Mistress Anne Part 3

But Anne had fled. Overwhelmingly she realized that Richard had believed her to be the daughter of Peter Bower. Daughter of that crude and common man! Sister of Beulah! Friend of Eric Brand!

Well, she had brought it on herself. She had looked after the dogs and she had waited on the table. People thought differently of these things.

The ideals she had tried to teach her children were not the ideals of the larger world. Labor did not dignify itself. The motto of kings was meaningless! A princess serving was no longer a princess!

Sitting very tense and still in the little rocking-chair in her own room, she decided that of course Richard looked down on her. He had perceived in her no common ground of birth or of breeding. Yet her grandfather had been the friend of the grandfather of Richard Brooks!

When Peggy came up, she announced that she was to sleep with Anne. It was an arrangement often made when the house was full. To-night Anne welcomed the cheery presence of the child. She sang her to sleep, and then sat for a long time by the little round stove with Peggy in her arms.

She laid her down as a knock sounded on her door.

"Are you up?" some one asked, and she opened it, to find Evelyn Chesley.

"May I borrow a needle?" She showed a torn length of lace-trimmed flounce. "I caught it on a rocker in my room. There shouldn't be any rocker."

"Mrs. Bower loves them," Anne said, as she hunted through her little basket; "she loves to rock and rock. All the women around here do."

"Then you're not one of them?"

"No. My grandmother was Cynthia Warfield of Carroll."

The name meant nothing to Evelyn. It would have meant much to Nancy Brooks.

"How did you happen to come here? I don't see how any one could choose to come."

"My mother died--and there was no one but my Great-uncle Rodman Warfield.

I had to get something to do--so I came here, and Uncle Rod went to live with a married cousin."

Evelyn had perched herself on the post of Anne's bed and was mending the flounce. Although she was not near the lamp, she gave an effect of gathering to her all the light of the room. She was wrapped in a robe of rose-color, a strange garment with fur to set it off, and of enormous fullness. It spread about her and billowed out until it almost hid the little bed and the child upon it.

Beside her, Anne in her blue serge felt clumsy and common. She knew that she ought not to feel that way, but she did. She would have told her scholars that it was not clothes that made the man, or dress the woman.

But then she told her scholars many things that were right and good. She tried herself to be as right and good as her theories. But it was not always possible. It was not possible at this moment.

"What brought you here?" Eve persisted.

"I teach school. I came in September."

"What do you teach?"

"Everything. We are not graded."

"I hope you teach them to be honest with themselves."

"I am not sure that I know what you mean?"

"Don't let them pretend to be something that they are not. That's why so many people fail. They reach too high, and fall. That's what Nancy Brooks is doing to Richard. She is making him reach too high."

She laughed as she bent above her needle. "I fancy you are not interested in that. But I can't think of anything but--the waste of it. I hope you will all be so healthy that you won't need him, and then he will have to come back to New York."

"I don't see how anybody could leave New York. Not to come down here."

Anne drew a quick breath.

Eve spoke carelessly: "Oh, well, I suppose it isn't so bad here for a woman, but for a man--a man needs big s.p.a.ces. Richard will be cramped--he'll shrink to the measure of all this--narrowness." She had finished her flounce, and she rose and gave Anne the needle. "In the morning, if the weather is good, we are to ride to Crossroads. Is your school very far away?"

"It is opposite Crossroads. Mrs. Brooks' father built it."

Anne spoke stiffly. She had felt the sting of Eve's indifference, and she was furious with herself for her consciousness of Eve's clothes, of her rings--of the gold comb in her hair.

When her visitor had gone, Anne took down her own hair, and flung it up into a soft knot on the top of her head. Swept back thus, her face seemed to bloom into sudden beauty. She slipped the blue dress from her shoulders and saw the long slim line of her neck and the whiteness of her skin.

The fire had died down in the little round stove. The room was cold. She thought of Eve's rose-color, and of the warmth of her furs.

Bravely, however, she hummed the tune to which the others had danced. She lifted her feet in time. Her shoes were heavy, and she took them off. She tried to get the rhythm, the lightness, the grace of movement. But these things must be taught, and she had no one to teach her.

When at last she crept into bed beside the sleeping Peggy, she was chilled to the bone, and she was crying.

Peggy stirred and murmured.

Soothing the child, Anne told herself fiercely that she was a goose to be upset because Eve Chesley had rings and wore rose-color. Why, she was no better than Diogenes, who had fumed and fussed because Toby had taken his straw in the stable.

But her philosophy failed to bring peace of mind. For a long time she lay awake, working it out. At last she decided, wearily, that she had wept because she really didn't know any of the worth-while things. She didn't know any of the young things and the gay things. She didn't know how to dance or to talk to men like Richard Brooks. The only things that she knew in the whole wide world were--books!

CHAPTER III

_In Which the Crown Prince Enters Upon His Own._

IT developed that the name of the young man with the eye-gla.s.ses was Geoffrey Fox. Mrs. Bower told Anne at the breakfast table, as the two women sat alone.

"He is writing a book, and he wants to stay."

"The little dark man?"

"I shouldn't call him little. He is thin, but he is as tall as Richard Brooks."

"Is he?" To Anne it had seemed as if Richard had towered above her like a young giant. She had scarcely noticed the young man with the eye-gla.s.ses.

He had melted into the background of old gentlemen; had become, as it were, a part of a composite instead of a single personality.

But to be writing a book!

"What kind of a book, Mrs. Bower?"

"I don't know. He didn't say. I am going to give him the front room in the south wing; then he will have a view of the river."

When Anne met the dark young man in the hall an hour later, she discovered that he had keen eyes and a mocking smile.

He stopped her. "Do we have to be introduced? I am going to stay here.