CHAPTER V
“O ANNA,” cried her mother as soon as the girl had seated herself, “have you heard about the people who have moved in where the Converses moved out?”
“Why, Jenny, that’s the house where Reuben was born and brought up,” observed Seth Miller. “It was before we knew Reuben or had any suspicion there was such a person, and we get in the way of thinking he always lived at Miss Penny’s; but I mistrust he had a good home and indulgent parents until his ma died, and his pa, who was one of them musical geniuses, took to drink.”
“Yes, ma, I heard about the Lorraines. Mrs. Phelps told Miss Penny last night,” returned Anna who always spent Sunday afternoon at her own home, which was diagonally across the way from Miss Penny’s. The girl was pale to-day and leaned listlessly back in her chair in a way that was foreign to her wonted lively self. Her mother had noticed in church that Anna, who was always thin, had grown intensely so within the last fortnight and had hastened to get the dinner dishes out of the way before her daughter should rush in and take the task off her hands.
“It was all in the papers last spring,” said Miller. “They was chock full of it for a spell, and the queer part of it was that the denouncement of the hull thing came right at the same time Wat Graham was arrested over at Wenham. If it hadn’t ’a been for Wat’s brother-in-law, Mudge, going bail for him and helping settle with the creditors, why Wat himself might ’a been in the cell next to Mr. Lorraine.”
“Why, Pa Miller! Wat Graham’s in another class altogether,” protested Anna.
“I know they called Lorraine an embezzler, but I supposed that was only a polite name for thief,” her father rejoined. “Anyhow, it looked from the papers and from what was said over to Spicer’s last night as if he was a particularly mean kind of thief—sort of specialized on widders and orphans, you might say.”
Anna uttered a little cry of protest. Mrs. Phelps had said that the story was that Lorraine’s crookedness had involved thousands of small investors who had lost their all through him. She had added that more than one of those ruined thus had committed suicide. As Anna had lain awake thinking of it, she had tried to convince herself that the latter statement was false, and the rest exaggerated. She hadn’t succeeded, but it was not until now that she realized that she had utterly failed. Poor Miss Lorraine! And no wonder Mrs. Lorraine protected herself with the bristles and spikes of a porcupine!
“Reuben will most likely feel cut up to have suchpeople living in his old house,” Mrs. Miller opined sadly.
“O ma, they can’t help it, and they aren’t that sort themselves at all!” cried Anna.
“And my patience, Jenny, Reuben would be the last one in the world to object to anybody because they was down; the quickest way to reach Reuben’s heart is to be in trouble,” declared Seth Miller loyally. “He started out as a little shaver by rescuing a poor, forlorn tramp cat, and he’s been like a shepherd seeking for lost sheep ever since. By the by, Anna, did I ever tell you that story—how Reuben clumb the highest tree in the county and like as not in the state?”
“You certainly did, pa, the very day after I got back, and many’s the time you have offered to tell it to me again,” retorted the girl. “Miss Penny told me the same story the second time she laid eyes on me and this very week she refreshed my memory with all the fine points of it. But all the same, it’s a first rate yarn, and Reuben’s a brick.”
“That was the beginning of his going to Miss Penny’s,” Seth Miller went on as if he could not leave the fascinating subject. Then suddenly he opened his eyes wide to see Mr. Langley drive up to the gate.
As Mr. Langley stepped on the porch, Anna was seized with a sudden and almost unaccountable sense of guilt. She felt as if she must make her escape. But there was no stairway except that in the front passage, and here was her mother beamingly ushering the minister in upon her. But as she glanced up—evenindeed, as she heard his step, the girl was reassured. Somehow, it seemed as if Mr. Langley had recaptured his springiness. He looked his old young self again, and as he took her hand he smiled in a way that made her feel as if she had had a benediction all to herself.
“O Anna, my dear child, Mrs. Langley wishes very much to see you,” he said eagerly and with a certain largeness that would have been amusing if it hadn’t been pathetic. For it seemed to indicate that he was the bearer of a mandate from royalty.
“She expected you yesterday, it seems, and to-day she was so disappointed to get a note instead of a call that I volunteered to come up at once and fetch you.”
Thus far no one outside the parsonage had known of that audacious visit of Anna’s. Seth Miller’s face wore an expression half-jaunty, half proud. No man had such extraordinary daughters as he, and sometimes it seemed as if Anna were quite as remarkable as Rusty. But Mrs. Miller looked frightened.
Mr. Langley turned to her with his charming smile.
“What do you think, Mrs. Miller! This is the first time that Mrs. Langley has felt any interest whatever in anyone or anything since we lost our little Ella May,” he said in a sort of hushed wonderment. “You will spare Anna for a little while, won’t you? I’ll bring her back shortly safe and sound.”
When Anna returned to Miss Penny’s at tea time, she found her in a state of almost wild excitement.
“O Anna, do sit down and tell me all about it,” shecried. “For the first time in my life I was glad—no, I can’t say I was glad, but I wasn’t really disappointed that Mr. Langley didn’t come in. Not that he thinks it wrong, being Sunday, and anyhow I really am an old lady and won’t be getting out to service many years more. But he had the Smith’s horse, you know. It was nice of him to bring you home, but of course he would. He thought you were here—that was why he stopped. And to think of Mrs. Langley’s asking for you all of her own accord. Dear me, dear me, what does she look like and did you have a nice time?”
“Not exactly what you would call slick,” replied Anna in her droll way that cloaked her weariness even for herself. “There was nothing lively enough about it to break the Sabbath. Our conversation was confined to the subject of tombstones.”
“O Anna, my dear!” said Miss Penny in mild reproof as if it were sacrilegious to speak lightly of such things.
Anna related briefly the occasion of her first visit and described the restoration of the marble image in the cemetery.
“Bless its little heart!” cried Miss Penny who was as enthusiastic as Anna in her love of animals. “It must be sweet. I wonder I never thought of going to look at it on Memorial day. I used to go to the cemetery regularly every year until I got so lame.”
“We’ll drive the pony up there some day. It’s not far to walk from the gate,” Anna said.
She dropped into a rocking chair, let her yellow headfall wearily back against the cushion and closed her eyes.
“I had to tell her of it over and over and over,” she said presently, raising her lashes pensively.
“Anna, you are very tired!” cried Miss Penny.
“Only a wee bit and it isn’t exactlytired, then,” declared the girl. “But you know how it is when you go into a painty room or pass by that awful-smelling tannery place beyond Wenham? You don’t draw a long breath all the while and yet you don’t realise that you’re holding your breath. Well, there’s something about Mrs. Langley and her room that makes you feel as if you were sitting on the edge of your chair waiting until you can get out where you see sunshine and people that talk and smile. Her eyes, you know, like coals of fire in the Bible, and great hollows in her cheeks and a voice that seems to come from a cave or a tomb. The blinds are drawn down almost to the window sills and there are medicine bottles to burn. There’s air enough, I suppose, but not the kind that’s sweetened by sunshine. It seems musty and makes you feel as if there were spiders in all the dark corners—huge black spiders with bodies big as this and crooked legs!”
“O Anna!”
“Sure thing! And what do you think? She wants me to come to see her every Saturday,—every blooming Saturday afternoon, Miss Penny.”
“Anna dear, I wouldn’t do it. You really mustnot,” said Miss Penny gravely. “It would be too great a strain upon you.”
Anna threw herself on the hassock at Miss Penny’s feet leaning her head upon the knee that was not lame.
“Really, Miss Penny, I am glad to go again and every Saturday,” she said softly. “Mr. Langley almost had tears in his eyes when he spoke of it. I didn’t dare look at him again to make sure, because after I had come out of that creepy place it wouldn’t have taken much to set me to crying.”
“I understand,” murmured Miss Penny stroking the girl’s yellow hair. “And to tell the truth, Anna, I almost envy you in being able to do something for Mr. Langley. Ever since he came to be our preacher, I have longed to do something for him to express my appreciation and affection for him, but it always seems impossible. It has always been the other way—his doing for me. And the best things in my life have come to me through him, Reuben and Rusty and now you, Anna.”
“Miss Penny,” said Anna quickly, “you know he visits her every day. Do you suppose he kisses her?”
“Dear me, Anna! what a question! I’m sure I have no idea. I suppose he does.”
“But how can he! But you haven’t seen her as she is now, and you never could imagine how she looks. He certainly seems to think a heap of her all the same, and as he can see as well as I can in the dark, he can’t help seeing that she looks old enough to be his great aunt. Well, I’m sorry for her but Iwouldn’t be related to her for a gold mine. However, I can stand it once a week all right.”
In the following days, they recurred to the matter frequently. A dozen times, Miss Penny suggested suddenly a new topic of conversation that had popped into her head as appropriate for Anna to introduce as an alternative to that of tombstones; but each one being only more utterly absurd than the foregoing, Anna would laugh until she cried, Miss Penny joining her merrily. None the less, when she returned late Saturday afternoon, she announced that she had gotten away from the little lamb, though not perhaps very far.
The girl had proposed one subject after another, receiving no response. And it had presently been borne in upon her there could hardly be a response in the nature of the case. Mrs. Langley was really living, so far as she was alive at all, in another generation, so that trying to converse with her was like shouting to someone miles behind one on the highway and only visible because of curves in the course of it. The years she had lived in retirement had counted for little more than nothing. Her mind was twenty years younger than the village she dwelt in.
“When I realised that, I tried to get back, and after a bit she was glad to talk about Ella May,” Anna said to Miss Penny as she dried the china after tea. “Only you would hardly know itwasElla May. Mr. Langley’s Ella May has been growing all these years until she went to college with Rusty and jumped ahead and graduated and—O dear me! Hers is still a teeny babythree days old. Now, Miss Penny, when those two get to heaven one of them is going to have the surprise of their lives.”
“Why Anna,” murmured Miss Penny reproachfully.
“Meantime, things are at sixes and sevens with both of them. What she needs is another baby, and what he needs is a full grown wife. Both of ’em need it frightfully. But how in the world is it ever going to be brought about, and who is to do it? I may think I am Charley-on-the-spot for ordinary cases, but a sticker like this stumps me flat. It would take someone a heap smarter than me to haul her over all the years she has missed and bring her up to date. And while that’s being done to her mind, her face, her looks ought to be stretched the other way until she looks somewhere near as young as her husband.”
The girl sighed. “It’s like the North-west Passage. It ought to be done, and I suppose it could be, but not by yours truly. And the worst is, she refuses to see anybody else. She hardly pays any more attention to Mr. Langley than she did before—just sends him orders about me through Big Bell. O Miss Penny, did you ever hear the proverb ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”