of bitter medicine, and you hope they will be the better for it. I
understand you, my dear. You have spirit enough, but you don't get it
up often. That is where they make their mistake. Often the meek are meek
from choice, and they are the ones to beware of. I don't blame you for
trying it. And you can have Effie and welcome. I warn you that she is a
little wearing. Of course she can't help her affliction, poor child, but
it is dreadful. I have had her taught. She can read and write very
well now, poor child, and she is not lacking, and I have kept her well
dressed. I take her out to drive with me every day, and am not ashamed
to have her seen with me. If she had all her faculties she would not be
a bad-looking little girl. Now, of course, she has something of a vacant
expression. That comes, I suppose, from her not being able to hear. She
has learned to speak a few words, but I don't encourage her doing that
before people. It is too evident that there is something wrong. She
never gets off one tone. But I will let her speak to you. She will be
glad to go with you. She likes you, and I dare say you can put up with
her. A woman when she is alone will make a companion of a brazen image.
You can manage all right for everything except her clothes and lessons.
I will pay for them.”
“Can't I give her lessons?”
“Well, you can try, but I am afraid you will need to have Mr. Freer come
over once a week. It seems to me to be quite a knack to teach the deaf
and dumb. You can see. I will have Effie come in and tell her about
the plan. I wanted to go to Europe this summer, and did not know how to
manage about Effie. It will be a godsend to me, this arrangement, and of
course after the year is up she can come back.”
With that Felicia touched a bell, the maid appeared with automatic
readiness, and presently a tall little girl entered. She was very well
dressed. Her linen frock was hand-embroidered, and her shoes were ultra.
Her pretty shock of fair hair was tied with French ribbon in a fetching
bow, and she made a courtesy which would have befitted a little
princess. Poor Effie's courtesy was the one feature in which Felicia
Hempstead took pride. After making it the child always glanced at her
for approval, and her face lighted up with pleasure at the faint smile
which her little performance evoked. Effie would have been a pretty
little girl had it not been for that vacant, bewildered expression of
which Felicia had spoken. It was the expression of one shut up with
the darkest silence of life, that of her own self, and beauty was
incompatible with it.
Felicia placed her stiff forefinger upon her own lips and nodded, and
the child's face became transfigured. She spoke in a level, awful voice,
utterly devoid of inflection, and full of fright. Her voice was as the
first attempt of a skater upon ice. However, it was intelligible.
“Good morning,” said she. “I hope you are well.” Then she courtesied
again. That little speech and one other, “Thank you, I am very well,”
were all she had mastered. Effie's instruction had begun rather late,
and her teacher was not remarkably skilful.
When Annie's lips moved in response, Effie's face fairly glowed with
delight and affection. The little girl loved Annie. Then her questioning
eyes sought Felicia, who beckoned, and drew from the pocket of her
rustling silk skirt a tiny pad and pencil. Effie crossed the room and
stood at attention while Felicia wrote. When she had read the words on
the pad she gave one look at Annie, then another at Felicia, who nodded.
Effie courtesied before Annie like a fairy dancer. “Good morning. I hope
you are well,” she said. Then she courtesied again and said, “Thank you,
I am very well.” Her pretty little face was quite eager with love and
pleasure, and yet there was an effect as of a veil before the happy
emotion in it. The contrast between the awful, level voice and the grace
of motion and evident delight at once shocked and compelled pity. Annie
put her arms around Effie and kissed her.
“You dear little thing,” she said, quite forgetting that Effie could not
hear.
Felicia Hempstead got speedily to work, and soon Effie's effects were
packed and ready for transportation upon the first express to Lynn
Corners, and Annie and the little girl had boarded the trolley thither.
Annie Hempstead had the sensation of one who takes a cold plunge--half
pain and fright, half exhilaration and triumph--when she had fairly
taken possession of her grandmother's house. There was genuine girlish
pleasure in looking over the stock of old china and linen and ancient
mahoganies, in starting a fire in the kitchen stove, and preparing a
meal, the written order for which Effie had taken to the grocer and
butcher. There was genuine delight in sitting down with Effie at her
very own table, spread with her grandmother's old damask and pretty
dishes, and eating, without hearing a word of unfavorable comment upon
the cookery. But there was a certain pain and terror in trampling upon
that which it was difficult to define, either her conscience or sense of
the divine right of the conventional.
But that night after Effie had gone to bed, and the house was set to
rights, and she in her cool muslin was sitting on the front-door step,
under the hooded trellis covered with wistaria, she was conscious of
entire emancipation. She fairly gloated over her new estate.
“To-night one of the others will really have to get the supper, and wash
the dishes, and not be able to say she did it and I didn't, when I
did,” Annie thought with unholy joy. She knew perfectly well that her
viewpoint was not sanctified, but she felt that she must allow her
soul to have its little witch-caper or she could not answer for the
consequences. There might result spiritual atrophy, which would be much
more disastrous than sin and repentance. It was either the continuance
of her old life in her father's house, which was the ignominious and
harmful one of the scapegoat, or this. She at last reveled in this. Here
she was mistress. Here what she did, she did, and what she did not do
remained undone. Here her silence was her invincible weapon. Here she
was free.
The soft summer night enveloped her. The air was sweet with flowers
and the grass which lay still unraked in her father's yard. A momentary
feeling of impatience seized her; then she dismissed it, and peace came.
What had she to do with that hay? Her father would be obliged to buy hay
if it were not raked over and dried, but what of that? She had nothing
to do with it.
She heard voices and soft laughter. A dark shadow passed along the
street. Her heart quickened its beat. The shadow turned in at her
father's gate. There was a babel of welcoming voices, of which Annie
could not distinguish one articulate word. She sat leaning forward, her
eyes intent upon the road. Then she heard the click of her father's gate
and the dark, shadowy figure reappeared in the road. Annie knew who it
was; she knew that Tom Reed was coming to see her. For a second, rapture
seized her, then dismay. How well she knew her sisters-how very well!
Not one of them would have given him the slightest inkling of the true
situation. They would have told him, by the sweetest of insinuations,
rather than by straight statements, that she had left her father's roof
and come over here, but not one word would have been told him concerning
her vow of silence. They would leave that for him to discover, to his
amazement and anger.
Annie rose and fled. She closed the door, turned the key softly, and ran
up-stairs in the dark. Kneeling before a window on the farther side from
her old home, she watched with eager eyes the young man open the gate
and come up the path between the old-fashioned shrubs. The clove-like
fragrance of the pinks in the border came in her face. Annie watched
Tom Reed disappear beneath the trellised hood of the door; then the bell
tinkled through the house. It seemed to Annie that she heard it as she
had never heard anything before. Every nerve in her body seemed urging
her to rise and go down-stairs and admit this young man whom she loved.
But her will, turned upon itself, kept her back. She could not rise
and go down; something stronger than her own wish restrained her. She
suffered horribly, but she remained. The bell tinkled again. There was a
pause, then it sounded for the third time.
Annie leaned against the window, faint and trembling. It was rather
horrible to continue such a fight between will and inclination, but she
held out. She would not have been herself had she not done so. Then she
saw Tom Reed's figure emerge from under the shadow of the door, pass
down the path between the sweet-flowering shrubs, seeming to stir up
the odor of the pinks as he did so. He started to go down the road;
then Annie heard a loud, silvery call, with a harsh inflection, from her
father's house. “Imogen is calling him back,” she thought.
Annie was out of the room, and, slipping softly down-stairs and out into
the yard, crouched close to the fence overgrown with sweetbrier, its
foundation hidden in the mallow, and there she listened. She wanted to
know what Imogen and her other sisters were about to say to Tom Reed,
and she meant to know. She heard every word. The distance was not great,
and her sisters' voices carried far, in spite of their honeyed tones
and efforts toward secrecy. By the time Tom had reached the gate of
the parsonage they had all crowded down there, a fluttering assembly in
their snowy summer muslins, like white doves. Annie heard Imogen first.
Imogen was always the ringleader.
“Couldn't you find her?” asked Imogen.
“No. Rang three times,” replied Tom. He had a boyish voice, and his
chagrin showed plainly in it. Annie knew just how he looked, how dear
and big and foolish, with his handsome, bewildered face, blurting out to
her sisters his disappointment, with innocent faith in their sympathy.
Then Annie heard Eliza speak in a small, sweet voice, which yet, to one
who understood her, carried in it a sting of malice. “How very strange!”
said Eliza.
Jane spoke next. She echoed Eliza, but her voice was more emphatic and
seemed multiple, as echoes do. “Yes, very strange indeed,” said Jane.
“Dear Annie is really very singular lately. It has distressed us all,
especially father,” said Susan, but deprecatingly.
Then Imogen spoke, and to the point. “Annie must be in that house,” said
she. “She went in there, and she could not have gone out without our
seeing her.”
Annie could fairly see the toss of Imogen's head as she spoke.
“What in thunder do you all mean?” asked Tom Reed, and there was a
bluntness, almost a brutality, in his voice which was refreshing.
“I do not think such forcible language is becoming, especially at the
parsonage,” said Jane.
Annie distinctly heard Tom Reed snort. “Hang it if I care whether it is
becoming or not,” said he.
“You seem to forget that you are addressing ladies, sir,” said Jane.
“Don't forget it for a blessed minute,” returned Tom Reed. “Wish I
could. You make it too evident that you are--ladies, with every word you
speak, and all your beating about the bush. A man would blurt it out,
and then I would know where I am at. Hang it if I know now. You all say
that your sister is singular and that she distresses your father, and
you”--addressing Imogen--“say that she must be in that house. You are
the only one who does make a dab at speaking out; I will say that much
for you. Now, if she is in that house, what in thunder is the matter?”
“I really cannot stay here and listen to such profane language,” said
Jane, and she flitted up the path to the house like an enraged white
moth. She had a fleecy white shawl over her head, and her pale outline
was triangular.
“If she calls that profane, I pity her,” said Tom Reed. He had known the
girls since they were children, and had never liked Jane. He continued,
still addressing Imogen. “For Heaven's sake, if she is in that house,
what is the matter?” said he. “Doesn't the bell ring? Yes, it does ring,
though it is as cracked as the devil. I heard it. Has Annie gone deaf?
Is she sick? Is she asleep? It is only eight o'clock. I don't believe
she is asleep. Doesn't she want to see me? Is that the trouble? What
have I done? Is she angry with me?”
Eliza spoke, smoothly and sweetly. “Dear Annie is singular,” said she.
“What the dickens do you mean by singular? I have known Annie ever since
she was that high. It never struck me that she was any more singular
than other girls, except she stood an awful lot of nagging without
making a kick. Here you all say she is singular, as if you meant she
was”--Tom hesitated a second--“crazy,” said he. “Now, I know that Annie
is saner than any girl around here, and that simply does not go down.
What do you all mean by singular?”
“Dear Annie may not be singular, but her actions are sometimes
singular,” said Susan. “We all feel badly about this.”
“You mean her going over to her grandmother's house to live? I don't
know whether I think that is anything but horse-sense. I have eyes in my
head, and I have used them. Annie has worked like a dog here; I suppose
she needed a rest.”
“We all do our share of the work,” said Eliza, calmly, “but we do it in
a different way from dear Annie. She makes very hard work of work.
She has not as much system as we could wish. She tires herself
unnecessarily.”
“Yes, that is quite true,” assented Imogen. “Dear Annie gets very tired
over the slightest tasks, whereas if she went a little more slowly
and used more system the work would be accomplished well and with no
fatigue. There are five of us to do the work here, and the house is very
convenient.”
There was a silence. Tom Reed was bewildered. “But--doesn't she want to
see me?” he asked, finally.
“Dear Annie takes very singular notions sometimes,” said Eliza, softly.
“If she took a notion not to go to the door when she heard the bell
ring, she simply wouldn't,” said Imogen, whose bluntness of speech was,
after all, a relief.
“Then you mean that you think she took a notion not to go to the door?”
asked Tom, in a desperate tone.
“Dear Annie is very singular,” said Eliza, with such softness and
deliberation that it was like a minor chord of music.
“Do you know of anything she has against me?” asked Tom of Imogen; but
Eliza answered for her.
“Dear Annie is not in the habit of making confidantes of her sisters,”
said she, “but we do know that she sometimes takes unwarranted
dislikes.”
“Which time generally cures,” said Susan.
“Oh yes,” assented Eliza, “which time generally cures. She can have no
reason whatever for avoiding you. You have always treated her well.”
“I have always meant to,” said Tom, so miserably and helplessly that
Annie, listening, felt her heart go out to this young man, badgered by
females, and she formed a sudden resolution.
“You have not seen very much of her, anyway,” said Imogen.
“I have always asked for her, but I understood she was busy,” said Tom,
“and that was the reason why I saw her so seldom.”
“Oh,” said Eliza, “busy!” She said it with an indescribable tone.
“If,” supplemented Imogen, “there was system, there would be no need of
any one of us being too busy to see our friends.”
“Then she has not been busy? She has not wanted to see me?” said Tom. “I
think I understand at last. I have been a fool not to before. You girls
have broken it to me as well as you could. Much obliged, I am sure. Good
night.”
“Won't you come in?” asked Imogen.
“We might have some music,” said Eliza.
“And there is an orange cake, and I will make coffee,” said Susan.
Annie reflected rapidly how she herself had made that orange cake, and
what queer coffee Susan would be apt to concoct.
“No, thank you,” said Tom Reed, briskly. “I will drop in another
evening. Think I must go home now. I have some important letters. Good
night, all.”
Annie made a soft rush to the gate, crouching low that her sisters might
not see her. They flocked into the house with irascible murmurings, like
scolding birds, while Annie stole across the grass, which had begun to
glisten with silver wheels of dew. She held her skirts closely wrapped
around her, and stepped through a gap in the shrubs beside the walk,
then sped swiftly to the gate. She reached it just as Tom Reed was
passing with a quick stride.
“Tom,” said Annie, and the young man stopped short.
He looked in her direction, but she stood close to a great
snowball-bush, and her dress was green muslin, and he did not see her.
Thinking that he had been mistaken, he started on, when she called
again, and this time she stepped apart from the bush and her voice
sounded clear as a flute.
“Tom,” she said. “Stop a minute, please.”
Tom stopped and came close to her. In the dim light she could see that
his face was all aglow, like a child's, with delight and surprise.
“Is that you, Annie?” he said.
“Yes. I want to speak to you, please.”
“I have been here before, and I rang the bell three times. Then you were
out, although your sisters thought not.”
“No, I was in the house.”
“You did not hear the bell?”
“Yes, I heard it every time.”
“Then why--?”
“Come into the house with me and I will tell you; at least I will tell
you all I can.”
Annie led the way and the young man followed. He stood in the dark entry
while Annie lit the parlor lamp. The room was on the farther side of the
house from the parsonage.
“Come in and sit down,” said Annie. Then the young man stepped into
a room which was pretty in spite of itself. There was an old Brussels
carpet with an enormous rose pattern. The haircloth furniture gave out
gleams like black diamonds under the light of the lamp. In a corner
stood a what-not piled with branches of white coral and shells. Annie's
grandfather had been a sea-captain, and many of his spoils were in the
house. Possibly Annie's own occupation of it was due to an adventurous
strain inherited from him. Perhaps the same impulse which led him to
voyage to foreign shores had led her to voyage across a green yard to
the next house.
Tom Reed sat down on the sofa. Annie sat in a rocking-chair near by. At
her side was a Chinese teapoy, a nest of lacquer tables, and on it stood
a small, squat idol. Annie's grandmother had been taken to task by her
son-in-law, the Reverend Silas, for harboring a heathen idol, but she
had only laughed,
“Guess as long as I don't keep heathen to bow down before him, he can't
do much harm,” she had said.
Now the grotesque face of the thing seemed to stare at the two
Occidental lovers with the strange, calm sarcasm of the Orient, but they
had no eyes or thought for it.
“Why didn't you come to the door if you heard the bell ring?” asked Tom
Reed, gazing at Annie, slender as a blade of grass in her clinging green
gown.
“Because I was not able to break my will then. I had to break it to go
out in the yard and ask you to come in, but when the bell rang I hadn't
got to the point where I could break it.”
“What on earth do you mean, Annie?”
Annie laughed. “I don't wonder you ask,” she said, “and the worst of
it is I can't half answer you. I wonder how much, or rather how little
explanation will content you?”
Tom Reed gazed at her with the eyes of a man who might love a woman and
have infinite patience with her, relegating his lack of understanding of
her woman's nature to the background, as a thing of no consequence.
“Mighty little will do for me,” he said, “mighty little, Annie dear, if
you will only tell a fellow you love him.”
Annie looked at him, and her thin, sweet face seemed to have a luminous
quality, like a crescent moon. Her look was enough.
“Then you do?” said Tom Reed.
“You have never needed to ask,” said Annie. “You knew.”
“I haven't been so sure as you think,” said Tom. “Suppose you come over
here and sit beside me. You look miles away.”
Annie laughed and blushed, but she obeyed. She sat beside Tom and
let him put his arm around her. She sat up straight, by force of her
instinctive maidenliness, but she kissed him back when he kissed her.
“I haven't been so sure,” repeated Tom. “Annie darling, why have I been
unable to see more of you? I have fairly haunted your house, and seen
the whole lot of your sisters, especially Imogen, but somehow or other
you have been as slippery as an eel. I have always asked for you, but
you were always out or busy.”
“I have been very busy,” said Annie, evasively. She loved this young man
with all her heart, but she had an enduring loyalty to her own flesh and
blood.
Tom was very literal. “Say, Annie,” he blurted out, “I begin to think
you have had to do most of the work over there. Now, haven't you? Own
up.”
Annie laughed sweetly. She was so happy that no sense of injury could
possibly rankle within her. “Oh, well,” she said, lightly. “Perhaps. I
don't know. I guess housekeeping comes rather easier to me than to the
others. I like it, you know, and work is always easier when one likes
it. The other girls don't take to it so naturally, and they get very
tired, and it has seemed often that I was the one who could hurry the
work through and not mind.”
“I wonder if you will stick up for me the way you do for your sisters
when you are my wife?” said Tom, with a burst of love and admiration.
Then he added: “Of course you are going to be my wife, Annie? You know
what this means?”
“If you think I will make you as good a wife as you can find,” said
Annie.
“As good a wife! Annie, do you really know what you are?”
“Just an ordinary girl, with no special talent for anything.”
“You are the most wonderful girl that ever walked the earth,” exclaimed
Tom. “And as for talent, you have the best talent in the whole world;
you can love people who are not worthy to tie your shoestrings, and
think you are looking up when in reality you are looking down. That is
what I call the best talent in the whole world for a woman.” Tom Reed
was becoming almost subtle.
Annie only laughed happily again. “Well, you will have to wait and find
out,” said she.
“I suppose,” said Tom, “that you came over here because you were tired
out, this hot weather. I think you were sensible, but I don't think you
ought to be here alone.”
“I am not alone,” replied Annie. “I have poor little Effie Hempstead
with me.”
“That deaf-and-dumb child? I should think this heathen god would be
about as much company.”
“Why, Tom, she is human, if she is deaf and dumb.”
Tom eyed her shrewdly. “What did you mean when you said you had broken
your will?” he inquired.
“My will not to speak for a while,” said Annie, faintly.
“Not to speak--to any one?”
Annie nodded.
“Then you have broken your resolution by speaking to me?”
Annie nodded again.
“But why shouldn't you speak? I don't understand.”
“I wondered how little I could say, and have you satisfied,” Annie
replied, sadly.
Tom tightened his arm around her. “You precious little soul,” he said.
“I am satisfied. I know you have some good reason for not wanting to
speak, but I am plaguey glad you spoke to me, for I should have been
pretty well cast down if you hadn't, and to-morrow I have to go away.”
Annie leaned toward him. “Go away!”
“Yes; I have to go to California about that confounded Ames will case.
And I don't know exactly where, on the Pacific coast, the parties I have
to interview may be, and I may have to be away weeks, possibly months.
Annie darling, it did seem to me a cruel state of things to have to go
so far, and leave you here, living in such a queer fashion, and not
know how you felt. Lord! but I'm glad you had sense enough to call me,
Annie.”
“I couldn't let you go by, when it came to it, and Tom--”
“What, dear?”
“I did an awful mean thing: something I never was guilty of before.
I--listened.”
“Well, I don't see what harm it did. You didn't hear much to your or
your sisters' disadvantage, that I can remember. They kept calling you
'dear.'”
“Yes,” said Annie, quickly. Again, such was her love and thankfulness
that a great wave of love and forgiveness for her sisters swept over
her. Annie had a nature compounded of depths of sweetness; nobody
could be mistaken with regard to that. What they did mistake was the
possibility of even sweetness being at bay at times, and remaining
there.
“You don't mean to speak to anybody else?” asked Tom.
“Not for a year, if I can avoid it without making comment which might
hurt father.”
“Why, dear?”
“That is what I cannot tell you,” replied Annie, looking into his face
with a troubled smile.
Tom looked at her in a puzzled way, then he kissed her.