Way Down East Part 10

And so the evening pa.s.sed with the banter that invariably took place when Rube was of the party. It was late when they left the Squire's, the constable going along with them, and all singing merrily as birds on a summer morning.

David went out under the stars and smoked innumerable pipes, but they did not give their customary solace to-night. There was an upheaval going on in his well regulated mind. "Who was she? What was the mystery about her? How did a girl like that come to be tramping about the country looking for work?" Her manner of speaking, the very intonations of her voice, her choice of words, all proclaimed her from a different world from theirs. He had noticed her hands, white and fragile, and her small delicate wrists. They did not belong to a working woman.

And her eyes, that seemed to hold the sorrows of centuries in their liquid depths. What was the mystery of it all? And that insolent city chap! What a look he had given her. The memory of it made Dave's hands come together as if he were strangling something. But it was all too deep for him. The lights glimmered in the rooms upstairs. His father walked to the outer gate to say good-night to Mr. Sanderson--and he tried to justify the feeling of hatred he felt toward Sanderson, but could not. The sound of a shutter being drawn in, caused him to look up. Anna, leaned out in the moonlight for a moment before drawing in the blind. Dave took off his hat--it was an unconscious act of reverence. The next moment, the grave, shy countryman had smiled at his sentimentality. The shutters closed and all was dark, but Dave continued to think and smoke far into the night.

The days slipped by in pleasant and even tenor. The summer burned itself out in a riot of glorious colors, the harvest was gathered in, and the ripe apples fell from the trees--and there was a wail of coming winter to the night wind. Anna Moore had made her place in the Bartlett family. The Squire could not imagine how he ever got along without her; she always thought of everyone's comfort and remembered their little individual likes and dislikes, till the whole household grew to depend on her.

But she never spoke of herself nor referred to her family, friends or manner of living, before coming to the Bartlett farm.

When she had first come among them, her beauty had caused a little ripple of excitement among the neighbors; the young men, in particular, were all anxious to take her to husking bees and quilting parties, but she always had some excellent excuse for not going, and while her refusals were offered with the utmost kindness, there was a quiet dignity about the girl that made any attempt at rustic playfulness or familiarity impossible.

Sanderson came to the house from time to time, but Anna treated him precisely as she would have treated any other young man who came to the Squire's. She was the family "help," her duty stopped in announcing the guests--or sometimes, and then she felt that fate had been particularly cruel--in waiting on him at table.

Once or twice when Sanderson had found her alone, he had attempted to speak to her. But she silenced him with a look that seat him away cowering like a whipped cur. If he had any interest in any member of the Squire's family, Anna did not notice it. He was an ugly scar on her memory, and when not actually in his presence she tried to forget that he lived.

CHAPTER XII.

KATE BREWSTER HOLDS SANDERSON'S ATTENTION.

"A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch Incapable of pity, void and empty From any dram of mercy."--_Shakespeare_.

It was perhaps owing to the fact that Anna strove hourly to eliminate the memory of Lennox Sanderson from her life, that she remained wholly unaware of that which every member of the Squire's household was beginning to notice: namely, that Lennox Sanderson was becoming daily more attentive to Kate Brewster.

She had more than once hazarded a guess on why a man of Sanderson's tastes should care to remain in so quiet a neighborhood, but could arrive at no solution of the case. In discussing him, she had heard the Bartletts quote his reason, that he was studying practical farming, and later on intended to take it up, on a large scale. When she had first seen him at the Squire's, she had made up her mind that it would be better for her to go away, but the memory of the homeless wanderings she had endured after her mother's death, filled her with terror, and after the first shock of seeing Sanderson, she concluded that it was better to remain where she was, unless he should attempt to force his society on her, in which case she would have to go, if she died by the wayside.

Dave was coming across the fields late one autumn afternoon when he saw Anna at the well, trying with all her small strength to draw up a bucket of water. The well--one of the old-fashioned kind that worked by a "sweep" and pole, at the end of which hung "the old oaken bucket"

which Anna drew up easily till the last few feet and then found it was hard work. She had both hands on the iron bale of the bucket and was panting a little, when a deep, gentle voice said in her ear: "Let go, little woman, that's too heavy for you." And she felt the bucket taken forcibly out of her hand.

"Never mind me, Mr. David," she said, giving way reluctantly.

"Always at some hard work or other," he said; "you won't quit till you get laid up sick."

He filled the water-pail from the bucket for her, which she took up and was about to go when he found courage to say:

"Won't you stay a minute, Anna, I want to talk to you.

"Anna, have you any relatives?"

"Not now."

"But have you no friends who knew you and loved you before you came to us?"

"I want nothing of my friends, Mr. David, but their good will."

"Anna, why will you persist in cutting yourself off from the rest of the world like this? You are too good, too womanly a girl, to lead this colorless kind of an existence forever."

She looked at him pleadingly out of her beautiful eyes. "Mr. David, you would not be intentionally cruel to me, I know, so don't speak to me of these things. It only distresses _me_--and can do you no good."

"Forgive me, Anna, I would not hurt you for the world--but you must know that I love you. Don't you think you could ever grow to care for me?"

"Mr. David, I shall never marry any one. Do not ask me to explain, and I beg of you, if you have a feeling of even ordinary kindness for me.

that you will never mention this subject to me again. You remember how I promised your father that if he would let me make my home with you, he should never live to regret it? Do you think that I intend to repay the dearest wish of his heart in this way? Why, Mr. David, you are engaged to marry Kate." She took up the water-pail to go.

"Kate's one of the best girls alive, but I feel toward her like a brother. Besides, Anna, what have you been doing with those big brown eyes of yours? Don't you see that Kate and Lennox Sanderson are head over heels in love with each other?"

The pail of water slipped from Anna's hand and sent a flood over David's boots.

"No, no--anything but that! You don't know what you are saying!"

Dave looked at her in absolute amazement. He had no chance to reply.

As if in answer to his remark, there came through the outer gate, Kate and Sanderson arm in arm. They had been gathering golden-rod, and their arms were full of the glory of autumn.

There was a certain a.s.sumption of proprietary right in the way that Sanderson a.s.sisted Kate with the golden-rod that Anna recognized. She knew it, and falseness of it burned through, her like so much corrosive acid. She stood with the upturned pail at her feet, unable to recover her composure, her bosom heaving high, her eyes dilating. She stood there, wild as a startled panther, uncertain whether to fight or fly.

"You don't know what a good time we've been having," Kate called out.

"You see, Anna dear, I was right," David said to her.

But Anna did not answer. Sorrow had broken her on its wheel. Where was the justice of it? Why should he go forth to seek his happiness--and find it--and she cower in shame through all the years to come?

Dave saw that she had forgotten his presence; she stood there in the gathering night with wild, unseeing eyes. Memory had turned back the hands of the clock till it pointed out that fatal hour on another golden afternoon in autumn, and Sanderson, the hero of the hour, had come to her with the marks of battle still upon him, and as the crowd gave away for him, right and left, he had said: "I could not help winning with your eyes on me."

Oh, the lying dishonor of it! It was not jealousy that prompted her, for a moment, to go to Kate and tell her all. What right had such vultures as he to be received, smiled upon, courted, caressed? If there was justice on earth, his sin should have been branded on him, that other women might take warning.

Dave knew that her thoughts had flown miles wide of him, and his unselfishness told him that it would be kindness to go into the house and leave her to herself, which he did with a heavy heart and many misgivings.

Hi Holler had none of Dave's sensitiveness. He saw Anna standing by the gate, and being a loquacious soul, who saw no advantage in silence, if there was a fellow creature to talk to; he came up grinning: "Say, Anna, I wonder if me and you was both thinkin' about the same thing--I was thinkin' as I seen Sanderson and Kate pa.s.sing that I certainly would enjoy a piece o' weddin' cake, don't care whose it was."

"No, Hi," Anna said, being careful to restrain any bitterness of tone, "I certainly was not wishing for a wedding cake."

"I certainly do like wedding cake, Anna, but then, I like everything to eat. Some folks don't like one thing, some folks don't like another.

Difference between them an' me is, I like everything."

Anna laughed in spite of herself.

"Yes, since I like everything, and I like it all the time, why, I ain't more than swallowed the last buckwheat for breakfast, than I am ready for dinner. You don't s'pose I'm sick or anything, do you, Anna?"

"I don't think the symptoms sound alarming, Hi."

"Well, you take a load off my mind, Anna, cause I was getting scared about myself." Seeing the empty water-pail, Hi refilled it and carried it in the house for Anna. Dave was not the only one in that household who was miserable, owing to Cupid's unaccountable antics. Professor Sterling, the well-paying summer boarder, continued to remain with the Bartletts, though summer, the happy season during which the rustic may square his grudge with the city man within his gates, had long since pa.s.sed.

The professor had spared enough time from his bugs and beetles to notice how blue Kate's eyes were, and how luxurious her hair; then he had also, with some misgivings, regarded his own in the mirror, with the una.s.suring result that his hair was thinning on top and his eyes looked old through his gold-bowed spectacles.

The discovery did not meet with the indifference one might have expected on the part of the conscientious entomologist. He fell even to the depths of reading hair-restoring circulars and he spent considerable time debating whether he should change his spectacles for a pince-nez.