Annie Kilburn Part 24

"Ralph, behave yourself! _Here's_ Winthrop, and we want you to take us home. Come now!" She pa.s.sed her arm through his, and the boy took his other hand. The action, so full of fearless custom and wonted affection from them both, seemed with her words to operate another total change in his mood.

"All right; I'm going, Ellen. Got to say good night Mrs. Munger, that's all." He managed to get to her, with his wife on his arm and his boy at his side. "Want to thank you for a pleasant evening, Mrs. Munger--want to thank you--"

"And _I_ want to thank you _too_, Mrs. Munger," said Mrs. Putney, with an intensity of bitterness no repet.i.tion of the words could give, "It's been a pleasant evening for _me_!"

Putney wished to stop and explain, but his wife pulled him away.

Dr. Morrell and Annie followed to get them safely into the carriage; he went with them, and when she came back Mrs. Munger was saying: "I will leave it to Mr. Wilmington, or any one, if I'm to blame. It had quite gone out of my head about Mr. Putney. There was plenty of coffee, besides, and if everything that could harm particular persons had to be kept out of the way, society couldn't go on. We ought to consider the greatest good of the greatest number." She looked round from one to another for support. No one said anything, and Mrs. Munger, trembling on the verge of a collapse, made a direct appeal: "Don't you think so, Mr. Peck?"

The minister broke his silence with reluctance. "It's sometimes best to have the effect of error unmistakable. Then we are sure it's error."

Mrs. Munger gave a sob of relief into her handkerchief. "Yes, that's just what I say."

Lyra bent her face on her arm, and Jack Wilmington put his head out of the window where he stood.

Mr. Peck remained staring at Mrs. Munger, as if doubtful what to do. Then he said: "You seem not to have understood me, ma'am. I should be to blame if I left you in doubt. You have been guilty of forgetting your brother's weakness, and if the consequence has promptly followed in his shame, it is for you to realise it. I wish you a good evening."

He went out with a dignity that thrilled Annie. Lyra leaned toward her and said, choking with laughter, "He's left Idella asleep upstairs. We haven't _any_ of us got _perfect_ memories, have we?"

"Run after him!" Annie said to Jack Wilmington, in undertone, "and get him into my carriage. I'll get the little girl. Lyra, _don't_ speak of it."

"Never!" said Mrs. Wilmington, with delight. "I'm solid for Mr. Peck every time."

XIX.

Annie made up a bed for Idella on a wide, old-fashioned lounge in her room, and put her away in it, swathed in a night-gown which she found among the survivals of her own childish clothing in that old chest of drawers.

When she woke in the morning she looked across at the little creature, with a tender sense of possession and protection suffusing her troubled recollections of the night before. Idella stirred, stretched herself with a long sigh, and then sat up and stared round the strange place as if she were still in a dream.

"Would you like to come in here with me?" Annie suggested from her bed.

The child pushed back her hair with her little hands, and after waiting to realise the situation to the limit of her small experience, she said, with a smile that showed her pretty teeth, "Yes."

"Then come."

Idella tumbled out of bed, pulling up the nightgown, which was too long for her, and softly thumped across the carpet. Annie leaned over and lifted her up, and pressed the little face to her own, and felt the play of the quick, light breath over her cheek.

"Would you like to stay with me--live with me--Idella?" she asked.

The child turned her face away, and hid a roguish smile in the pillow. "I don't know."

"Would you like to be my little girl?"

"No."

"No? Why not?"

"Because--because"--she seemed to search her mind--"because your night-gowns are too long."

"Oh, is that all? That's no reason. Think of something else."

Idella rubbed her face hard on the pillow. "You dress up cats."

She lifted her face, and looked with eyes of laughing malice into Annie's, and Annie pushed her face against Idella's neck and cried, "You're a rogue!"

The little one screamed with laughter and gurgled: "Oh, you tickle! You tickle!"

They had a childish romp, prolonged through the details of Idella's washing and dressing, and Annie tried to lose, in her frolic with the child, the anxieties that had beset her waking; she succeeded in confusing them with one another in one dull, indefinite pain.

She wondered when Mr. Peck would come for Idella, but they were still at their belated breakfast when Mrs. Bolton came in to say that Bolton had met the minister on his way up, and had asked him if Idella might not stay the week out with them.

"I don' know but he done more'n he'd ought.

"But she can be with us the rest part, when you've got done with her."

"I haven't begun to get done with her," said Annie. "I'm glad Mr. Bolton asked."

After breakfast Bolton himself appeared, to ask if Idella might go up to the orchard with him. Idella ran out of the room and came back with her hat on, and tugging to get into her shabby little sack. Annie helped her with it, and Idella tucked her hand into Bolton's loose, hard fist, and gave it a pull toward the door.

"Well, I don't see but what she's goin'," he said.

"Yes; you'd better ask her the next time if _I_ can go," said Annie.

"Well, why don't you?" asked Bolton, humouring the joke. "I guess you'd enjoy it about as well as any. We're just goin' for a basket of wind-falls for pies. I guess we ain't a-goin' to be gone a great while."

Annie watched them up the lane from the library window with a queer grudge at heart; Bolton stiffly lumbering forward at an angle of forty-five degrees, the child whirling and dancing at his side, and now before and now after him.

At the sound of wheels on the gravel before the front door, Annie turned away with such an imperative need of its being Dr. Morrell's buggy that it was almost an intolerable disappointment to find it Mrs. Munger's phaeton.

Mrs. Munger burst in upon her in an excitement which somehow had an effect of premeditation.

"Miss Kilburn, I wish to know what you think of Mr. and Mrs. Putney's behaviour to me, and Mr. Peck's, in my own house, last night. They are friends of yours, and I wish to know if you approve of it. I come to you _as_ their friend, and I am sure you will feel as I do that my hospitality has been abused. It was an outrage for Mr. Putney to get intoxicated in my house; and for Mr. Peck to attack me as he did before everybody, because Mr. Putney had taken advantage of his privileges, was abominable. I am not a member of his church; and even if I were, he would have had no right to speak so to me."

Annie felt the blood fly to her head, and she waited a moment to regain her coolness. "I wonder you came to ask me, Mrs. Munger, if you were so sure that I agreed with you. I'm certainly Mr. and Mrs. Putney's friend, and so far as admiring Mr. Peck's sincerity and goodness is concerned, I'm _his_ friend. But I'm obliged to say that you're mistaken about the rest."

She folded her hands at her waist, and stood up very straight, looking firmly at Mrs. Munger, who made a show of taking a new grip of her senses as she sank unbidden into a chair.

"Why, what do you mean, Miss Kilburn?"

"It seems to me that I needn't say."

"Why, but you must! You _must_, you know. I can't be _left_ so! I must know where I _stand_! I must be sure of my _ground_! I can't go on without understanding just how much you mean by my being mistaken."

She looked Annie in the face with eyes superficially expressive of indignant surprise, and Annie perceived that she wished to restore herself in her own esteem by browbeating some one else into the affirmation of her innocence.