Annie Kilburn. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ full of the monument still. “But I might have heard and forgotten it,” she added. “I was very much taken up toward the last before I left Rome.”

      “Well, come to think,” said Bolton; “I don't know's you'd had time to heard. He hain't been here a great while.”

      “Is he—satisfactory?” asked Miss Kilburn, feeling how far from satisfactory the Victory was, and formulating an explanatory apology to the committee in her mind.

      “Oh yes, he's satisfactory enough, as far forth as that goes. He's talented, and he's right up with the times. Yes, he's progressive. I guess they got pretty tired of Mr. Rogers, even before he died; and they kept the supply a-goin' till—all was blue, before they could settle on anybody. In fact they couldn't seem to agree on anybody till Mr. Peck come.”

      Miss Kilburn had got as far, in her tacit interview with the committee, as to have offered to replace at her own expense the Victory with a Volunteer, and she seemed to be listening to Bolton with rapt attention.

      “Well, it's like this,” continued the farmer. “He's progressive in his idees, 'n' at the same time he's spiritual-minded; and so I guess he suits pretty well all round. Of course you can't suit everybody. There's always got to be a dog in the manger, it don't matter where you go. But if anybody was to ask me, I should say Mr. Peck suited. Yes, I don't know but what I should.”

      Miss Kilburn instantaneously closed her transaction with the committee, removed the Victory, and had the Volunteer unveiled with appropriate ceremonies, opened with prayer by the Rev. Mr. Peck.

      “Peck?” she said. “Did you tell me his name was Peck?”

      “Yes, ma'am; Rev. Julius W. Peck. He's from down Penobscotport way, in Maine. I guess he's all right.”

      Miss Kilburn did not reply. Her mind had been taken off the monument for the moment by her dislike for the name of the new minister, and the Victory had seized the opportunity to get back.

      Bolton sighed deeply, and continued in a strain whose diffusiveness at last became perceptible to Miss Kilburn through her own humiliation. “There's some in every community that's bound to complain, I don't care what you do to accommodate 'em; and what I done, I done as much to stop their clack as anything, and give him the right sort of a start off, an' I guess I did. But Mis' Bolton she didn't know but what you'd look at it in the light of a libbutty, and I didn't know but what you would think I no business to done it.”

      He seemed to be addressing a question to her, but she only replied with a dazed frown, and Bolton was obliged to go on.

      “I didn't let him room in your part of the house; that is to say, not sleep there; but I thought, as you was comin' home, and I better be airin' it up some, anyway, I might as well let him set in the old Judge's room. If you think it was more than I had a right to do, I'm willin' to pay for it. Git up!” Bolton turned fully round toward his horses, to hide the workings of emotion in his face, and shook the reins like a desperate man.

      “What are you talking about, Mr. Bolton?” cried Miss Kilburn. “Whom are you talking about?”

      Bolton answered, with a kind of violence, “Mr. Peck; I took him to board, first off.”

      “You took him to board?”

      “Yes. I know it wa'n't just accordin' to the letter o' the law, and the old Judge was always pootty p'tic'lah. But I've took care of the place goin' on twenty years now, and I hain't never had a chick nor a child in it before. The child,” he continued, partly turning his face round again, and beginning to look Miss Kilburn in the eye, “wa'n't one to touch anything, anyway, and we kep' her in our part all the while; Mis' Bolton she couldn't seem to let her out of her sight, she got so fond of her, and she used to follow me round among the hosses like a kitten. I declare, I miss her.”

      Bolton's face, the colour of one of the lean ploughed fields of Hatboro', and deeply furrowed, lighted up with real feeling, which he tried to make go as far in the work of reconciling Miss Kilburn as if it had been factitious.

      “But I don't understand,” she said. “What child are you talking about?”

      “Mr. Peck's.”

      “Was he married?” she asked, with displeasure, she did not know why.

      “Well, yes, he had been,” answered Bolton. “But she'd be'n in the asylum ever since the child was born.”

      “Oh,” said Miss Kilburn, with relief; and she fell back upon the seat from which she had started forward.

      Bolton might easily have taken her tone for that of disgust. He faced round upon her once more. “It was kind of queer, his havin' the child with him, an' takin' most the care of her himself; and so, as I say, Mis' Bolton and me we took him in, as much to stop folks' mouths as anything, till they got kinder used to it. But we didn't take him into your part, as I say; and as I say, I'm willin' to pay you whatever you say for the use of the old Judge's study. I presume that part of it was a libbutty.”

      “It was all perfectly right, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn.

      “His wife died anyway, more than a year ago,” said Bolton, as if the fact completed his atonement to Miss Kilburn, “Git ep! I told him from the start that it had got to be a temporary thing, an' 't I only took him till he could git settled somehow. I guess he means to go to house-keepin', if he can git the right kind of a house-keeper; he wants an old one. If it was a young one, I guess he wouldn't have any great trouble, if he went about it the right way.” Bolton's sarcasm was merely a race sarcasm. He was a very mild man, and his thick-growing eyelashes softened and shadowed his grey eyes, and gave his lean face pathos.

      “You could have let him stay till he had found a suitable place,” said Miss Kilburn.

      “Oh, I wa'n't goin' to do that,” said Bolton. “But I'm 'bliged to you just the same.”

      They came up in sight of the old square house, standing back a good distance from the road, with a broad sweep of grass sloping down before it into a little valley, and rising again to the wall fencing the grounds from the street. The wall was overhung there by a company of magnificent elms, which turned and formed one side of the avenue leading to the house. Their tops met and mixed somewhat incongruously with those of the stiff dark maples which more densely shaded the other side of the lane.

      Bolton drove into their gloom, and then out into the wide sunny space at the side of the house where Miss Kilburn had alighted so often with her father. Bolton's dog, grown now so very old as to be weak-minded, barked crazily at his master, and then, recognising him, broke into an imbecile whimper, and went back and coiled his rheumatism up in the sun on a warm stone before the door. Mrs. Bolton had to step over him as she came out, formally supporting her right elbow with her left hand as she offered the other in greeting to Miss Kilburn, with a look of question at her husband.

      Miss Kilburn intercepted the look, and began to laugh.

      All was unchanged, and all so strange; it seemed as if her father must both get down with her from the carriage and come to meet her from the house. Her glance involuntarily took in the familiar masses and details; the patches of short tough grass mixed with decaying chips and small weeds underfoot, and the spacious June sky overhead; the fine network and blisters of the cracking and warping white paint on the clapboarding, and the hills beyond the bulks of the village houses and trees; СКАЧАТЬ