"I've told him everything, Virginia," Ann broke in. "I had to. I couldn't see my dear boy suffering like he was, when-"

"You know-" Virginia began, aghast, "you know-"

"About you and Chester?" King said, with a light laugh. "Yes, I know all about it, and it made me think you the grandest, most self-sacrificing little girl in all the world. So you thought I was dead? That was all gossip. It was only a quarrel that amounted to nothing. I understand, now that he is sober, that Chester is heartily ashamed of himself."

Half an hour afterwards Ann stood at the gate and saw them walking together towards Virginia's home. She watched them till they were lost from her sight in the dusk, then she went back into the house. She stood over the low fire for a moment, then said: "I won't get any supper ready. I couldn't eat a bite. Meat and bread couldn't shove this lump out of my throat. It's pretty, pretty, pretty to see those two together that way. I believe they have got the sort of thing the Almighty really meant love to be. I know _I_ never got that kind, though, as a girl, I dreamt of nothing else-nothing from morning till night but that one thing, and yet here I am this way-_this way_!"

XLII

The next morning the weather was as balmy as spring. Ann had taken all the coverings from her beds and hung them along the fence to catch the purifying rays of the sun. Her rag-carpet was stretched out on the ground ready to be beaten. She was occupied in sweeping the bare floor of her sitting-room when a shadow fell across the threshold. Looking up, she saw a tall, lean man, very ill-clad, his tattered hat in hand, his shoes broken at the toes and showing the wearer's bare feet.

"It's me, Ann," Boyd said. "I couldn't stay away any longer. I hope you won't drive me off, anyway, before I've got out what I come to say."

She turned pale as she leaned her broom against the wall and began to roll her sleeves down her fat arms towards her wrists. "Well, I wasn't looking for you," she managed to say.

"I reckon not, Ann," he returned, a certain wistful expression in his voice and strangely softened face; "but I had to come. As I say-I had to come and speak to you, anyway."

"Well, take a chair," she said, awkwardly. "I've got the windows up to let the dust drive out, and I'll close them. It's powerful draughty. I don't feel it, working like I am, but you might, coming in from the outside."

He advanced to one of the straight-backed chairs which he remembered so well, and laid an unsteady hand on it, but he did not draw it towards him nor sit down. Instead, his great, hungry eyes followed her movements, as she bustled from one window to another, like those of a patient, offending dog.

"Well, why don't you sit down?" She had turned back to him, and stood eying his poor aspect with strange misgivings and pity. In her comfort and luxury, he, with his evidences of poverty and despair, struck a strangely discordant note.

He drew the chair nearer, and with quivering knees she saw him sink into it, with firmness at the beginning and then with the sudden collapse of an invalid. She went to a window and looked out. Not seeing his horse hitched near by, she came back to him.

"Where did you hitch?" she asked, her voice losing firmness.

"I didn't have no horse," he said; "I walked, Ann. Lawson was hauling wood with the horse. He wouldn't have let me take it, anyway. He's got awfully contrary here lately. Me 'n' him don't get along at all."

"Do you mean to tell me-do you mean to tell me you walked all that way, in them shoes without bottoms, and-and you looking like you've just got up from a long sick spell?"

"I made it all right, Ann, stopping to rest on the way." A touch of color seemed to have risen into his wan cheeks. "I had to come to-day-as I did awhile back-to do my duty, as I saw it. In fact, this seems even more my duty. Ann, Jane Hemingway came over to Gilmer awhile back. She come straight to my house, and, my G.o.d, Ann, she come and told me she'd been at the bottom of all our trouble. She set right in and acknowledged that she lied; she said she'd been lying all along for spite, because she hated you."

"And loved you," Ann interposed, quickly. "Yes, she came back here, so I've been told, and stood up in meeting and said she'd been to see you, and she confessed it all in public. I can't find it in my heart to be hard with her, Joe. She was only obeying her laws of nature, as you have obeyed yours and I have mine, and-and as our offspring is now obeying hers. Tell me the straight truth, Joe. I reckon Nettie still feels strange towards me."

Joe Boyd's mild eyes wavered and sought the fire beyond the toes of his ragged shoes.

"Tell me the truth, Joe," Ann demanded. "I'm ent.i.tled to that, anyway."

"She's always been a queer creature," Boyd faltered, evasively, without looking up, and she saw him nervously laving his bony hands in the sheer, unsuggestive emptiness about him. "But you mustn't think it's just _you_ she's against, Ann. She's plumb gone back on me, too. The money you furnished cleared the place of debt and bought her wedding outfit, and she got her man; but not long back she found out where the means come from, and-"

Ann's lips tightened in the pause that ensued. Her face was set like a grotesque mask of stone. She leaned over the fire and pushed a fallen ember back under the steaming logs with a poker.

"She couldn't stomach that, I reckon?" Ann said, in a.s.sumed calmness.

"Well, it made her mad at me. I won't tell you all she done or said, Ann. It wouldn't do no good. I'm responsible for what she is, I reckon.

She might have growed up different if she'd had the watchful care of-of a mother. What she is, is what any female will become under the care of a shiftless man like I am."

"No, you are wrong, Joe," Ann said. "Why it is so I don't intend to explain, but Nettie would have been like she is under all circ.u.mstances.

Money and plenty of everything might have glazed her character over, but down at bottom she'd have been what she is. Adversity generally brings out all the good that's in a person; the reason it hasn't fetched it out in her is because it isn't there, nor never has been. You say you and her don't get on well?"

"Not now," he said. "She just as good as driv me from home yesterday.

She told me point-blank that there wasn't room for me, and that when the baby comes they would be more crowded and pinched than ever. She actually sent Lawson to the Ordinary at Springtown to see if there was a place on the poor-farm vacant. When I dropped onto that, Ann, I come off. For all I know, they may have some paper for vagrancy ready to serve on me. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm not going back to them two, never while there is a lingering breath left in my body."

"The poor-farm!" Ann said, half to herself. "To think that she would consent to that, and you her father."

"I think his folks is behind it, Ann. They've got a reason for wanting to get rid of me."

"A reason, you say?" Ann was staring at him steadily.

Joe Boyd's embarra.s.sment of a moment before returned. He twisted his hands together again. "Yes; it's like this, Ann," he went on, awkwardly: "a short time back Lawson's mother and father got onto the fact that you were in good circ.u.mstances, and it made the biggest change in them you ever heard of. They talked it all over the settlement. They are hard up, and they couldn't talk of anything but how much you was worth, and what you had your money invested in, and the like. After they got onto that, they never-never paid no attention to what had been-been circulated-your money covered all that as completely as a ten-foot snow. Instead of turning up their noses, as Nettie was afraid they would do, it only made them brag about how well their boy had done, and what a fool I was. They tried all sorts of ways to get Nettie interested in some scheme to attract your attention, but Nettie would just cry and take on and refuse to come over here or to write to you."

"I understand"-Ann stroked her compressed lips with an unsteady hand-"I understand. I've never been a natural mother to her; she couldn't come to me like that. But you say they turned against you."

"Yes. You see, the Lawsons got an idea-the old woman did, in particular, from something she'd picked up-that it was _me_ that stood between you and Nettie. They thought you and me had had such a serious falling-out that a proud woman like you never would have anything to do with Nettie as long as I was about, and that the best thing was to shove me off so the reconciliation would work faster. The truth is, they said that would please you."

"I see, I see," Ann said. "And they set about putting you at the poor-farm."

"Yes; they seemed to think that was as good a place as any. And they could get all the proof necessary to put me there, for I hadn't a cent to my name nor a whole rag to my back; and, Ann, for the last three months I haven't been able to do a lick o' work. I've had a strange sort of hurting all down my left side, and my right ankle seems affected in the same way."

Ann Boyd suddenly turned away. Through the window she had seen the wind blowing one of her sheets from the fence, and she went out and put it in place. He limped out into the sunlight and stood at the little, sagging gate a few yards from her. Something of his old dignity and gallantry of manner was on him: he still held his hat in his hand, his thin, iron-gray hair exposed to the warm rays of the sun.

"Well, I'd better be going, Ann," he said. "There is no telling when somebody might come along and see me here, and start the talk you hate so much. I come all the way here to tell you how low and mean I feel for taking Jane Hemingway's word instead of yours, and how plumb sorry I am.

You and me may never meet again this side of the Seat of Judgment, and I'll say this if I never speak again. Ann, the only days of perfect happiness I ever had was here with you, and, if all of it was to do over again, I'd suffer torture by fire rather than believe you anything but an angel from heaven. Oh, Ann, it was just my poor, weak inferiority to you that made me misjudge you. If I'd ever been a _real_ man-a man worthy of a woman like you-I'd have snapped my fingers at all that was said, but I was obeying my laws, as you say. I simply wasn't deep enough nor high enough to do you justice."

He drew the little gate ajar and dragged his tired feet through the opening. The fence was now between them. She looked down the road. A woman under a sun-bonnet and little shawl was coming towards them. By a strange fatality it was Jane Hemingway, but she was not to pa.s.s directly by them, as her path homeward turned sharply to the left a hundred yards below. They both recognized her.

"I don't know fully what you mean, Joe," Ann said, softly, "but if you mean by what you just said that you'd be willing now to-to come back-if _that's_ what you mean, I'd have something to say that maybe, in justice to myself, I ought to say."

"_Would_ I come back? Would I? Oh, Ann, how could you doubt that, when you see how miserable and sorry I feel. G.o.d knows I'd never feel worthy of you; but if you would-if you only could-let me stay, I-"

"I couldn't consent to _that_, Joe-that's the point," Ann answered, firmly. "Anything else on earth but _that_. I expect to provide for Nettie in a substantial way, and I expect to have a lawyer make it one of the main conditions that her income depends on her good treatment of you as long as you and she live. I expect to do that, but the other matter is different. A woman of my stamp has her pride and her rights, Joe. I've been through a lot, but I can endure just so much and no more.

If-if you _did_ come back, and we was married over again, it would go out to the world that you had taken _me_ back, and I couldn't stand that. My very womanhood rises up and cries out against that in a voice that rings clear to the end of truth and justice and woman's eternal rights. Joe, I'm too big and pure in _myself_ to let the world say a man who was-was-I'm going to say it-was little enough to doubt my word for the best part of my days had at last taken _me_ back-taken me back when my lonely life's sun was on the decline. No, no, never; for the sake of unborn girl infants who may have to meet what I fell under when I was too young to know the difference between the smile of h.e.l.l and the smile of heaven, I say No! We'd better live out our days in loneliness apart-you frail and uncared for, and me on here without a friend or companion-than to sanction such a baleful thing as that."

"Then I'll tell you what you let _me_ do," Boyd said, with a flare of his old youthful adoration in his face. "Let me get down on my knees, Ann, and crawl with my nose in the dust to everybody that we ever knew and tell them that I'd begged and begged for mercy, and at last Ann had taken _me_ back, weak and broken as I am-weak, ashamed, and unworthy, but back with her in the place I lost through my own narrowness and cowardice. Let me do that, Ann-oh, let me do that! I can't go away. I'd die without you. I've loved you all, all these years and had you in my mind night and day."

Ann was looking at the ground. The blood had mounted red and warm into her face. Suddenly she glanced down the road. Jane Hemingway was just turning into the path leading to her home; her eyes were fastened on them. She paused and stood staring.

"Poor thing!" Ann said, her moist, glad eyes fixed upon Jane. "She is as sorry and repentant as she can be. Her only hope right now, Joe, is that we'll make it up. She used to love you, too, Joe. You are the only man she ever did love. Let's wave our hands to her so she will understand that-we have come to an understanding."

"Oh, Ann, do you mean-" But Ann, with a flushed, happy face, was waving her hand at her old enemy. As for Boyd, he lowered his head to the fence and sobbed.

THE END