Chapter 17

“Oh yes!” sighed Annie, from the exaltation to which the events of the evening had borne her. “And we mustn't let him go. It would be a loss that every one would feel; that--”

“I'm tired of this fighting,” Mrs. Putney broke in, “and I think it's ruining Ralph every way. He hasn't slept the last two nights, and he's been all in a quiver for the last fortnight. For my part I don't care what happens now, I'm not going to have Ralph mixed up in it any more. I think we ought all to forgive and forget. I'm willing to overlook everything, and I believe others are the same.”

“You'd better ask Mrs. Gerrish the next time she calls,” Putney interposed.

Mrs. Putney stopped, and took her hand from her husband's arm. “Well, after what Mr. Gerrish said to-night about you, I _don't_ think Emmeline had better call _very_ soon!”

“Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” shrieked Putney, and his laugh flapped back at them in derisive echo from the house-front they were passing. “I guess Brother Peck had better stay and help fight it out. It won't be _all_ brotherly love after he goes--or sisterly either.”

XXVI.

Annie knew from the light in the kitchen window that Mrs. Bolton, who had not gone to the meeting, was there, and she inferred from the silence of the house that Bolton had not yet come home. She went up to her room, and after a glance at Idella asleep in her crib, she began to lay off her things. Then she sat down provisionally by the open window, and looked out into the still autumnal night. The air was soft and humid, with a scent of smoke in it from remote forest fires. The village lights showed themselves dimmed by the haze that thickened the moonless dark.

She heard steps on the gravel of the lane, and then two men talking, one of whom she knew to be Bolton. In a little while the back entry door was opened and shut, and after a brief murmur of voices in the library Mrs. Bolton knocked on the door-jamb of the room where Annie sat.

“What is it, Mrs. Bolton?”

“You in bed yet?”

“No; I'm here by the window. What is it?”

“Well, I don't know but what you'll think it's pretty late for callers, but Mr. Peck is down in the library. I guess he wants to speak with you about Idella. I told him he better see _you_.”

“I will come right down.”

She followed Mrs. Bolton to the foot of the stairs, where she kept on to the kitchen, while Annie turned into the library. Mr. Peck stood beside her father's desk, resting one hand on it and holding his hat in the other.

“Won't you be seated, Mr. Peck?”

“I thank you. It's only for a moment. I am going away to-morrow, and I wish to speak with you about Idella.”

“Yes, certainly. But surely you are not going to leave Hatboro', Mr. Peck! I hoped--we all did--that after what you had seen of the strong feeling in your favour to-night you would reconsider your determination and stay with us!” She went on impetuously. “You must know--you must understand now--how much good you can do here--more than any one else--more than you could do anywhere else. I don't believe that you realise how much depends upon your staying here. You can't stop the dissensions by going away; it will only make them worse. You saw how Colonel Marvin and Mr. Wilmington were with you; and Mr. Gates--all classes. I oughtn't to speak--to attempt to teach you your duty; I'm not of your church; and I can only tell you how it seems to me: that you never can find another place where your principles--your views--”

He waited for her to go on; but she really had nothing more to say, and he began: “I am not hoping for another charge elsewhere, at least not for the present; but I am satisfied that my usefulness here is at an end, and I do not think that my going away will make matters worse. Whether I go or stay, the dissensions will continue. At any rate, I believe that there are those who need help more, and whom I can help more, in another field--”

“Yes,” she broke in, with a woman's relevancy to the immediate point, “there is nothing to do here.”

He went on as if she had not spoken: “I am going to Fall River to-morrow, where I have heard that there is work for me--”

“In the mills!” she exclaimed, recurring in thought to what he had once said of his work in them. “Surely you don't mean that!” The sight, the smell, the tumult of the work she had seen that day in the mill with Lyra came upon her with all their offence. “To throw away all that you have learnt, all that you have become to others!”

“I am less and less confident that I have become anything useful to others in turning aside from the life of toil and presuming to attempt the guidance of those who remained in it. But I don't mean work in the mills,” he continued, “or not at first, or not unless it seems necessary to my work with those who work in them. I have a plan--or if it hardly deserves that name, a design--of being useful to them in such ways as my own experience of their life in the past shall show me in the light of what I shall see among them now. I needn't trouble you with it.”

“Oh yes!” she interposed.

“I do not expect to preach at once, but only to teach in one of the public schools, where I have heard of a vacancy, and--and--perhaps otherwise. With those whose lives are made up of hard work there must be room for willing and peaceful service. And if it should be necessary that I should work in the mills in order to render this, then I will do so; but at present I have another way in view--a social way that shall bring me into immediate relations with the people.” She still tried to argue with him, to prove him wrong in going away, but they both ended where they began. He would not or could not explain himself further. At last he said: “But I did not come to urge this matter. I have no wish to impose my will, my theory, upon any one, even my own child.”

“Oh yes--Idella!” Annie broke in anxiously. “You will leave her with me, Mr. Peck, won't you? You don't know how much I'm attached to her. I see her faults, and I shall not spoil her. Leave her with me at least till you see your way clear to having her with you, and then I will send her to you.”

A trouble showed itself in his face, ordinarily so impassive, and he seemed at a loss how to answer her; but he said: “I--appreciate your kindness to her, but I shall not ask you to be at the inconvenience longer than till to-morrow. I have arranged with another to take her until I am settled, and then bring her to me.”

Annie sat intensely searching his face, with her lips parted to speak. “_Another!_” she said, and the wounded feeling, the resentment of his insensibility to her good-will, that mingled in her heart, must have made itself felt in her voice, for he went on reluctantly--

“It is a family in which she will be brought up to work and to be helpful to herself. They will join me with her. You know the mother--she has lost her own child--Mrs. Savor.”

At the name, Annie's spirit fell; the tears started from her eyes. “Yes, she must have her. It is just--it is the only expiation. Don't you remember that it was I who sent Mrs. Savor's baby to the sea-shore, where it died?”

“No; I had forgotten,” said the minister, aghast. “I am sorry--”

“It doesn't matter,” said Annie lifelessly; “it had to be.” After a pause, she asked quietly, “If Mrs. Savor is going to work in the mills, how can she make a home for the child?”

“She is not going into the mills,” he answered. “She will keep house for us all, and we hope to have others who are without homes of their own join us in paying the expenses and doing the work, so that all may share its comfort without gain to any one upon their necessity of food and shelter.”

She did not heed his explanation, but suddenly entreated: “Let me go with you. I will not be a trouble to you, and I will help as well as I can. I can't give the child up! Why--why”--the thought, crazy as it would have once seemed, was now such a happy solution of the trouble that she smiled hopefully--“why shouldn't I go with Mr. and Mrs. Savor, and help to make a home for Idella there? You will need money to begin your work; I will give you mine. I will give it up--I will give it all up. I will give it to any good object that you approve; or you may have it, to do what you think best with; and I will go with Idella and I will work in the mills there--or anything.”

He shook his head, and for the first time in their acquaintance he seemed to feel compassion for her. “It isn't possible. I couldn't take your money; I shouldn't know what to do with it.”

“You know what to do with your own,” she broke in. “You do good with that!”

“I'm afraid I do harm with it too,” he returned. “It's only a little, but little as it has been, I can no longer meet the responsibility it brings.”

“But if you took my money,” she urged, “you could devote your life to preaching the truth, to writing and publishing books, and all that; and so could others: don't you see?”

He shook his head. “Perhaps others; but I have done with preaching for the present. Later I may have something to say. Now I feel sure of nothing, not even of what I've been saying here.”

“Will you send for Idella? When she goes with the Savors I will come too!”

He looked at her sorrowfully. “I think you are a good woman, and you mean what you say. But I am sorry you say it, if any words of mine have caused you to say it, for I know you cannot do it. Even for me it is hard to go back to those associations, and for you they would be impossible.”

“You will see,” she returned, with exaltation. “I will take Idella to the Savors' to-morrow--or no; I'll have them come here!”

He stood looking at her in perplexity. At last he asked, “Could I see the child?”

“Certainly!” said Annie, with the lofty passion that possessed her, and she led him up into the chamber where Idella lay sleeping in Annie's own crib.

He stood beside it, gazing long at the little one, from whose eyes he shaded the lamp. Then he said, “I thank you,” and turned away.

She followed him down-stairs, and at the door she said: “You think I will not come; but I will come. Don't you believe that?”

He turned sadly from her. “You might come, but you couldn't stay. You don't know what it is; you can't imagine it, and you couldn't bear it.”

“I will come, and I will stay,” she answered; and when he was gone she fell into one of those intense reveries of hers--a rapture in which she prefigured what should happen in that new life before her. At its end Mr. Peck stood beside her grave, reading the lesson of her work to the multitude of grateful and loving poor who thronged to pay the last tribute to her memory. Putney was there with his wife, and Lyra regretful of her lightness, and Mrs. Munger repentant of her mendacities. They talked together in awe-stricken murmurs of the noble career just ended. She heard their voices, and then she began to ask herself what they would really say of her proposing to go to Fall River with the Savors and be a mill-hand.

XXVII.

Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till morning.

The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions, all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.

She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast, and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them the more obligatory.

She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs. Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.

She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.

By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell's custom to come nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck; and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her: his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.

She let Mrs. Bolton go to the door, and she did not rise to meet the doctor; she saw from his smile that he knew he had a moral rather than a physical trouble to deal with, but she did not relax the severity of her glare in sympathy, as she was tempted from some infinite remoteness to do.

When he said, “You're not well,” she whispered solemnly back, “Not at all.”

He did not pursue his inquiry into her condition, but said, with an irrelevant cheerfulness that piqued her, “I was coming here this evening at any rate, and I got your message on the way up from my office.”

“You are very kind,” she said, a little more audibly.

“I wanted to tell you,” he went on, “of what a time Putney and I have had to-day working up public sentiment for Mr. Peck, so as to keep him here.”

Annie did not change her position, but the expression of her glance changed.

“We've been round in the enemy's camp, everywhere; and I've committed Gerrish himself to an armed neutrality. That wasn't difficult. The difficulty was in another quarter--with Mr. Peck himself. He's more opposed than any one else to his stay in Hatboro'. You know he intended going away this morning?”

“Did he?” Annie asked dishonestly. The question obliged her to say something.

“Yes. He came to Putney before breakfast to thank him and take leave of him, and to tell him of the plan he had for--Imagine what!”

“I don't know,” said Annie, hoarsely, after an effort, as if the untruth would not come easily. “I am worse than Mrs. Munger,” she thought.

“For going to Fall River to teach school among the mill-hands' children! And to open a night-school for the hands themselves.”

The doctor waited for her sensation, and in its absence he looked so disappointed that she was forced to say, “To teach school?”

Then he went on briskly again. “Yes. Putney laboured with him on his knees, so to speak, and got him to postpone his going till to-morrow morning; and then he came to me for help. We enlisted Mrs. Wilmington in the cause, and we've spent the day working up the Peck sentiment to a fever-heat. It's been a very queer campaign; three Gentiles toiling for a saint against the elect, and bringing them all over at last. We've got a paper, signed by a large majority of the members of the church--the church, not the society--asking Mr. Peck to remain; and Putney's gone to him with the paper, and he's coming round here to report Mr. Peck's decision. We all agreed that it wouldn't do to say anything about his plan for the future, and I fancy some of his people signed our petition under the impression that they were keeping a valuable man out of another pulpit.”

Annie accompanied the doctor's words, which she took in to the last syllable, with a symphony of conjecture as to how the change in Mr. Peck's plans, if they prevailed with him, would affect her, and the doctor had not ceased to speak before she perceived that it would be deliverance perfect and complete, however inglorious. But the tacit drama so vividly preoccupied her with its minor questions of how to descend to this escape with dignity that still she did not speak, and he took up the word again.

“I confess I've had my misgivings about Mr. Peck, and about his final usefulness in a community like this. In spite of all that Putney can say of his hard-headedness, I'm afraid that he's a good deal of a dreamer. But I gave way to Putney, and I hope you'll appreciate what I've done for your favourite.”

“You are very good,” she said, in mechanical acknowledgment: her mind was set so strenuously to break from her dishonest reticence that she did not know really what she was saying. “Why--why do you call him a dreamer?” She cast about in that direction at random.

“Why? Well, for one thing, the reason he gave Putney for giving up his luxuries here: that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay in the world, he must share them. It seems to me that I might as well say that as long as there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I must share them. Then he has a queer notion that he can go back and find instruction in the working-men--that they alone have the light and the truth, and know the meaning of life. I don't say anything against them. My observation and my experience is that if others were as good as they are in the ratio of their advantages, Mr. Peck needn't go to them for his ideal. But their conditions warp and dull them; they see things askew, and they don't see them clearly. I might as well expose myself to the small-pox in hopes of treating my fellow-sufferers more intelligently.”

She could not perceive where his analogies rang false; they only overwhelmed her with a deeper sense of her own folly.

“But I don't know,” he went on, “that a dreamer is such a desperate character, if you can only keep him from trying to realise his dreams; and if Mr. Peck consents to stay in Hatboro', perhaps we can manage it.” He drew his chair a little toward the lounge where she reclined, and asked, with the kindliness that was both personal and professional, “What seems to be the matter?”

She started up. “There is nothing--nothing that medicine can help. Why do you call him my favourite?” she demanded violently. “But you have wasted your time. If he had made up his mind to what you say, he would never give it up--never in the world!” she added hysterically. “If you've interfered between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly any one had any duty, you've done a very unwarrantable thing.” She was aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words themselves, but she hurried on: “I am going with him. He was here last night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the mills; and I shall not care what people think, if it's right--”

She stopped and weakly dropped back on the lounge, and hid her face in the pillow.

“I really don't understand.” The doctor began, with a physician's carefulness, to unwind the coil she had flung down to him. “Are the Savors going, and the child?”

“He will give her the child for the one they lost--you know how! And they will take it with them.”

“But you--what have you--”

“I must have the child too! I can't give it up, and I shall go with them. There's no other way. You don't know. I've given him my word, and there is no hope!”

“He asked you,” said the doctor, to make sure he had heard aright--“he asked you--advised you--to go to work in a cotton-mill?”

“No;” she lifted her face to confront him. “He told me _not_ to go; but I said I would.”

They sat staring at each other in a silence which neither of them broke, and which promised to last indefinitely. They were still in their daze when Putney's voice came through the open hall door.

“Hello! hello! hello! Hello, Central! _Can't_ I make you hear, any one?” His steps advanced into the hall, and he put his head in at the library doorway. “Thought you'd be here,” he said, nodding at the doctor. “Well, doctor, Brother Peck's beaten us again. He's going.”

“Going?” the doctor echoed.

“Yes. It's no use. I put the whole case before him, and I argued it with a force of logic that would have fetched the twelfth man with eleven stubborn fellows against him on a jury; but it didn't fetch Brother Peck. He was very appreciative and grateful, but he believes he's got a call to give up the ministry, for the present at least. Well, there's some consolation in supposing he may know best, after all. It seemed to us that he had a great opportunity in Hatboro', but if he turns his back on it, perhaps it's a sign he wasn't equal to it. The doctor told you what we've been up to, Annie?”

“Yes,” she answered faintly, from the depths of the labyrinth in which she was plunged again.

“I'm sorry for your news about him,” said the doctor. “I hoped he was going to stay. It's always a pity when such a man lets his sympathies use him instead of using them. But we must always judge that kind of crank leniently, if he doesn't involve other people in his erase.”

She knew that he was shielding and trying to spare her, and she felt inexpressibly degraded by the terms of his forbearance. She could not accept, and she had not the strength to refuse it; and Putney said: “I've not seen anything to make me doubt his sanity; but I must say the present racket shakes my faith in his common-sense, and I rather held by that, you know. But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be if she were a man--excuse me, Annie--is ever absolutely right. I suppose the truth is a constitutional thing, and you can't separate it from the personal consciousness, and so you get it coloured and heated by personality when you get it fresh. That is, we can see what the absolute truth was, but never what it is.”

Putney amused himself in speculating on these lines with more or less reference to Mr. Peck, and did not notice that the doctor and Annie gave him only a silent assent. “As to misleading any one else, Mr. Peck's following in his new religion seems to be confined to the Savors, as I understand. They are going with him to help him set up a sort of cooperative boarding-house. Well, I don't know where we shall get a hotter gospeller than Brother Peck. Poor old fellow! I hope he'll get along better in Fall River. It is something to be out of reach of Gerrish.”

The doctor asked, “When is he going?”

“Why, he's gone by this time, I suppose,” said Putney. “I tried to get him to think about it overnight, but he wouldn't. He's anxious to go and get back, so as to preach his last sermon here Sunday, and he's taken the 9.10, if he hasn't changed his mind.” Putney looked at his watch.

“Let's hope he hasn't,” said Dr. Morrell.

“Which?” asked Putney.

“Changed his mind. I'm sorry he's coming back.”

Annie knew that he was talking at her, though he spoke to Putney; but she was powerless to protest.

XXVIII.