Nobody's Child

I

ANN

The quietude of winter still lay on the land, the apathetic dun of field and woodland unstirred as yet by the hint of spring that was tipping with eagerness the wings of the birds and, under their brown frost-dulled blanket, was quickening into fresh green the woody stems of arbutus. The mid-morning sun had struggled out of a gray March chill and was setting a-gleam the drops of moisture on trees and grass, drawing little rivulets from the streaks of snow which hid in the corners of the rail-fences and in the hollows of the creek. Winter was reluctantly saying farewell.

The girl, who a mile back had turned in from the old Fox-Ridge Post-Road and had come up through the pastures to the edge of the woodland, looked with smiling understanding at the slow yielding of winter. Another winter added to her sum of seventeen. Or, rather, as youth always looks forward and counts much upon the future, perhaps a joyous spring to be added to her sum of experience.

As she sat, swaying gently to the jerky motion of the creaking buggy, the reins lax in her hands, her eyes from beneath the shadow of her brown hood traveled over the reaches of pasture, the slopes of reddish soil freshly turned for oats, the trails of the snake-fences strangled by brown undergrowth, the twists and curves of the creek that divided the pasture from the upward slopes of grain-land, and, beyond, against the horizon, the red scars and dull patches of scrubby growth that marked the "Mine Banks," the ancient, worked-out, and now overgrown and abandoned iron-ore bed that a hundred and fifty years before had yielded wealth to its owners.

"Spring will make even the Mine Banks lovely," Ann Penniman was thinking.

She had come up now to the woodland, a wide half circle of tall oaks and chestnuts, which, like the bend of a huge bow, touched the Mine Banks in the distance, and behind her reached to the Post-Road. She skirted the woods for a time, the horse straining through sand, a rough road, in the winter rarely traveled, but in summer a possible short cut from the Post-Road to the Penniman farm, which was just beyond the woods.

A short distance ahead, this side of where the creek came out into the open, the road turned and led into the woods, and Ann had almost reached the turn when a streak of red, a fox running swift and low, darted across the road, slid over the corner of pasture that lay between the woods and the creek, reappeared beyond the creek, then sped up the slope of plowed ground, making for the shelter of the Mine Banks.

Ann drew up and waited a moment, until the woods awoke to the deep bay of the hounds as they picked up the scent, followed by the halloo of the huntsmen. The next moment the whole pack swept almost under her horse's nose, over and under and through the rail-fence, across the bit of pasture, checked for a moment or two and casting along the bank of the creek, then were over and off up the plowed slope, after their quarry.

The color came into the girl's cheeks and she sat taut. A bag-fox! If a game fox, he would mix up the hunt in the Mine Banks, and be off to the denser woods and rock-holes above the river, an all day's sport for the Fox-Ridge Hunt Club. The woods rang and rustled now to their approach. Some took the fence, some came out by the road, and one and all cleared the creek and galloped up the opposite slope. Here and there fluttered a woman's dark skirt, a somber note amid the cluster of men in pink.

Ann knew the meaning of it all well. The Hunt Club was just beyond the woods, half a mile or so from the Penniman farm. They had loosed the fox at the edge of the woods, given him his start, then set on the hounds. She looked with tingling wistfulness after the aristocracy of the Ridge, embarked on its Saturday of excitement and pleasure, then with lifted lip at the thin rump of the mare she was driving, and gathered up the reins. The animal had pricked its ears and quivered when the hunt swept over it; it had life enough in it for that, but that was all.

Then with a revulsion of feeling, pity for the beast commingled with self-pity, she let the reins drop. It had been a hard pull of four miles up the muddy Post-Road and through the sand of the Back Road, and the wait here was pleasanter than the return to the farm would be. The hunt had passed, leaving her behind; everything bearing the name of Penniman or belonging to a Penniman was fated to be left behind; why not sit in the sun for a time?

But it seemed she had not seen the last of the hunt, for her ear caught now the gallop of horses, even before she saw them: two horsemen who cleared the fence at the lower end of the pasture with a bird-like lift and dip that brought the light into Ann's eyes, and who now galloped up and by her, headed for the creek, two belated huntsmen come cross-country from the Post-Road and evidently intent upon joining the hunt. Ann recognized the foremost rider first from his horse, a long-necked, clean-limbed sorrel, then from the fleeting glimpse of the man's profile, dark and clear-cut, the face that for months had played with her fancy: Garvin Westmore, the most indefatigable sportsman of the Ridge. The other young man's heavier-jawed and rougher-featured face she did not know. A guest of the club, probably, out from the city for the day.

Then she saw again, with a choke of delight, the light lift and dip of the riders as they cleared the creek – stood up in her ramshackle buggy to see it… Saw one horse go down, pitching his rider over his head, and the other horseman, not Garvin Westmore, go on – wheel when well up the slope and start back; saw that the horse was struggling with nose to the ground, but that the man lay motionless.

II

THREE MEN AND A GIRL

Ann had crossed the creek and reached the prostrate man before the other horseman had time to dismount. She was bending over Garvin Westmore when the other stood over her.

"Hurt?" he asked tersely.

Ann looked up at him, meeting fairly a pair of keen eyes, grayed into coldness by an excitement that his manner did not betray.

"He doesn't move – his eyes are shut – " she answered breathlessly. Her own eyes were dark and dilated, her face a-quiver.

"Wait a minute."

He plunged down into the creek and came up with his cap filled with water, and, kneeling, dashed it over the unconscious man's face – and over Ann's hovering hands as well. "It's probably only a faint. The ground's soft – he's had the breath knocked out of him, that's all."

He appeared to be right, for Garvin Westmore stirred, and, when Ann had wiped the wet from his face, looked at the two with full consciousness; at Ann's frightened face and her companion's questioning eyes.

"He threw me – the damned brute."

"Lucky if you've broken no bones," the other returned. "See if you can stand."

Ann moved aside and he helped Garvin to his feet, watching him critically as he stretched his arms and felt his body. "All right?" he asked.

"I think so."

"You're lucky."

"Lucky, am I – " Garvin said through his teeth. Then his voice rose. "Look – !"

Ann looked, and caught her breath. The horse had at last struggled up and stood quivering, nostrils wide and head bent, nosing the leg that hung limp. He had essayed a step, then stopped, grown suddenly moist. There was something very human in the eyes he lifted to the two men when they came to him, and even under their handling he shifted only a little.

Then they drew back, and their voices came sharply to Ann as she stood with hand pressed to her lips and eyes wide with pity.

"Broken, Garvin – and the shoulder strained – I've seen them like that."

"He went down in that rabbit-hole, Baird!"

"Yep – poor beast."

"What's to be done?" Garvin's voice was strained.

"Nothing – he's done for."

There was silence for a moment and Ann saw that the color had flamed in Garvin's white face. He was suddenly as violently a-quiver as the suffering animal, curiously and tensely excited. He glanced behind him, then to either side, an uncertain look that passed over Ann and his surroundings, unseeing and yet furtive. Then he took a step backward, and the hand that had gone to his hip-pocket was swiftly upflung.

Ann's shriek rang out almost simultaneously with the shot, at one with the leaden fall of the horse and the sharp echo sent back from the Mine Banks and the chattering lift of the birds in the woods. A crow cawed wildly as it rose; all about was the stir of startled and scurrying things.

Baird had whirled to look at Ann, who stood bent over and with arm hiding her face, and his angry exclamation were the first words spoken: "God, Garvin, are you mad? What a thing to do – before her!"

He strode to Ann and touched her shaking shoulder. "Come away," he said with a note of shame. "The idea of his doing such a thing before a girl! His fall must have knocked the sense out of him!"

But Garvin Westmore was almost as quick as he. He also had turned, with brows raised high and eyes wild. Then on the instant his face was swept of expression. He was pale again, collected, even protective when he drew Ann from Baird's touch. "Don't be frightened, Ann," he said softly, with the air of one who knew her well. "I'm sorry. I forgot you were here. I couldn't see the animal suffer – that was all." Then meeting over Ann's head the commingling of disgust and anger and something else, the touch of aversion in Baird's eyes, he continued even more softly, his softness a little husky: "Why should anything that's done for be allowed to go on suffering a minute more than is necessary? That's what I was thinking… Wasn't I right, Ann?"

He addressed the girl, but he was answering Baird's look.

"You looked as if you enjoyed doing it," Baird retorted bluntly.

A flash of expression crossed Garvin Westmore's face, a gleam menacing and dangerous, like the momentary exposure of a dagger. It came and went. "I wanted the beast out of pain – if that is what you mean," he said with hauteur. "Ann knows me better than you do," and he bent over her. "Don't cry, Ann; the horse is better off than any one of us."

He continued to bend his height to her and to talk in low tones, until she consented to look up at him. "I don't see how you could – " she said, in a smothered way. "I – I want to go home – "

"You shall in a minute – but not like this." In her run down to the creek her hood had slipped off, and he tried now to draw it up over her fallen hair. She lifted shaking hands and began hurriedly to coil the dark mass about her head.

Baird watched them curiously. The girl was something more than pretty. The brown cape with hood attached had concealed her, but when she lifted her arms he saw that she was slim and rounded, very perfectly so, and not too tall. Her hair was noticeably black, a dense black, heavy and with a tendency to curl. As she gathered it up, Baird noticed how beautifully it grew about her low forehead – that her features were regular, and that, contrasted with black hair and brows and lashes, her skin was very white, luminously white. She was certainly very young; her cheeks and chin were as softly rounded as a baby's. And Garvin was a particularly good-looking man, of the unmistakably inbred type, tall, slender, dark, with clear-cut features, well-marked brows and fine eyes. His were the Westmore features refined into nervousness by inbreeding, the features of his great-great-grandfather, colonial aristocrat and owner of the Mine Banks.

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.