Nobody's Child

Nickolas Baird, as noticeably but one generation removed from the ranks and of the type that carves its own fortunes, watched the two curiously.

He was not the only onlooker. A man had ridden out of the woods just as the shot was fired and had come slowly down to the creek. His horse had leaped when the report came and had sidled nervously as if eager for a run, but his rider had reined him sharply, held him to a walk, while he eyed the group in the distance. Though well mounted and in faultless riding attire, he was evidently not of the hunt; he wore no signs of haste or eagerness. He had crossed the bit of pasture deliberately, and had come to the other side of the creek. Then, as if he considered himself breakable, he had dismounted deliberately and, dropping the reins, slowly crossed the creek, selecting and testing his footing in the same careful fashion. His eyes alone, gloomy under their lowered brows, showed interest in what was passing.

He stood just behind the group before he spoke: "What's all this, Garvin?"

The three started and turned and Garvin stepped back hastily from Ann, who with hands still lifted to her hair and eyes wet with tears stared at the new-comer.

It was Garvin who answered quickly. "It's plain enough what's happened, Ed. The sorrel went down in a rabbit-hole and broke his leg – incidentally, he nearly did for me too."

"And you shot him without giving him time to say his prayers. I was in time to see that."

"He was no gift of yours – I raised him," Garvin answered, with an instant note of antagonism.

There had been stern rebuke in the elder man's remark, though so quietly spoken. But they were very evidently brothers. Their features were the same, the Westmore features; only the elder man's black hair had streaks of gray about the temples and his face was sallow and his eyes somber. Garvin at twenty-eight looked less than his age, and his brother, ten years his senior, looked full forty.

Edward Westmore made no answer. He had looked from his brother to Ann, at her wistfully moist eyes and air of distress. But if his caught breath and slowly heightening color indicated the same anger Baird had felt, he restrained himself well. He said nothing at all, simply looked at her steadily, flushing and breathing quickly. Then he turned abruptly and looked up the slope of pasture at Ann's ramshackle buggy; then, turning more slowly, he gazed an appreciable moment at the looming Mine Banks.

Possibly it was his way of gaining self-control. Possibly he was looking for an explanation of the girl's presence and discovered it in the waiting buggy. At any rate, his manner was calm and courteous when he faced them again.

"It's too bad it happened," he said, more to Baird than any one else. "But it can't be helped… You'll have to get the animal off this land, it's not ours – unless you can get permission to bury him, Garvin?"

"Not likely," his brother said in an undertone. "It's old Penniman's land. He hasn't learned to hate us any less these years you've been away."

Edward Westmore's brows contracted sharply. "I'll take her to her buggy, and come back," he said, and turned hastily to Ann, who was clambering down into the creek.

Garvin looked after him in surprise. Then, conscious of his brother's backward glance, he turned away. Nevertheless, he listened intently to Edward's low-toned courtesy.

"Let me help you – the bank is slippery."

Both he and Baird could hear distinctly Ann's soft rejoinder, the slurred syllables that marked her a southern child, but without the nasal twang usual with the country-folk of the Ridge. "Don't you come, suh – I can get up easily." She was more embarrassed than distressed now; her face was rosy red under her hood and her eyes were lowered.

But Edward went on with her, up the stretch of pasture. They saw him help her into the buggy and stand for a time, evidently talking to her. And, finally, when she drove off, he bowed to her, as deeply as he would to any lady on the Ridge, standing and looking after her as she drove into the woods.

Baird had observed the whole proceeding with interest. The Westmore family interested him. Ann interested him also, perhaps because he "couldn't place her," as he himself would have expressed it. During his two weeks' stay on the Ridge he had assimilated its class distinctions. There were three classes on the Ridge: the aristocracy, depleted and poverty ridden as a rule, clinging tenaciously to bygone glory while casting a half-contemptuous and at the same time envious eye on the sheer power of money; the second somewhat heterogeneous class developed during the forty years since the "war," and that, on the Ridge, had as its distinctive element the small farmer who, in most cases, though not so well-born, possessed wide family ramifications and an inbreeding and a narrow jealous pride quite on a par with that of the descendants of governors and revolutionary generals; and the third class, the class that had always been, the "poor-white-trash."

In which social division did Ann belong? Certainly not to the latter, and not to the first, either, Baird judged, for he had watched Garvin's manner to the girl closely. And he had also noted Garvin's look of surprise when Edward had followed her. He saw that while Garvin was audibly considering the best means of getting rid of the dead horse, his real attention was given to the two at the edge of the woods.

Baird asked his question a little abruptly. "Who is she, Garvin?"

Perhaps Garvin expected the question. "Ann Penniman," he said, without looking up from the horse.

"One of your people?" Baird asked, conscious that he was expressing himself awkwardly.

Garvin caught his meaning at once. "Heavens, no! Her people are farmers. She's old Penniman's grand-daughter. His farm runs down through the woods there, and this field is part of it – up to the Mine Banks. They're ours, worse luck – just waste ground. I wish the sorrel was up there in one of the old ore-pits."

Baird felt that Garvin wanted to lead off from the subject. "She's the prettiest girl I've seen in a year," he declared.

"Ann is pretty, but I don't see what good it's going to do her," Garvin answered carelessly. "She'll marry some one of the Penniman tribe – they're all inter-married – and go on working like an ox. Old Penniman would take a shotgun to any man who came around who wasn't a cousin, or a Penniman of some sort. Ann's just a farm girl and has been brought up like all of them about here." Garvin nodded in the direction of the disappearing buggy. "She's back now from taking butter and eggs to the village in exchange for a few doled-out groceries – they're hard up, the Pennimans." He looked down then at the horse, bent and stroked its tawny mane. "Poor old Nimrod!" he muttered. "You had a short life of it – though between us we sometimes had a merry one." His voice had changed completely, deepened into genuine feeling. "I raised him from a colt," he remarked to Baird, with face averted.

In the light of what had happened, Baird found it difficult to explain the man's present emotion. Baird had had a good deal of western experience which had taught him to regard thoughtfully any man who was as quick with his pistol as Garvin Westmore had been.

But Baird's real interest was elsewhere. He asked no more questions. In his own mind he decided that the dormered roof, crisscrossed by naked branches, which he could see from his window at the Hunt Club, covered the Penniman house. And he also reflected that he had plenty of spare time in which to reconnoiter.

III

PENNIMAN AND WESTMORE

Ann drove on through the woods, with the color still warm in her cheeks. She could not have told just why she was still trembling and felt inclined to cry. As Garvin Westmore had said, it was best to put the sorrel out of pain at once. She did not feel, as the young man Garvin had called Baird had felt, that it was an outrageous thing for Garvin to have shot the horse while she was there, for Ann had never been shown any particular consideration by anybody; she was well acquainted with the hard side of life.

But Garvin's look had been so strange. It had shocked and puzzled her… And then Edward Westmore's manner to her? He had been so "nice" to her, a protective, considerate niceness. He had asked her about her family and about herself. He had been away from the Ridge for many years; he had never brought his foreign wife to Westmore. But, now that she and his father were gone, he had returned to Westmore with the fortune she had left him and was head of the family. And yet he remembered them all, her grandfather and her Aunt Sue and her father, who had been away from the Ridge as long as Ann could remember, and her mother, whom Ann had never seen. Edward Westmore had not referred to the life-long enmity that had existed between his father and her grandfather, and yet he had made her feel that he did not share in it; that it was a bygone thing and should be buried. Ann had liked him, as suddenly and as uncontrollably as she had liked Garvin.

For Garvin Westmore had also been "nice" to her, though in a different way. Back in the days when she used to disobey her grandfather and steal off to the Westmore Mine Banks for fascinating visits to its caves and ore-pits, the tall boy who galloped recklessly up hill and down, always with several hounds at his horse's heels, was one of Ann's terrors. Then there had been the vague period when she had been "growing up" and had seen him only very occasionally and had not thought of him at all.

But ever since the day, a few weeks ago, when he had met her and had ridden up the Post-Road beside her buggy, he had become a vivid entity. Under his smiling regard she had quickly lost the Penniman antagonism to any one bearing the name of Westmore. His had been an astonishing and exhilarating "niceness" to which Ann's suddenly aroused femininity had instantly responded. Ann had learned that day, for the first time, that she was pretty and that it was possible for her to arouse admiration. And during the last two weeks… It was not merely pity for the sorrel that had set her cheeks aflame and made her eyes moist; it was excitement, the stir of commingled emotions and impressions. Her nerves were always keyed high, vibrant to every impression. And during the last weeks she had been hiding from every one something of graver import than her usual thoughts and feelings. Those she had always kept to herself, partly because she was inclined to be secretive, partly because of native independence.

Ann had reached the end of the woods now and stopped to compose herself. Her grandfather would not notice that she had been crying, but her Aunt Sue would. She would have to tell of the tragedy in the Mine Banks field; news of that sort had a way of traveling. She would have to say that she had seen what had happened, but not a word of Edward Westmore's talk with her or of Garvin – not even to her Aunt Sue. Sue, in her quiet way, hated the Westmores as bitterly as her grandfather did. Ann's swift liking for these two men who had, each in his own fashion, been nice to her, and her swift determination to be nice in return, was a thing to be carefully concealed. As she had come through the woods, she had looked at the dead chestnut tree in the split crotch of which there had once been a flicker's nest. Garvin had not said so, he would not with the other man standing by, but it probably held a message for her. This was not the best time to get it, however. Some one might see her and wonder.

Ann took off her hood and smoothed her hair and pressed her hands to her hot eyes; sat still then and let the wind cool the ache in them, her face settling into its usual wistful expression, eyes dark under drooping lids, lips full but smileless, cheeks and chin so rounded and infantile that they were appealing. Life might make hers a voluptuous face, there was more than a hint of the probability in the desirous mouth and full white throat. It was the straight nose with its slightly disdainful nostrils and the arched and clearly penciled brows that gave her face its real beauty – a nobler promise than was suggested by lips and chin.

Through the few intervening trees Ann could see the Penniman barn, a low wide structure with a basement for housing cattle, an arrangement that the sharply sloping ground made possible. The house, a little to the left and beyond, even in winter was obscured by trees. Two tall Lombardy poplars guarded the kitchen entrance and the woodshed, towering high above a steep-pitched roof and the alanthus and locust trees that in summer shaded it. The woods through which Ann had just passed semicircled the upward sloping field that lay between her and the farm buildings. To the right, the slope was crested by an orchard, and to the left, stretching from the house like a long line of melancholy sentinels, was a double row of magnificent cedars, guarding the road that led straight across open country, past the Hunt Club and to the Post-Road. That was the way by which Ann should have come had not the hint of spring tempted her to take the Back Road, through the pastures and the woods.

There was no one in sight. In the bit of marsh made by a spread of the creek several pigs were wallowing, as if glad to find the ground soft, and in the enclosure behind the barn a horse and three cows stood in the sun amid a clutter of chickens. Beyond the marsh, under a group of weeping-willows, was the spring and the usual accompaniment, a spring-house. Ann had expected to see her aunt's red shawl either at the spring or on the path that led up between the double row of grapevines, a full three hundred yards of upward toil to the kitchen door, for it was the hour for carrying the day's supply of water. But there was no one in view, not even her grandfather moving feebly about the barn.

Ann took up the reins with a sigh, and drove on. She always sighed when she approached her home, and tingled with the sensation of embarking on an adventure when she left it, for Ann possessed in abundance the attributes of youth: faith, hope, imagination and the capacity to enjoy intensely. Home meant work, work, work, and few smiles to sweeten the grind. But for her Aunt Sue, the smoldering rebellion the farm had bred in Ann would have flared dangerously. As long as she had been too young to understand, and had had the fields and the woods, it had not mattered so much. In a vague way, Ann had always felt that she was nobody's child, a nonentity to her grandfather except when her high spirits, tinged always by coquetry, and her inflammable temper aroused in him a sullen anger. And Ann knew that to her aunt she was more a duty than a joy; Sue Penniman appeared to have an enormous capacity for duty and a small capacity for affection. But, with the necessity to cling to something, Ann clung to her aunt. For Sue she worked uncomplainingly. For Sue's sake she hid her resentment at being a nonentity.

For in the last year of rapid awakening Ann had realized that she had never been permitted an actual share in the narrow grinding interests of the family, though, of necessity, she was tied fast to the monotonous round and, together with her grandfather and aunt, lay between the upper and nether millstones. The clannish pride that lay in every Penniman lay in her also, and yet, Ann had felt, vaguely as a child and poignantly as she grew older, that she was of them and yet not of them. Her grandfather, even her aunt had made her feel it – and above all the father who had forsaken her when she was barely old enough to remember him. Ann never thought of her father without an ache in her throat that made it impossible for her to talk of him.

At the barn Ann hitched the horse. Her grandfather might want the buggy; it was best not to unharness until she knew. She took the bundles of groceries and went on to the house, past the basement door, to the stairs that led up to the kitchen, for the house, like the barn, was built on the slope, its front resting on the crown of the slope, its rear a story from the ground, permitting a basement room and a forward cellar that burrowed deep into the ground.

Ann had glanced into the basement, but her aunt was not there. The kitchen, an ancient-looking room, whitewashed and with small square-paned windows, was also empty. Ann put down her parcels and went into the living-room. It and the kitchen and the two rooms above were all that remained of the colonial house that antedated even Westmore. It was low-ceilinged, thick-walled, and casement-windowed, and had a fireplace spacious enough to seat a family. Built of English brick brought to the colony two centuries before, the old chimney had withstood time and gaped deep and wide and soot-blackened. This room had been one wing of the colonial mansion, and, because of the solid masonry that enclosed the cellar beneath it, had not fallen into decay like the rest of the house.

But it had not been built by a Penniman. A hundred years before, a Penniman, "a man of no family, but with money in his pocket," had bought the house and the land "appertaining" from an encumbered Westmore, and had become father of the Pennimans now scattered through three counties. The first Penniman and his son's son after him had been tobacco growers on a small scale and slave owners, but they had never been of the aristocracy.

It was Ann's grandfather who, some thirty years before, ten years after the war, had torn down the other two wings of the old house and had built the porch and plain two-storied front that now sat chin on the crown of the slope and looked out over terraces whose antiquity scorned its brief thirty years; looked over and beyond them, to miles of rolling country. The narrow, back-breaking stairs that led from the living-room to the rooms above, a back-stairs in colonial days, was now the main stairway. The mansion had become a farmhouse, for the first Penniman had been the only Penniman "with money in his pocket."

There was no one in the living-room, and Ann paused to listen, then climbed the stairs, coming up into a narrow passageway, at one end of which were three steps. They led to the front bedrooms, her grandfather's addition to the old house. One room was his, the other had been Coats Penniman's room, Ann's father's room. Like many of the Pennimans, Ann's mother had married her first cousin, a boy who had grown up in her father's house.

The stir Ann had heard was in this room, which, except when it had accommodated an occasional visiting Penniman, had been closed for fourteen years. The door stood wide now, the windows were open, and her aunt was making the bed.

Ann stopped on the threshold, held by surprise. She had not known of any expected visitor. For the last six years they had been too poor and too proud to entertain even a Penniman. And there was something in her aunt's manner and appearance that arrested Ann's attention. Sue Penniman was always pale, Ann could easily remember the few times when she had seen color in her aunt's cheeks, and, though she always worked steadily, it was without energy or enthusiasm. But there was color in her cheeks now, and eagerness in her movements. She was thin and her shoulders a little rounded from hard work, but now, when she lifted to look at Ann, she stood very erect and the unwonted color in her face and the brightness in her blue eyes made her almost pretty.

"Is some one comin', Aunt Sue?" Ann asked.

Her aunt did not answer at once. She looked at Ann steadily, long enough for a quiver of feeling to cross her face. Then she came around the bed, came close enough to Ann to put her hands on Ann's shoulders.

"Cousin Coats is comin', Ann," she said, her nasal drawl softened almost to huskiness.

Her father coming! The color of sudden and intense emotion swept into Ann's face, widening her eyes and parting her lips, a lift of joy and of craving combined that stifled her. It was a full moment before Ann could speak. Then she asked, "When – ?"