She looked for a moment silently in his face, then, throwing her arms round his neck, answered:
"And I wonder who wouldn't be glad to wait for your sweet face to the very Day of Judgment, sir, when all must have their own at last."
Therewith she burst into tears, and, turning, led the way to the parlor.
"Here's your Hector, Annie," she said as she opened the door. "Take him, and make much of him, for I'm sure he deserves it."
Then she drew him hastily into the room, and closed the door.
"You see," Hector went on, "I must let you both know that my mother is dead against my having Annie. She thinks, of course, that I might do better; but I know she is only far too good for me, and that I shall be a fortunate as well as happy man the day we come together. She has already proved herself as true a woman as ever God made."
"She is that, sir, as I know and can testify, who have known her longer than anybody else. But sit you down and love each other, and never mind me; I'll not be a burden to you as long as I can lift a hand to earn my own bread. And when I'm old and past work, I'll not be too proud to take whatever you can spare me, and eat it with thankfulness."
So they sat down, and were soon making merry together.
But nothing could reconcile Mrs. Macintosh to the thought of Annie for her daughter-in-law; her pride, indignation, and disappointment were much too great, and they showed themselves the worse that her husband would not say a word against either Annie or Hector, who, he insisted, had behaved very well. He would not go a step beyond confessing that the thing was not altogether as he could have wished, but upheld that it contained ground for satisfaction. In vain he called to his wife's mind the fact that neither she nor he were by birth or early position so immeasurably above Annie. Nothing was of any use to calm her; nothing would persuade her that Annie had not sought their service with the express purpose of carrying away her son. Her behavior proved, indeed, that Annie had done prudently in going at once home to her mother, where presently her late mistress sought and found her; acting royally the part of one righteously outraged in her dearest dignity. Her worst enemy could have desired for her nothing more degrading than to see and hear her. She insisted that Hector should abjure Annie, or leave the house. Hector laid the matter before his father. He encouraged him to humor his mother as much as he could, and linger on, not going every night to see the girl, in the hope that time might work some change. But the time passed in bitter reproaches on the part of the mother, and expostulations on the part of the son, and there appeared no sign of the amelioration the father had hoped for. The fact was that Mrs. Macintosh's natural vulgarity had been so pampered by what she regarded as wealth, and she had grown so puffed up, that her very person seemed to hold the door wide for the devil. For self-importance is perhaps a yet deeper root of all evil than even the love of money. Any deep, honest affection might have made it too hot for the devil, but in her heart there was little room for such a love. She seemed to believe in nothing but mode and fashion, to care for nothing but what she called "the thing." She grew in self-bulk, and gathered more and more weight in her own esteem: she wore yet showier and more vulgar clothes, and actually cultivated a slang that soon bade farewell to delicacy, so that she sank and she sank, and she ate and she drank, until at last she impressed her good-natured clergyman himself as one but a very little above the beasts that perish—if, indeed, she was in any respect equal to a good, conscientious dog! She retained, however, this much respect for her son, for which that son gave her little thanks, that by-and-by she limited herself to ex-pending all her contempt upon Annie, and toward Hector settled into a dogged silence, where upon he, finding it impossible to make any progress toward an understanding where he could not even get a reply, at last gave up the attempt and became as silent as she.
To poor Annie it was a terrible thought that she should thus have come between mother and son; but she remembered that she had read of mothers who without cause had even hated their own flesh, and how much the more might not she who knew her ambitions and designs so utterly opposed to the desires of her son?
And thereupon all at once awoke in Annie the motherhood that lies deepest of all in the heart of every good woman, making her know in herself that, his mother having forsaken him, she had no choice but take him up and be to him henceforward both wife and mother. What remains of my story will perhaps serve to show how far she succeeded in fulfilling this her vow.
At last Mr. Macintosh saw that things could not thus continue, and that he had better accept an offer made him some time before by a London correspondent—to take Hector into his banking-house and give him the opportunity of widening his experience and knowledge of business; and Hector, on his part, was eager to accept the proposal. The salary offered for his services was certainly not a very liberal one, but the chief attraction was that the hours were even shorter than they had been with his father, and would yet enlarge his liberty of an evening. Hector's delights, as we have seen, had always lain in literature, and in that direction the labor in him naturally sought an outlet. Now there seemed a promise of his being able to pursue it yet more devotedly than before: who could tell but he might ere long produce something that people might care to read? Some publisher might even care to put it in print, and people might care to buy it! That would start him in a more genuine way of living, and he might the sooner be able to marry Annie—an aspiration surely legitimate and not too ambitious. He had had a good education, and considered himself to be ably equipped. It was true he had not been to either Oxford or Cambridge, but he had enjoyed the advantages possessed by a Scotch university even over an English one, consisting mainly in the freedom of an unhampered development. Since then he had read largely, and had cultivated naturally wide sympathies. As his vehicle for utterance, we have already seen that he had a great attraction to verse, and had long held and argued that the best training for effective prose was exercise in the fetters of verse—a conviction in which he had lived long enough to confirm himself, and perhaps one or two besides.
His relations with his mother, and consequent impediments to seeing Annie, took away the sting of having to part with her for awhile; and, when he finally closed with the offer, she at once resumed her application for a place in the High School, and was soon accepted, for there were not a few in the town capable of doing justice to her fitness for the office; so that now she had the joy not merely of being able to live with her mother as before, and of contributing to her income, but of knowing at the same time that she lived in a like atmosphere with Hector, where her growth in the knowledge of literature, and her experience in the world of thought, would be gradually fitting her for a companion to him whom she continued to regard as so much above her. Her marked receptivity in the matter of verse, and her intrinsic discrimination of nature and character in it, became in her, at length, as they grew, sustaining forces, enlarging her powers both of sympathy and judgment, so that soon she came to feel, in reading certain of the best writers, as if she and Hector were looking over the same book together, reading and pondering it as one, simultaneously seeing what the writer meant and felt and would have them see and feel. So that, by the new intervention of space, they were in no sense or degree separated, but rather brought by it actually, that is, spiritually, nearer to each other. Also Hector wrote to her regularly on a certain day of every week, and very rarely disappointed her of her expected letter, in which he uttered his thoughts and feelings more freely than he had ever been able to do in conversation. This also was a gain to her, for thus she went on to know him better and better, rising rapidly nearer to his level of intellectual development, while already she was more than his equal in the moral development which lies at the root of all capacity for intellectual growth. So Annie grew, as surely—without irreverence I may say—in favor both with God and man; for at the same time she grew constantly in that loveliest of all things—humanity.