Ann Boyd.

by Will N. Harben.

I

Ann Boyd Stood at the open door of her corn-house, a square, one-storied hut made of the trunks of young pine-trees, the bark of which, being worm-eaten, was crumbling from the smooth hard-wood. She had a tin pail on her arm, and was selecting "nubbins" for her cow from the great heap of husked corn which, like a mound of golden nuggets, lay within. The strong-jawed animal could crunch the dwarfed ears, grain and corn together, when they were stirred into a mush made of wheat-bran and dish-water.

Mrs. Boyd, although past fifty, showed certain signs of having been a good-looking woman. Her features were regular, but her once slight and erect figure was now heavy, and bent as if from toil. Her hair, which in her youth had been a luxuriant golden brown, was now thinner and liberally streaked with gray. From her eyes deep wrinkles diverged, and the corners of her firm mouth were drawn downward. Her face, even in repose, wore an almost constant frown, and this habit had deeply gashed her forehead with lines that deepened when she was angry.

With her pail on her arm, she was turning back towards her cottage, which stood about a hundred yards to the right, beneath the shade of two giant oaks, when she heard her name called from the main-travelled road, which led past her farm, on to Darley, ten miles away.

"Oh, it's you, Mrs. Waycroft!" she exclaimed, without change of countenance, as the head and shoulders of a neighbor appeared above the rail-fence. "I couldn't imagine who it was calling me."

"Yes, it was me," the woman said, as Mrs. Boyd reached the fence and rested her pail on the top rail. "I hain't seed you since I seed you at church, Sunday. I tried to get over yesterday, but was too busy with one thing and another."

"I reckon you have had your hands full planting cotton," said Mrs. Boyd.

"I didn't expect you; besides, I've had all I could do in my own field."

"Yes, my boys have been hard at it," said Mrs. Waycroft. "I don't go to the field myself, like you do. I reckon I ain't hardy enough, but keeping things for them to eat and the house in order takes all my time."

"I reckon," said Mrs. Boyd, studying the woman's face closely under the faded black poke-bonnet-"I reckon you've got something to tell me. You generally have. I wish I could not care a snap of the finger what folks say, but I'm only a natural woman. I want to hear things sometimes when I know they will make me so mad that I won't eat a bite for days."

Mrs. Waycroft looked down at the ground. "Well," she began, "I reckon you know thar would be considerable talk after what happened at meeting Sunday. You know a thing like that naturally _would_ stir up a quiet community like this."

"Yes, when I think of it I can see there would be enough said, but I'm used to being the chief subject of idle talk. I've had twenty odd years of it, Mary Waycroft, though this public row was rather unexpected. I didn't look for abuse from the very pulpit in G.o.d's house, if it _is_ His. I didn't know you were there. I didn't know a friendly soul was nigh."

"Yes, I was there clean through from the opening hymn. A bolt from heaven on a sunny day couldn't have astonished me more than I was when you come in and walked straight up the middle aisle, and sat down just as if you'd been coming there regular for all them years. I reckon you had your own private reasons for making the break."

"Yes, I did." The wrinkled mouth of the speaker twitched nervously. "I'd been thinking it out, Mrs. Waycroft, for a long time and trying to pray over it, and at last I come to the conclusion that if I didn't go to church like the rest, it was an open admission that I acknowledged myself worse than others, and so I determined to go-I determined to go if it killed me."

"And to think you was rewarded that way!" answered Mrs. Waycroft; "it's a shame! Ann Boyd, it's a dirty shame!"

"It will be a long time before I darken a church door again," said Mrs.

Boyd. "If I'm ever seen there it will be after I'm dead and they take me there feet foremost to preach over my body. I didn't look around, but I knew they were all whispering about me."

"You never saw the like in your life, Ann," the visitor said. "Heads were b.u.mping together to the damagement of new spring hats, and everybody was asking what it meant. Some said that, after meeting, you was going up and give your hand to Brother Bazemore and ask him to take you back, as a member, but he evidently didn't think you had a purpose like that, or he wouldn't have opened up on you as he did. Of course, everybody thar knowed he was. .h.i.tting at you."

"Oh yes, they all knew, and he had no reason for thinking I wanted to ask any favor, for he knows too well what I think of him. He hates the ground I walk on. He has been openly against me ever since he come to my house and asked me to let the Sunday-school picnic at my spring and in my grove. I reckon I gave it to him pretty heavy that day, for all I'd been hearing about what he had had to say of me had made me mad. I let him get out his proposal as politely as such a sneaking man could, and then I showed him where I stood. Here, Mrs. Waycroft, I've been treated like a dog and an outcast by every member of his church for the last twenty years, called the vilest names a woman ever bore by his so-called Christian gang, and then, when they want something I've got-something that n.o.body else can furnish quite as suitable for their purpose-why he saunters over to my house holding the skirts of his long coat as if afraid of contamination, and calmly demands the use of my property-property that I've slaved in the hot sun and sleet and rain to pay for with hard work. Oh, I was mad! You see, that was too much, and I reckon he never in all his life got such a tongue-lashing. When I came in last Sunday and sat down, I saw his eyes flash, and knew if he got half an excuse he would let out on me. I was sorry I'd come then, but there was no backing out after I'd got there."

"When he took his text I knew he meant it for you," said the other woman. "I have never seen a madder man in the pulpit, never in my life.

While he was talking, he never once looked at you, though he knew everybody else was doing nothing else. Then I seed you rise to your feet. He stopped to take a drink from his goblet, and you could 'a'

heard a pin fall, it was so still. I reckon the rest thought like I did, that you was going right up to him and pull his hair or slap his jaws.

You looked like you hardly knowed what you was doing, and, for one, I tuck a free breath when you walked straight out of the house. What you did was exactly right, as most fair-minded folks will admit, though I'm here to tell you, my friend, that you won't find fair-minded folks very plentiful hereabouts. The fair-minded ones are over there in that graveyard."

Mrs. Boyd stroked her quivering lips with her hard, brown hand, and said, softly: "I wasn't going to sit there and listen to any more of it.

I'd thrown aside pride and principle and gone to do my duty to my religion, as I saw it, and thought maybe some of them-one or two, at least-would meet me part of the way, but I couldn't listen to a two hours' tirade about me and my-my misfortune. If I'd stayed any longer, I'd have spoken back to him, and that would have been exactly what he and some of the rest would have wanted, for then they could have made a case against me in court for disturbing public worship, and imposed a heavy fine. They can't bear to think that, in spite of all their persecution, I've gone ahead and paid my debts and prospered in a way that they never could do with all their sanctimony."

There was silence for a moment. A gentle breeze stirred the leaves of the trees and the blades of long gra.s.s beside the road. There was a far-away tinkling of cow and sheep bells in the lush-green pastures which stretched out towards the frowning mountain against which the setting sun was levelling its rays.

"You say you haven't seen anybody since Sunday," remarked the loitering woman, in restrained, tentative tones.

"No, I've been right here. Why did you ask me that?"

"Well, you see, Ann," was the slow answer, "talking at the rate Bazemore was to your face, don't you think it would be natural for him to-to sort o' rub it on even heavier behind your back, after you got up that way and went out so sudden."

"I never thought of it, but I can see now that it would be just like him." Mrs. Boyd took a deep breath and lowered her pail to the ground.

"Yes," she went on, reflectively, as she drew herself up again and leaned on the fence, "I reckon he got good and mad when I got up and left."

"Huh!" The other woman smiled. "He was so mad he could hardly speak. He fairly gulped, his eyes flashed, and he was as white as a bunch of cotton. He poured out another goblet of water that he had no idea of drinking, and his hand shook so much that the gla.s.s tinkled like a bell against the mouth of the pitcher. You must have got as far as the hitching-rack before his fury busted out. I reckon what he said was the most unbecoming thing that a stout, able-bodied man ever hurled at a defenceless woman's back."

There was another pause. Mrs. Boyd's expectant face was as hard as stone; her dark-gray eyes were two burning fires in their shadowy orbits.

"What did he say?" she asked. "You might as well tell me."

Mrs. Waycroft avoided her companion's fierce stare. "He looked down at the place where you sat, Ann, right steady for a minute, then he said: 'I'm glad that woman had the common decency to sit on a seat by herself while she was here; but I hope when meeting is over that some of you brethren will take the bench out in the woods and burn it. I'll pay for a new one out of my own pocket.'"

"Oh!" The exclamation seemed wrung from her when off her guard, and Mrs.

Boyd clutched the rail of the fence so tightly that her strong nails sunk into the soft wood. "He said _that_! He said that _about me_!"

"Yes, and he ought to have been ashamed of himself," said Mrs. Waycroft; "and if he had been anything else than a preacher, surely some of the men there-men you have befriended-would not have set still and let it pa.s.s."

"But they _did_ let it pa.s.s," said Mrs. Boyd, bitterly; "they did let it pa.s.s, one and all."

"Oh yes, n.o.body would dare, in this section, to criticise a preacher,"

said the other. "What any little, spindle-legged parson says goes the same as the word of G.o.d out here in the backwoods. I'd have left the church myself, but I knowed you'd want to hear what was said; besides, they all know I'm your friend."

"Yes, they all know you are the only white woman that ever comes near me. But what else did he say?"

"Oh, he had lots to say. He said he hadn't mentioned no names, but it was always the hit dog that yelped, and that you had made yourself a target by leaving as you did. He went on to say that, in his opinion, all that was proved at court against you away back there was just. He said some folks misunderstood Scripture when it come to deal with your sort and stripe. He said some argued that a church door ought always to be wide open to any sinner whatsoever, but that in your daily conduct of holding every coin so tight that the eagle on it squeals, and in giving nothing to send the Bible to the heathens, and being eternally at strife with your neighbors, you had showed, he said, that no good influence could be brought to bear on you, and that people who was really trying to live upright lives ought to shun you like they would a catching disease. He 'lowed you'd had the same Christian chance in your bringing-up, and a better education than most gals, and had deliberately throwed it all up and gone your headstrong way. In his opinion, it would be wrong to condone your past, and tell folks you stood an equal chance with the rising generation fetched up under the rod and Biblical injunction by parents who knowed what lasting scars the fires of sin could burn in a living soul. He said the community had treated you right, in sloughing away from you, ever since you was found out, because you had never showed a minute's open repentance. You'd helt your head, he thought, if possible, higher than ever, and in not receiving the social sanction of your neighbors, it looked like you was determined to become the richest woman in the state for no other reason than to prove that wrong prospered."

The speaker paused in her recital. The listener, her face set and dark with fury, glanced towards the cottage. "Come in," she said, huskily; "people might pa.s.s along and know what we are talking about, and, somehow, I don't want to give them that satisfaction."

"That's a fact," said Mrs. Waycroft; "they say I fetch you every bit of gossip, anyway. A few have quit speaking to me. Bazemore would himself, if he didn't look to me once a month for my contribution. I hope what I've told you won't upset you, Ann, but you always say you want to know what's going on. It struck me that the whole congregation was about the most heartless body of human beings I ever saw packed together in one bunch."

"I want you to tell me one other thing," said Mrs. Boyd, tensely, as they were entering the front doorway of the cottage-"was Jane Hemingway there?"

"Oh yes, by a large majority. I forgot to tell you about her. I had my eyes on her, too, for I knowed it would tickle her nigh to death, and it did. When you left she actually giggled out loud and turned back an'

whispered to the Mayfield girls. Her old, yellow face fairly shone, she was that glad, and when Bazemore went on talking about you and burning that bench, she fairly doubled up, with her handkerchief clapped over her mouth."

Mrs. Boyd drew a stiff-backed chair from beneath the dining-table and pushed it towards her guest. "There is not in h.e.l.l itself, Mary Waycroft, a hatred stronger than I feel right now for that woman. She is a fiend in human shape. That miserable creature has hounded me every minute since we were girls together. As G.o.d is my judge, I believe I could kill her and not suffer remorse. There was a time when my disposition was as sweet and gentle as any girl's, but she changed it.

She has made me what I am. She is responsible for it all. I might have gone on-after my-my misfortune, and lived in some sort of harmony with my kind if it hadn't been for her."

"I know that," said the other woman, as she sat down and folded her cloth bonnet in her thin hands. "I really believe you'd have been a different woman, as you say, after-after your trouble if she had let you alone."

Mrs. Boyd seated herself in another chair near the open door, and looked out at a flock of chickens and ducks which had gathered at the step and were noisily clamoring for food.