indeed! I never knew that the old gentleman ever had any interest
in horses," Miss Judy murmured absently, almost tearfully, not thinking
in the least of what she was saying.
"That was a long time ago," said Sidney hastily, remembering suddenly to
whom she was speaking. "What the old folks were in their young days is
neither here nor there. It makes no difference now. This young Gordon
seems to be a fine young fellow, but, fine or coarse, all that I ask of
that old Hessian, or of anybody, is to do as I do, and to let him and
Doris alone, and not to meddle; just to give the two young things a fair
field and no favor. And that's what she and everybody's got to do, too,
or walk over Sidney Wendall's dead body."
"Don't--don't," entreated Miss Judy's soft voice, coming out of the
quiet darkness with a tremulous gentleness, and telling of the tender
tears in her blue eyes. "Let not your heart be troubled, dear friend.
All will be well with the child. All is sure to come right at last, if
we are but as patient and as trusting and as true and as faithful and as
loving--above all as loving--as we should be. For love _is now--as it
was in the beginning, and ever shall be_--the strongest thing in the
world."
XXII
THE UPAS TREE
When Miss Judy, thus urged, set the day for the tea-party, naming even
the hour, she forgot for the moment that the higher court of the
district convened its summer session on the day which she had appointed.
And this fact made it impossible to give the party on that day. Not
because she had ever had or ever expected to have anything to do with
any court of law--for coming events do not always cast their shadows
before--but because she expected a visit from Judge Stanley on the
evening of his first day in town. For she always knew just when to look
for him; during many years he had come on the same day of the month, at
the same hour and almost at the same minute. And Miss Judy had through
all those years been in the habit of making certain delightful
preparations for his visit, which nothing but her love and anxiety for
Doris ever could have caused her to forget, and which not even that
could now induce her to forego.