Annie Kilburn

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"Sort of medicine-man?" suggested Morrell.

"Exactly! The aborigines understood the thing. Why, I suppose that a real
live medicine-man could go through a community like this and not leave a
sinful soul nor a sore body in it among the ladies--perfect faith cure."

"But what did you say to Mr. Peck, Ralph?" asked Annie. "Didn't you attempt
any defence?"

"No," said Putney. "He had the advantage of me. You can't talk back at a
man in the pulpit."

"Oh, it was a sermon?"

"I suppose the other people thought so. But I knew it was a private
conversation that he was publicly holding with me."

Putney and the doctor began to talk of the nature and origin of evil, and
Annie and the boy listened. Putney took high ground, and attributed it to
Adam. "You know, Annie," he explained, "I don't believe this; but I like to
get a scientific man that won't quite deny Scripture or the good old Bible
premises, and see him suffer. Hello! you up yet, Winthrop? I guess I'll go
through the form of carrying you to bed, my son."

When Mrs. Putney rejoined them, Annie said she must go, and Mrs. Putney
went upstairs with her, apparently to help her put on her things, but
really to have that talk before parting which guest and hostess value above
the whole evening's pleasure. She showed Annie the pictures of the little
girls that had died, and talked a great deal about their sickness and their
loveliness in death. Then they spoke of others, and Mrs. Putney asked Annie
if she had seen Lyra Wilmington lately. Annie told of her call with Mrs.
Munger, and Mrs. Putney said: "I _like_ Lyra, and I always did. I
presume she isn't very happily married; he's too old; there couldn't have
been any love on her part. But she would be a better woman than she is if
she had children. Ralph says," added Mrs. Putney, smiling, "that he knows
she would be a good mother, she's such a good aunt."

Annie put her two hands impressively on the hands of her friend folded at
her waist. "Ellen, what _does_ it mean?"

"Nothing more than what you saw, Annie. She must have--or she _will_
have--some one to amuse her; to be at her beck and call; and it's best to
have it all in the family, Ralph says."

"But isn't it--doesn't he think it's--odd?"

"It makes talk."

They moved a little toward the door, holding each other's hands. "Ellen,
I've had a _lovely_ time!"

"And so have I, Annie. I thought you'd like to meet Dr. Morrell."

"Oh yes, indeed!"

"And I can't tell you what a night this has been for Ralph. He likes you so
much, and it isn't often that he has a chance to talk to two such people as
you and Dr. Morrell."

"How brilliant he is!" Annie sighed.

"Yes, he's a very able man. It's very fortunate for Hatboro' to have such
a doctor. He and Ralph are great cronies. I never feel uneasy now when
Ralph's out late--I know he's been up at the doctor's office, talking. I--"

Annie broke in with a laugh. "I've no doubt Dr. Morrell is all you say,
Ellen, but I meant Ralph when I spoke of brilliancy. He has a great future,
I'm sure."

Mrs. Putney was silent for a moment. "I'm satisfied with the present, so
long as Ralph--" The tears suddenly gushed out of her eyes, and ran down
over the fine wrinkles of her plump little cheeks.

"Not quite so much loud talking, please," piped a thin, high voice from a
room across the stairs landing.

"Why, dear little soul!" cried Annie. "I forgot he'd gone to bed."

"Would you like to see him?" asked his mother.

She led the way into the room where the boy lay in a low bed near a larger
one. His crutches lay beside it. "Win sleeps in our room yet. He can take
care of himself quite well. But when he wakes in the night he likes to
reach out and touch his father's hand."

The child looked mortified.

"I wish I could reach out and touch _my_ father's hand when I wake in
the night," said Annie.

The cloud left the boy's face. "I can't remember whether I said my prayers,
mother, I've been thinking so."

"Well, say them over again, to me."

The men's voices sounded in the hall below, and the ladies found them
there. Dr. Morrell had his hat in his hand.

"Look here, Annie," said Putney, "_I_ expected to walk home with you,
but Doc Morrell says he's going to cut me out. It looks like a put-up job.
I don't know whether you're in it or not, but there's no doubt about
Morrell."

Mrs. Putney gave a sort of gasp, and then they all shouted with laughter,
and Annie and the doctor went out into the night. In the imperfect light
which the electrics of the main street flung afar into the little avenue
where Putney lived, and the moon sent through the sidewalk trees, they
struck against each other as they walked, and the doctor said, "Hadn't you
better take my arm, Miss Kilburn, till we get used to the dark?"

"Yes, I think I had, decidedly," she answered; and she hurried to add: "Dr.
Morrell, there is something I want to ask you. You're their physician,
aren't you?"

"The Putneys? Yes."

"Well, then, you can tell me--"

"Oh no, I can't, if you ask me as their physician," he interrupted.

"Well, then, as their friend. Mrs. Putney said something to me that makes
me very unhappy. I thought Mr. Putney was out of all danger of
his--trouble. Hasn't he perfectly reformed? Does he ever--"

She stopped, and Dr. Morrell did not answer at once. Then he said
seriously: "It's a continual fight with a man of Putney's temperament, and
sometimes he gets beaten. Yes, I guess you'd better know it."

"Poor Ellen!"

"They don't allow themselves to be discouraged. As soon as he's on his feet
they begin the fight again. But of course it prevents his success in his
profession, and he'll always be a second-rate country lawyer."

"Poor Ralph! And so brilliant as he is! He could be anything."

"We must be glad if he can be something, as it is."

"Yes, and how happy they seem together, all three of them! That child
worships his father; and how tender Ralph is of him! How good he is to his
wife; and how proud she is of him! And that awful shadow over them all the
time! I don't see how they live!"

The doctor was silent for a moment, and finally said: "They have the peace
that seems to come to people from the presence of a common peril, and they
have the comfort of people who never blink the facts."

"I think Ralph is terrible. I wish he'd let other people blink the facts a
little."

"Of course," said the doctor, "it's become a habit with him now, or a
mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of
conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn't venture to check him in his way of
talking. He may find strength in it."

"It's all terrible!"

"But it isn't by any means hopeless."

"I'm so glad to hear you say so. You see a great deal of them, I believe?"

"Yes," said the doctor, getting back from their seriousness, with apparent
relief. "Pretty nearly every day. Putney and I consider the ways of God to
man a good deal together. You can imagine that in a place like Hatboro' one
would make the most of such a friend. In fact, anywhere."

"Yes, of course," Annie assented. "Dr. Morrell," she added, in that effect
of continuing the subject with which one breaks away from it, "do you know
much about South Hatboro'?"

"I have some patients there."

"I was there this morning--"

"I heard of you. They all take a great interest in your theatricals."

"In _my_ theatricals? Really this is too much! Who has made them my
theatricals, I should like to know? Everybody at South Hatboro' talked as
if I had got them up."

"And haven't you?"

"No. I've had nothing to do with them. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about
them a week ago, and I was foolish enough to go round with Mrs. Munger
to collect public opinion about her invited dance and supper; and now it
appears that I have invented the whole affair."

"I certainly got that impression," said the doctor, with a laugh lurking
under his gravity.

"Well, it's simply atrocious," said Annie. "I've nothing at all to do with
either. I don't even know that I approve of their object."

"Their object?"

"Yes. The Social Union."

"Oh! Oh yes. I had forgot about the object," and now the doctor laughed
outright.

"It seems to have dropped into the background with everybody," said Annie,
laughing too.

"You like the unconventionality of South Hatboro'?" suggested the doctor,
after a little silence.

"Oh, very much," said Annie. "I was used to the same thing abroad. It might
be an American colony anywhere on the Continent."

"I suppose," said the doctor musingly, "that the same conditions of sojourn
and disoccupation _would_ produce the same social effects anywhere.
Then you must feel quite at home in South Hatboro'!"

"Quite! It's what I came back to avoid. I was sick of the life over there,
and I wanted to be of some use here, instead of wasting all my days."

She stopped, resolved not to go on if he took this lightly, but the doctor
answered her with sufficient gravity: "Well?"

"It seemed to me that if I could be of any use in the world anywhere, I
could in the place where I was born, and where my whole childhood was
spent. I've been at home a month now, the most useless person in Hatboro'.
I did catch at the first thing that offered--at Mr. Brandreth and his
ridiculous Social Union and theatricals, and brought all this trouble on
myself. I talked to Mr. Peck about them. You know what his views are?"

"Only from Putney's talk," said the doctor.

"He didn't merely disapprove of the dance and supper, but he had some very
peculiar notions about the relations of the different classes in general,"
said Annie; and this was the point she had meant circuitously to lead up
to when she began to speak of South Hatboro', though she theoretically
despised all sorts of feminine indirectness.

"Yes?" said the doctor. "What notions?"

"Well, he thinks that if you have money, you _can't_ do good with it."

"That's rather odd," said Dr. Morrell.

"I don't state it quite fairly. He meant that you can't make any kindness
with it between yourself and the--the poor."

"That's odd too."

"Yes," said Annie anxiously. "You can impose an obligation, he says, but
you can't create sympathy. Of course Ralph exaggerates what I said about
him in connection with the invited dance and supper, though I don't justify
what I did say; and if I'd known then, as I do now, what his history had
been, I should have been more careful in my talk with him. I should be very
sorry to have hurt his feelings, and I suppose people who've come up in
that way are sensitive?"

She suggested this, and it was not the reassurance she was seeking to have
Dr. Morrell say, "Naturally."

She continued with an effort: "I'm afraid I didn't respect his sincerity,
and I ought to have done that, though I don't at all agree with him on the
other points. It seems to me that what he said was shocking, and
perfectly--impossible."

"Why, what was it?" asked the doctor.

"He said there could be no real kindness between the rich and poor, because
all their experiences of life were different. It amounted to saying that
there ought not to _be_ any wealth. Don't you think so?"

"Really, I've never thought about it," returned Dr. Morrell. After a moment
he asked, "Isn't it rather an abstraction?"

"Don't say that!" said Annie nervously. "It's the _most_ concrete
thing in the world!"

The doctor laughed with enjoyment of her convulsive emphasis; but she went
on: "I don't think life's worth living if you're to be shut up all your
days to the intelligence merely of your own class."

"Who said you were?"

"Mr. Peck."

"And what was your inference from the fact? That there oughtn't to be any
classes?"

"Of course it won't do to say that. There _must_ be social
differences. Don't you think so?"

"I don't know," said Dr. Morrell. "I never thought of it in that light
before. It's a very curious question." He asked, brightening gaily after a
moment of sober pause, "Is that the whole trouble?"

"Isn't it enough?"

"No; I don't think it is. Why didn't you tell him that you didn't want any
gratitude?".

"Not _want_ any?" she demanded.

"Oh!" said Dr. Morrell, "I didn't know but you thought it was enough to
_give."_

Annie believed that he was making fun of her, and she tried to make her
resentful silence dignified; but she only answered sadly: "No; it isn't
enough for me. Besides, he made me see that you can't give sympathy where
you can't receive it."

"Well, that _is_ bad," said the doctor, and he laughed again. "Excuse
me," he added. "I see the point. But why don't you forget it?"

"Forget it!"

"Yes. If you can't help it, why need you worry about it?"

She gave a kind of gasp of astonishment. "Do you really think that would be
right?" She edged a little away from Dr. Morrell, as if with distrust.

"Well, no; I can't say that I do," he returned thoughtfully, without
seeming to have noticed her withdrawal. "I don't suppose I was looking at
the moral side. It's rather out of my way to do that. If a physician let
himself get into the habit of doing that, he might regard nine-tenths of
the diseases he has to treat as just penalties, and decline to interfere."

She fancied that he was amused again, rather than deeply concerned, and she
determined to make him own his personal complicity in the matter if she
could. "Then you _do_ feel sympathy with your patients? You find it
necessary to do so?"

The doctor thought a moment. "I take an interest in their diseases."

"But you want them to get well?"

"Oh, certainly. I'm bound to do all I can for them as a physician."

"Nothing more?"

"Yes; I'm sorry for them--for their families, if it seems to be going badly
with them."

"And--and as--as--Don't you care at all for your work as a part of what
every one ought to do for others--as humanity, philan--" She stopped the
offensive word.

"Well, I can't say that I've looked at it in that light exactly," he
answered. "I suspect I'm not very good at generalising my own relations to
others, though I like well enough to speculate in the abstract. But don't
you think Mr. Peck has overlooked one important fact in his theory? What
about the people who have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans
have? They have the same experiences, and why can't they sympathise with
those who have remained poor?"

"I never thought of that. Why didn't I ask him that?" She lamented so
sincerely that the doctor laughed again. "I think that Mr. Peck--"

"Oh no! oh no!" said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing tone, expressive
of a satiety with the subject that he might very well have felt; and he
ended with another laugh, in which, after a moment of indignant
self-question, she joined him.

"Isn't that delicious?" he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace
with his.

The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped
one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as
they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird
hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows
of the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and black
that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop down and lift
them from the ground. A broad bath of moonlight washed one of the house
fronts, and the white-painted clapboards looked wet with it.

They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own traits and
peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr. Peck and all the
perplexities he had suggested.

She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home with her,
and had said she hoped he would find time to come and see them. It would
have been stiff not to do it, and she believed she had done it in a very
off-hand, business-like way. But she continued to question whether she had.

XII.

Miss Northwick called upon Annie during the week, with excuses for her
delay and for coming alone. She seemed to have intentions of being polite;
but she constantly betrayed her want of interest in Annie, and disappointed
an expectation of refinement which her physical delicacy awakened. She
asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for
her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on
to talk of her sister's part in them. The relation of the Northwick family
to the coming entertainment, and an impression of frail mottled wrists and
high thin cheeks, and an absence of modelling under affluent drapery, was
the main effect of Miss Northwick's visit.

When Annie returned it, she met the younger sister, whom she found a great
beauty. She seemed very cold, and of a _hauteur_ which she subdued
with difficulty; but she was more consecutively polite than her sister,
and Annie watched with fascination her turns of the head, her movements of
leopard swiftness and elasticity, the changing lights of her complexion,
the curves of her fine lips, the fluttering of her thin nostrils.

A very new basket phaeton stood glittering at Annie's door when she got
home, and Mrs. Wilmington put her head out of the open parlour window.

"How d'ye do, Annie?" she drawled, in her tender voice. "Won't you come in?
You see I'm in possession. I've just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at
once to crush you with it. Isn't it a beauty?"

"You're too late, Lyra," said Annie. "I've just come from the Northwicks,
and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton."

"Oh, _poor_ Annie!" Lyra began to laugh with agreeable intelligence.
"_Do_ come in and tell me about it!"

"Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals? She doesn't care
to please any one, does she?"

"I didn't know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie. I
thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others. _I_ do.
But then I may be different. Perhaps Miss Northwick wants to please Mr.
Brandreth."

"Do you mean it, Lyra?" demanded Annie, arrested on her threshold by the
charm of this improbability.

"Well, I don't know; they're opposites. But, upon second thoughts, you
needn't come in, Annie. I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new
phaeton," said Lyra, coming out.

Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded:
"Get right in. We'll go down to the Works. You've never met my husband yet;
have you, Annie?"

"No, I haven't, Lyra. I've always just missed him somehow. He seems to have
been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back."

"Well, he's really at home now. And I don't mean at the house, which isn't
home to him, but the Works. You've never seen the Works either, have you?"

"No, I haven't."

"Well, then, we'll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone.
I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave
it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know
Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?"

"I heard he was somewhat your senior," said Annie reluctantly.

Lyra laughed. "Well, I always say we were born in the same century,
_any_way."

They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in
front of her husband's factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs.
Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as
ugly as the shoe shops.

The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they
mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar
for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of
machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy
air. "Of course it doesn't smell very nice," said Lyra.

She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment
empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat
writing at a table.

"George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn."

"Oh yes, yes, yes," said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming
round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and
wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive
curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with
the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the
cream. "I've been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects;
but I've been away a great deal this season, and--and--We're all very happy
to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I've often heard my wife speak of
your old days together at Hatboro'."

They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man
standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand
upon it.

Lyra interrupted them. "Well, I think now that Annie is here, we'd better
not let her get away without showing her the Works."

"Oh--oh--decidedly! I'll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!" He bustled
about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for
the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his
eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy
consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those
who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office
door they encountered Jack Wilmington.

"I'll show them through," he said to his uncle; and the old man assented
with, "Well, perhaps you'd better, Jack," and went back to his room.

The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room
was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint
smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and
catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless
machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched
them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made
off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to
their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of
spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her
nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and
returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to
time, at Lyra's bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious
feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she
tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before
her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it,
and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except
when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration
of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such
places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was
a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half
a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different
numbers. "Here's where _I_ used to work," said Lyra, "and here's
where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place is _full_ of romantic
associations. The stockings are all one _size_, Annie; but people like
to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number do
_you_ wear? Or don't you wear the Wilmington machine-knit? _I_
don't. Well, they're not _dreams_ exactly, Annie, when all's said and
done for them."

When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her,
saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that
Jack was going to Boston.

They had a long evening together, after Mr. Wilmington took himself off
after tea to his study, as he called it, and remained shut in there. Annie
was uneasily aware of him from time to time, but Lyra had apparently no
more disturbance from his absence than from his presence, which she had
managed with a frank acceptance of everything it suggested. She talked
freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was.
She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich
dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because
she never went anywhere.

Annie said she thought she would at least like to go to the seaside
somewhere during the summer, but "No," Lyra said; "it would be too much
trouble, and you know, Annie, I always did hate _trouble_. I don't
want the care of a cottage, and I don't want to be poked into a hotel, so
I stay in Hatboro'." She said that she had always been a village girl, and
did not miss the interests of a larger life, as she caught glimpses of them
in South Hatboro', or want the bother of them. She said she studied music a
little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the
library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.

At moments it all seemed no harm; at others, the luxury in which this life
was so contentedly sunk oppressed Annie like a thick, close air. Yet she
knew that Lyra was kind to many of the poor people about her, and did
a great deal of good, as the phrase is, with the superfluity which it
involved no self-denial to give from. But Mr. Peck had given her a point
of view, and though she believed she did not agree with him, she could not
escape from it.

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