Nobody's Child

She lifted her lips to him, and his arms took her and held her, and she clung to him with a tensity of affection. He kissed her long and passionately, but with self-control enough to realize the quality of what he received, its affection and gratitude and lack of passion. And when her lips parted from his and he buried his face on her shoulder shaken by the first effort for restraint he had ever cared to make, her hand stroked his hair, gently. "I didn't know you were unhappy, too," she said softly.

When he raised his head he was pale. "You're a child yet," he said. "You'll wake up one of these days – then you'll love me as I love you."

"I like you a great deal," Ann answered, with conviction.

He laughed shortly. "Yes, we're good friends – that's it, isn't it, Ann?"

The note of urgency and dissatisfaction made her uncomfortable. "You asked me to be friends," she said.

She moved away from his hold, and he let her go. "There's all the future," he said more quietly. "You'll love me by and by… Ann, have you really the courage to go away from all that down there?"

"Yes."

"And the wisdom to keep our friendship to yourself?.. It will be a terrible thing for both of us, if they know. I met your father this morning, on his way home, and I'd have spoken to him, if he had let me. I did speak and he cut me – he has neither forgotten nor forgiven."

"What is it they've not forgotten or forgiven?" Ann asked earnestly. "Aunt Sue wouldn't tell me."

Garvin told her what he had told Baird.

Ann flamed scarlet. "There isn't any Penniman would have done that!"

"And there's not a Westmore now who thinks it," Garvin said positively. "The thing's more than half a century old, but it's an insult your people will never forgive… It's not going to matter to you, is it, now you know?" he added, for Ann looked so perturbed. "I never have believed it for a moment – or Edward either. I know he's terribly sorry for the quarrel, and ashamed that father let the thing rankle. It worries Ed. If it worries you, I'm sorry I told you."

"It doesn't worry me," Ann said firmly. "It doesn't make the least difference to me – in the way I feel to you and Mr. Westmore – we had nothing to do with it, an' to hate an' hate is sickening. But I know how it is with my people. I think grandfather would almost kill me if he knew that we were friends. Even Aunt Sue would be fearful to me." She drew a quick nervous breath. "It makes me want to get away more than ever."

"You shall go – I'll help you," Garvin promised. "But in the meantime I want to see you – I must. If I think of a safe way, you will meet me, won't you?"

Ann thought of the thing that had added hurt to hurt, her father's pleasure in Sue. They had been painfully kind to her at dinner, and after the meal was over he had gone off with Sue, they two to talk together.

"Yes," Ann said. "I'm not afraid. We're doing nothing wrong in liking each other."

"I'll think of a way and write to you."

She got up. "An' I must go now." Her lips quivered and set. "My father has gone with Aunt Sue – to walk around the farm – but they'll be coming back before supper."

"I am afraid you must, dear. If I brought them down on you, I should never forgive myself… I can go with you to where I met you."

He went with her around to the back of the Crest, down the steep red-clay slope and into the shelter of the bushes. There he lifted her up and kissed her. "Ann!" he said. "Ann! I'm going to make you love me."

Ann received his kiss more shyly, turned her cheek to it. She had emerged a little from wretchedness, and the quality that invites pursuit, that draws passion and gives sparingly in return, the quality with which Ann was plentifully endowed, was coming to the surface. She escaped from his hands without answer and with eyes down.

XV

AS WITH A CHILD

Ann gained the woods in safety, so much Garvin saw from his perch, but he could not see what followed. At the point where the Back Road forked, she came face to face with Edward Westmore. He was coming from the club, riding slowly, as always.

Ann was flushed from rapid walking; she flushed more deeply when she saw him, and nodded and smiled shyly.

Edward lifted his cap, his tired face lighting. "So we meet again!" he said. "I was thinking of you – have you walked far?"

"Just across the pastures," Ann answered in embarrassment, the more so because he had checked his horse.

She had not expected him to do that, or to look so pleased when he saw her, still less to dismount and come to her which he did immediately. "You look warm, aren't you tired?" he asked.

"Yes," Ann answered, too much surprised for anything but a monosyllable. She was wide-eyed and a little startled, the child look that made her prettiest, and he studied her intently, as if absorbing her features. And yet his manner was deferential; he looked and smiled as he had the day before when he had talked with her.

"I am tired, too," he said. "I have just ridden up from the station to the club… Won't you rest a few minutes? I wanted to talk more yesterday – I was interested in all you told me, and promised myself to take the first chance to talk again, but I hardly expected this good fortune."

Baird would have been astonished by Edward's air of animation and pleasure, more so even than Ann. "He hates quarreling and wants very much to be friends," was Ann's thought, and she was pleased. The miserable day was ending more happily; Garvin had told her that he loved her and that there was "all the future," and now his brother was showing her that he liked her. There were people in the world to whom she mattered; Garvin was interested in her, deeply interested. Ann was being carried away from her troubles; transformed into beauty and charm.

She gave Edward her drooping glance and slow smile. "I should like to talk, too."

"Shall we sit down then, for a few minutes?.. Over there by the creek, don't you think? There used to be a hollow there, and a flat rock."

"Yes – it's there yet," Ann assented willingly.

It was the spot where she had hidden from Baird that morning, where the bank of the creek shelved sharply to a big rock around which the water fretted and quarreled. Clumps of chinkapin bushes intervened, effectually hiding the hollow from the road.

Edward led his horse around them and, after a swift survey that convinced him that they would be well screened, dropped the bridle. Carefully and attentively, as if she were fragile, he helped Ann down to the rock, and Ann, who had sprung down that morning as nimbly as a chamois, lent herself daintily to his guidance, instantly adapting herself to it, enjoying it. This was something quite new to her, as new as Baird's impetuosity or Garvin's restrained passion. And she took, quite as her due, the step-like ridge in the rock that seated Edward at her feet. She was neither embarrassed nor awed, partly because of Edward's well sustained ease and deference, partly because of his very evident interest in every word she uttered.

With a skill which Ann was not experienced enough to recognize, he led her to talk of the farm, then of her people, then of herself. He had been away so long, he told her. He had been everywhere – except at Westmore – much of the time in Europe; everything she told him was news. He drew from her an accurate picture of her life as it had been from her earliest remembrance and as it was now, and that without any such passionate outburst as she had visited upon Garvin. With his knowledge of her family and his growing knowledge of her, it was easy to read between the lines. She was apart from her family; she was not happy with them. Whether she had attained to seventeen years without a romance was the one point upon which he was uncertain; even a very young girl would know how to guard that secret.

Ann could not know that she was being manipulated by a master-hand. When he looked up at her, his eyes held only pleased interest. When he looked down at the resentful, quarreling water and they were hidden from her, his expression was different.

Edward Westmore's combination of ease and impenetrable reserve, of swift intelligence and yet guarded speech, the melancholy that shadowed him, like a thin veil drawn over a smile, had baffled more astute people than Ann. It had made him a noticeable man wherever he had gone; a man of acknowledged charm and suspected subtlety. His family had known him as a spirited and yet dependable boy, the most dependable of the Westmores, until the upheaval which had sent him away from his home had revealed passions his family had not suspected. He had demanded a release from Westmore and Westmore conditions and had gained it. That he had married beyond all expectations well a woman older than himself and possessed of a fortune, and had settled into the inscrutable man he was, with the welfare of Westmore apparently his closest interest, was one of the inexplicable things about him.

Judith perhaps understood Edward better than any one else did; certainly, in their twelve years of married life, his wife had not fathomed him. If his charm had won him conquests, they had never obtruded. If he had craved youth and beauty, he had given no intimation of it. He had unwaveringly upheld both his wife's dignity and his by an unswerving courtesy; how much or how little love he had given her was a secret she had carried with her – she had left him her fortune, unconditionally.

He had led Ann up to the very present, and she told him what he already knew: "And my father came home to-day." She paused on that, because of the tragedy it had been to her, but her face was more expressive than she knew.

"I suppose he will sell the farm and take you all west with him when he goes back? That will mean a different life for you," Edward said.

The suggestion was an entirely new one to Ann; she grew wide-eyed over it. Then she shook her head decidedly. "No, he won't do that – he loves the place."

"Then he will probably send you to school in the autumn."

This also was a new idea, but after consideration she dismissed it. "No… I didn't study very well when Aunt Sue sent me to school," she added with a touch of shame.

"You didn't?" Edward was genuinely surprised; it was not his reading of her.

"I couldn't ever learn arithmetic – I tried hard, but I couldn't. The teacher told Aunt Sue that I had no brains for study, an' she took me away from school." Ann hated to make the admission, she had been led into it before she knew, and added quickly, "But I liked history and composition – I like to read. I've read my father's books through and through."

"They don't know what good brains are in that school in the village," Edward said quietly. "My greatest pleasure is reading, too – you are fortunate to have grown up in a library."

Ann was forced to admit that it was not a library, just a cupboard in her father's room stacked with books. Edward knew that, as a boy, Coats Penniman had been an omnivorous reader and something of a student. He selected in his mind the books Coats was likely to have read, many histories, the lives of great men, and the staider fiction which he himself had enjoyed when a boy, and Ann warmed into vivid pleasure when she found that they had acquaintances in common. She talked of George Eliot's characters as one would of friends, and lovingly of Maggie Tulliver, that creation of a great woman's brain always tenderly loved by misfits such as Ann.

"She was a nobody's child," Ann said softly.