Chapter 15

DAVID CONFESSES HIS LOVE.

"Come live with me and be my love; And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dales and fields, Woods, or steep mountains, yield."--_Marlowe_.

Sanderson, recovering his self-possession almost immediately, drawled out:

"Glad to see you, Dave. Came over thinking I might be in time to go over to Putnam's with your people. They had gone, so I stopped long enough to get warm. I must be going now. Good-night, Miss--Miss"--(he seemed, to have great difficulty in recalling the name) "Moore."

David paid no attention to him; his eyes were riveted on Anna, who had changed color and was now like ivory flushing into life. She trembled and fell to her knees, making a pretense of gathering up her knitting that had fallen.

"What brought Sanderson here, Anna? Is he anything to you--are you anything to him?"

She tried to assume a playful lightness, but it failed dismally. It was all her pallid lips could do to frame the words: "Why, Mr. David, what a curious question! What possible interest could the 'catch' of the neighborhood have in your father's servant?"

The suggestion of flippancy that her words contained irritated the grave, quiet man as few things could have done. He turned from her and would have left the room, but she detained him.

"I am sorry I wounded you, Mr. David, but, indeed, you have no right to ask."

"I know it, Anna, and you won't give me the right; but how dared that cub Sanderson speak to you in that way?" He caught her hand, and unconsciously wrung it till she cried out in pain. "Forgive me, dear, I would not hurt you for the world; but that man's manner toward you makes me wild."

She looked up at him from beneath her long, dark lashes; he thought her eyes were like the glow of forest fires burning through brushwood. "We will never think of him again, Mr. David. I assure you that I am no more to Mr. Sanderson than he is to me, and that is--nothing."

"Thank you for those words, Anna. I cannot tell you how happy they make me. But I do not understand you at all. Even a countryman like me can see that you have never been used to our rough way of living; you were never born to this kind of thing, and yet when that man Sanderson looks at you or talks to you, there is always an undertone of contempt in his look, his words."

She sank wearily into an armchair. It seemed to her that her limit of endurance had been reached, but he, taking her silence for acquiescence, lost no time in following up what he fondly hoped might be an advantage. "I did not go to the Putnams to-night, Anna, because you were not going, and there is no enjoyment for me when you are not there."

"Mr. David, if you continue to talk to me like this I shall have to leave this house."

"Tell me, Anna," he said so gravely that the woman beside him knew that life and death were balanced with her words: "tell me, when you said that day last autumn by the well that you never intended to marry, was it just a girl's coquetry or was there some deeper reason for your saying so?"

She could not face the love in those honest eyes and answer as her conscience prompted. She was tired, so tired of the struggle, what would she not have given to rest here in the shelter of this perfect love and trust, but it was not for her.

"Mr. David," she said, looking straight before her with wide, unseeing eyes; "I can be no man's wife."

He knew from the lines of suffering written deep on the pale young face, that maiden coquetry had not inspired her to speak thus; but word for word, it had been wrung from out of the depths of a troubled soul.

"Anna!" cried David, in mingled astonishment and pain. But Anna only turned mutely toward him with an imploring look. She stretched out her hands to him, as if trying to tell him more. But words failed her. Her tears overcame her and she fled, sobbing, to her room. All the way up the winding night of stairs, David could hear her anguished moans. He would have followed her, but Hi burst into the room, stamping the snow from his boots. He shoved in the front door as if he had been an invading army. He unwound his muffler and cast it from him as if he had a grudge against it, as he proceeded to deliver himself of his wrongs.

"If there's any more visitors coming to the house to-night that wants their horses held, they can do it themselves, for I am going to have my supper." David made no reply, but went to his own room to brood over the day's events. And so Anna was spared any further talk with David that night; a circumstance for which she was devoutly thankful.

The next day the snow was deeper by a foot, but this did not deter the Squire from making his proposed trip to Belden. He started immediately after breakfast, prepared to sift matters to the bottom.

An air of tension and anxiety pervaded the household all that long, miserable day. Anna was tortured with doubts. Should she slip away quietly without telling, or should she make her humiliating confession to Kate? Mrs. Bartlett, who knew the object of her husband's errand, could not control her nerves. She knew intuitively "that something was going to happen," as the good soul put it to herself.

Altogether it was one of those nerve-wracking days that come from time to time in the best regulated households, apparently for no other purpose but to prove the fact that a solitary existence is not necessarily the most unhappy.

Mrs. Bartlett, for the first time in her life, was worried about Dave. He was moody and morose, even to her, his sworn friend and ally, with whom he had never had a word's difference. He had gone off that morning shortly after the Squire left the house; and his mother, watching him carefully at breakfast, noticed that he had shoved away his plate with the food untasted.

A fatal symptom to the ever-watchful maternal eye.

Kate felt sulky because her aunt and uncle had been urging her to marry Dave, and apparently Dave had no affection for her beyond that of a cousin, the situation irritating her in the extreme.

"Aunt Louisa, what is the matter with every one?" she said, flouncing into the kitchen. "Something seems to have jarred the family nerves. Here is uncle off on some mysterious business, Dave goes off in the snow in a tantrum, and you look as if you had just buried your last friend." And the young lady left the room as suddenly as she entered it.

"It does feel as if trouble was brewing," Mrs. Bartlett admitted to Anna, with a gloomy shake of the head. "I'm getting that worried about Dave, he's been away all day, and it's not usual for him to stay away like this." Her voice broke a little, and she left the room hurriedly.

He came in almost immediately, stamping the snow from his boots and looking twice as savage as when he went away.

"Mrs. Bartlett had been worrying about you all day, Mr. David," Anna said as she turned from the dresser with her arms full of plates.

"And did you care, Anna, that I was not here?" He gave her the appealing glance of a great mastiff who hopes for a friendly pat on the head.

"My feelings on the subject can be of no interest to you," she answered with chilling decision.

"All right," and he went to the hat-rack to get his muffler and cap, preparatory to again facing the storm.

The snow had been falling steadily all day. Drifting almost to the height of the kitchen window, it whirled about the house and beat against the window panes with a muffled sound that was inexpressibly dreary to the girl, who felt herself the center of all this pitiful human contention.

"David, David; where have you been all day, and where are you going now?" His mother looked at his gray, haggard face and tried to guess his hidden trouble, the first he had ever kept from her.

"Mother, I am not a child, and you can't expect me to hang about the stove like a cat, all my life." It was his first harsh word to her and she shrank before it as if it had been a blow. David, her boy, to speak to her like that! She turned quickly away to hide the tears, the first she had ever shed on his account.

"Here, Anna," she said, struggling to recover her composure, "take this bucket and get it filled for me, please."

The girl reached for her cloak that hung on a peg near the door.

"No, Anna, you shall not go out for water a night like this; it's not the work for you to do." David had sprung forward and caught the bucket from her hand and plunged with it into the storm. Kate's quick eyes caught the expression of David's face--while Mrs. Bartlett only heard his words. She gave Anna a searching look as she said: "So it is you whom David loves." At last Kate understood the secret of Anna's distracted face--and at last the mother understood the secret of her boy's moodiness--he loved Anna. And her heart was filled with bitterness and anger at the very thought; she had taken her boy, this stranger, with whom the tongue of scandal was busy. The kindly, gentle, old face lost all its sweetness; jealous anger filled it with ugly lines. Turning to Anna she said:

"It would have been better for all of us if we had not taken you in that day to break up our home with your mischief."

Anna was cut to the quick. "Oh, Mrs. Bartlett, please do not say that; I will go away as soon as you like, but it is not with my consent that David has these foolish fancies about me."

"And do you mean to say that you have never encouraged him," indignantly demanded the irate mother, who with true feminine inconsistency would not have her boy's affections go begging, even while she scorned the object of it.

"Encouraged him? I have begged, entreated him to let me alone; I do not want his love."

An angry sparrow defending her brood could not have been more indignantly demonstrative than this gentle old lady.

"And isn't he good enough for you, Miss?" she asked in a voice that shook with wrath.

"Dear Mrs. Bartlett, would you have me take his love and return it?"

"No, no; that would never do!" and the inconsistent old soul rocked herself to and fro in an agony of despair.

Anna did not resent Mrs. Bartlett's indignation, unjust though it was; she knew how blind good mothers could be when the happiness of their children is at stake. She felt only pity for her and remembered only her kindness. So slipping down on her knees beside the old lady's chair, she took the toil-worn old hands in her own and said:

"Do not think hardly of me, Mrs. Bartlett. You have been so good--and when I am gone, I want you to think of me with affection. I will go away, and all this trouble will straighten itself out, and you will forget that I ever caused you a moment's pain."

Dave came in with the bucket of water that had caused the little squall and prevented his mother from replying, but the hard lines had relaxed in the good old face. She was again "mother" whom they all knew and loved. Sanderson followed close after David; he had just come from Boston, he said, and inquired for Kate with a simple directness that left no doubt as to whom he had come to see.

It is an indisputable law of the eternal feminine for all women to flaunt a conquest in the face of the man who had declined their affection. Kate was not in love with her cousin David, but she was devoutly thankful to Providence that there was a Lennox Sanderson to flaunt before him in the capacity of tame cat, and prove that he "was not the only man in the world," as she put it to herself.

Therefore when Lennox Sanderson handed her a magnificent bunch of Jacqueminot roses that he had brought her from Boston, Kate was not at all backward in rewarding Sanderson with her graciousness.

"How beautiful they are, Mr. Sanderson; it was so good of you."

"You make me very happy by taking them," he answered with a wealth of meaning.

Anna, who had gone to the storeroom for some apples, after her reconciliation with Mrs. Bartlett, returned to find Sanderson talking earnestly to Kate by the window. Kate held up the roses for Anna to smell. "Aren't they lovely, Anna? There is nothing like roses for taking the edge off a snowstorm."

Anna was forced to go through the farce of admiring them, while Sanderson looked on with nicely concealed amusement.

"Well, what do you think of them, Anna?" said Kate, disappointed that she made no comment.

"The best thing about roses, speaking generally, Miss Kate, is that they fade quickly and do not embarrass one by outliving the little affairs in which they have played a part." She returned Sanderson's languid glance in a way that made him quail.

"That is quite true," said Kate, being in the humor for a little cynicism. "What a pity that love letters can't be constructed on the same principle."

Sanderson did not feel particularly at ease while these two young women served and returned cynicism; he was accordingly much relieved when Mrs. Bartlett and Anna both left the room, intent on the solemn ceremony of opening a new supply of preserved peaches.

"Kate, did you mean what you just said to that girl?" Sanderson asked when they were alone.

"What did I say? Oh, yes, about the love letters. Well, what difference does it make whether I meant it or not?"

"It makes all the difference in the world to me, Kate." He read refusal in the big blue eyes, and he made haste to plead his cause before she could say anything.

"Don't answer yet, Kate; don't give me my life-sentence," he said playfully, taking her hand. "Think it over; take as long as you like. Hope with you is better than certainty with any other woman."

Professor Sterling, who had been to a neighboring town on business for the past two or three days, walked into the middle of this little tableau in time to hear the last sentence. Kate and Sanderson had failed to hear him, partly because he had neglected to remove his overshoes, and partly because they were deeply engrossed with each other.

Though his rival's declaration, which he had every reason to suppose would be accepted, was the death blow to his hopes, yet he unselfishly stepped out into the snow, waited five minutes by his watch--a liberal allowance for an acceptance, he considered--and then rapped loud and theatrically before entering a second time. Could unselfishness go further?

Kate and Sanderson had no other opportunity for confidential talk that evening.

They were barely seated about the supper table, when there came a tremendous rapping at the door, and Marthy Perkins came in, half frozen. For once her voluble tongue was silenced. She retailed no gossip while submitting to the friendly ministrations of Mrs. Bartlett and Anna, who chafed her hands, gave her hot tea and thawed her back to life--and gossip.

"Is the Squire back yet?" asked Marthy with returning warmth. "Land sakes, what can be keeping him? Heard him say last night that he intended going away this morning, and thought he might have come back."

"With news?" naively asked Sanderson.

"Why, yes. I did think it was likely that he might have gathered up something interesting, away a whole day." Every one laughed but Mrs. Bartlett. She alone knew the object of her husband's quest.

"Your father's not likely to be back to-night--do you think so, Dave?" she asked her son, more by way of drawing him out than in the hope of getting any real information.

"No, I do not think it is likely, mother," he answered.

"Good land! and I nearly froze to death getting here!" Marthy said in an aside to Mrs. Bartlett. "I tell you, Looizy, there is nothing like suspense for wearing you out. I couldn't get a lick of sewing done to-day, waiting for Amasy to get in with the news."

"Hallo! hallo! Let us in quick--here we are, me and the Squire--most froze! Hallo, hallo"--The rest of Hi's remarks were a series of whoops.

Every one rose from the table, Mrs. Bartlett pale with apprehension. Marthy flushed with delight. She was not to be balked of her prey. The Squire was here with the news.