The Portion of Labor Part 19

"Yes," said she. "It was more on your account than on my own; confession would be good for the soul. The secret has always rankled in my pride. I would much rather defy opinion than fly before it.

But I know that you would mind. However, there was another reason."

"What?"

She hesitated a little and colored, even laughed a little, embarra.s.sed laugh which was foreign to her. "Well, Lyman," said she, finally, "one reason why I did not speak was that I see my way clear to making up to that child and her parents for any wrong which I may have done them by causing them a few hours' anxiety. When she has finished the high-school I mean to send her to college."

Chapter XV

When Ellen was about sixteen, in her second year at the high-school, her own family never looked at her without a slight shock of wonder, as before the unexpected. Her mates, being themselves in the transition state, received her unquestioningly as a fellow-traveller, and colored like themselves with the new lights of the journey. But Ellen's father and mother and grandmother never ceased regarding her with astonishment and admiration and something like alarm. While they regarded Ellen with the utmost pride, they still privately regretted this perfection of bloom which was the forerunner of independence of the parent stalk--at least, Andrew did. Andrew had grown older and more careworn; his mine had not yet paid any dividends, but he had scattering jobs of work, and with his wife's a.s.sistance had managed to rub along, and his secret was still safe.

One day in February there was a half-holiday. Lloyd's was shut for the rest of the day, for his brother in St. Louis was dead, and had been brought to Rowe to be buried, and his funeral was at two o'clock.

"Goin' to the funeral, old man?" one of Andrew's fellow-workmen had asked, jostling him as he went out of the shop at noon. Before Andrew could answer, another voice broke in fiercely. It belonged to Joseph Atkins, who was ghastly that day.

"I ain't goin' to no funerals," he said; "guess they won't shut up shop for mine." Then he coughed. His daughter Abby, who had been working in the factory for some time then, pressed close behind her father, and the expression in her face was an echo of his.

"When I strike, that's what I'm going to strike for--to have the shop shut up the day of my funeral," said she; and the remark had a ghastly flippancy, contradicted by her intense manner. A laugh went around, and a young fellow with a handsome, unshaven face caught her by the arm.

"You'd better strike to have the shop shut up the day you're married," said he; but Abby flung away from him.

"I'll thank you to let me alone, Tom Hardy," she said, with a snap; and the men laughed harder.

Abby was attractive to men in spite of her smallness and leanness and incisiveness of manner. She was called mighty smart and dry, which was the shop synonym for witty, and her favors, possibly because she never granted them, were accounted valuable. Abby Atkins had more admirers than many a girl who was prettier and presumably more winning in every way, and could have married twice to their once. But Abby had no wish for a lover. "I've got all I can do to earn my own living and the living of them that belong to me," said she.

That afternoon Andrew Brewster stayed at home. After dinner Eva Tenny and her little girl came in, and Ellen went down street on an errand.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster was crossing her yard to her son's house when she saw Ellen pa.s.sing, and paused to gaze at her with that superb pride which pertains to self and is yet superior to it. It was the idealized pride of her own youth. When she proceeded again against the February gusts, it was with an unconscious aping of her granddaughter's freedom of gait. Mrs. Zelotes wore an old red cashmere scarf crossed over her bosom; she held up her black skirts in front, and they trailed pointedly in the rear; she also stood well back on her heels, and when she paused in the wind-swept yard presented a curious likeness to an old robin pausing for reconnoitre. f.a.n.n.y and Eva Tenny in the next house saw her coming.

"Look at her holding up her dress in front and letting it drag in the back," said Eva. "It always seemed to me there was somethin'

wrong about any woman that held up her dress in front and let it drag behind."

Eva retained all the coa.r.s.e beauty of her youth, but lines of unalterable hardness were fixed on her forehead and at her mouth corners, and the fierce flush in her cheeks was as set as paint. Her beauty had endured the siege; no guns of mishaps could affect it, but that charm of evanescence which awakens tenderness was gone. Jim Tenny's affection seemed to be waning, and Eva looked at herself in the gla.s.s even when bedecked with tawdry finery, and owned that she did not wonder. She strained up her hair into the latest perkiness of twist, and crimped it, and curled her feathers, and tied her ribbons not as much in hope as in a stern determination to do her part towards the furbishing of her faded star of attraction. "Jim don't act as if he thought so much of me, an' I dun'no' as I wonder," she told her sister.

f.a.n.n.y looked at her critically. "You mean you ain't so good-lookin'

as you used to be?" said she.

Eva nodded.

"Well, if that is all men care for us," said f.a.n.n.y.

"It ain't," said Eva, "only it's the key to it. It's like losin' the key and not bein' able to get in the door in consequence."

"It wa'n't my husband's key," said f.a.n.n.y, with a glance at her own face, faded as to feature and bloom, but intensified as to love and daily duty, like that of a dog sharpened to one faithfulness of existence.

"Andrew ain't Jim," said Eva, shortly.

"I know he ain't," f.a.n.n.y a.s.sented, with emphasis.

"But I wouldn't swap off my husband for a dozen of yours," said Eva.

"Well, I wouldn't swap off mine for a thousand of yours," returned f.a.n.n.y, sharply; and there might have been one of the old-time tussles between the sisters had not Eva's violent, half-bitter sense of humor averted it. She broke into a hard laugh.

"Good Lord," she said, "I dun'no' as I should want a thousand like Jim. Seems to me it would be considerable care."

f.a.n.n.y began to speak, but checked herself. She had heard rumors regarding Jim Tenny of late and had flown fiercely with denial at the woman who told her, and had not repeated them to her sister.

She was thinking how she had heard that Jim had been seen driving in Wenham with Aggie Morse several times lately. Aggie Morse had been Aggie Bemis, Jim's old sweetheart. She had married a well-to-do merchant in Wenham, who died six months before and left her with considerable property. It was her own smart little turn-out in which she had been seen with Jim.

Eva was working in the shop, and Jim had been out of employment for nearly a year, and living on his wife. There was a demand for girls and not for men just then, so Jim loafed. His old mother cared for the house as well as she was able, and Eva did the rest nights and mornings. At first Jim had tried to help about the house-work, but Eva had interfered.

"It ain't a man's work," said she. "Your mother can leave the hard part of it till I get home." Eva used to put the money she earned surrept.i.tiously into her husband's pockets that he might not feel his manly pride injured, but she defeated her own ends by her very solicitude. Jim Tenny began to reason that his wife saw his shame and ignominious helplessness, else she would not have been so anxious to cover it. The stoop of discouragement which Eva used to fear for his shoulders did not come, but, instead, something worse--the defiant set-back of recklessness. He took his wife's earnings and despised himself. Whenever he paid a bill, he was sure the men in the store said, the minute his back was turned, "It's his wife's money that paid for that." He took to loafing on sunny corners, and eying the pa.s.sers-by with the blank impudence of regard of those outside the current of life. When his wife pa.s.sed by on her way from the shop he nodded to her as if she were a stranger, and presently followed her home at a distance. He would not be seen on the street with her if he could avoid it. If by any chance when he was standing on his corner of idleness his little girl came past, he melted away imperceptibly. He could not bear it that the child should see him standing there in that company of futility and openly avowed inadequacy. The child was a keen-eyed, slender little girl, resembling neither father nor mother, but looking rather like her paternal grandmother, who was a fair, attenuated woman, with an intelligence which had sharpened on herself for want of anything more legitimate, and worn her out by the unnatural friction. The little Amabel, for Eva had been romantic in the naming of her child, was an old-fashioned-looking child in spite of Eva's careful decoration of the little figure in the best childish finery which she could muster.

Little Amabel was reading a child's book at another window. When Mrs. Zelotes entered she eyed her with the sharpness and inscrutable conclusions therefrom of a kitten, then turned a leaf in her book.

When Mrs. Zelotes had greeted her daughter-in-law and Eva, she looked with disapproval at Amabel.

"When I was a little girl I should have been punished if I hadn't got up and curtsied and said good-afternoon when company came in,"

she remarked, severely.

Amabel was not a favorite outside of her own family. People used to stare aghast at her unexpected questions and demands delivered in a shrill clarion as from some summit of childish wisdom, and they said she was a queer child. She yielded always to command from utter helplessness, but the why of obedience was strongly alert within her. The child might have been in some subtle and uncanny fashion the offspring of her age and generation instead of her natural parents, she was so unlike either of them, and so much a product of the times, with her meekness and slavishness of weakness and futility, and her unquenchable and unconquerable vitality of dissent.

Ellen adored the little Amabel. Presently, when she returned from her errand down-town, she cried out with delight when she saw her; and the child ran to meet her, and clung to her, with her flaxen head snuggled close to her cheek. Ellen caught the child up, seated herself, and sat cuddling her as she used to cuddle her doll.

"You dear little thing!" she murmured, "you dear little thing! You did come to see Ellen, didn't you?" And the child gazed up in the young girl's face with a rapt expression. Nothing can express the admiration, which is almost as unquestionable as worship, of a very little girl for a big one. Amabel loved her mother with a rather unusual intensity for a child, but Ellen was what she herself would be when she was grown up. Through Ellen her love of self and her ambition budded into blossom. Ellen could do nothing wrong because she did what she herself would do when she was grown. She never questioned Ellen for her reasons.

Mrs. Zelotes kept looking at the two, with pride in Ellen and disapproval of her caresses of the child. "Seems to me you might speak to your own folks as well as to have no eyes for anybody but that child," she said, finally.

"Why, grandma, I spoke to you just a little while ago," returned Ellen. "You know I saw you just a few minutes before I went down-town." Ellen straightened the child on her knees, and began to try to twist her soft, straight flaxen locks into curls. Andrew lounged in from the kitchen and sat down and regarded Ellen fondly.

The girl's cheeks were a splendid color from her walk in the cold wind, her hair around her temples caught the light from the window, and seemed to wreathe her head with a yellow flame. She tossed the child about with lithe young arms, whose every motion suggested reserves of tender strength. Ellen was more beautiful than she had ever been before, and yet something was gone from her face, though only temporarily, since the lines for the vanished meaning was still there. All the introspection and dreaminess and poetry of her face were gone, for the girl was, for the time, overbalanced on the physical side of her life. The joy of existence for itself alone was intoxicating her. The innocent frivolities of her s.e.x had seized her too, and the instincts which had not yet reached her brain nor gone farther than her bounding pulses of youth. "Ellen is getting real fond of dress," f.a.n.n.y often said to Andrew. He only laughed at that.

"Well, pretty birds like pretty feathers, and no wonder," said he.

But he did not laugh when f.a.n.n.y added that Ellen seemed to think more about the boys than she used to. There was scarcely a boy in the high-school who was not Ellen's admirer. It was a curious happening in those days when Ellen was herself in much less degree the stuff of which dreams are made than she had been and would be thereafter, that she was the object of so many. Every morning when she entered the school-room she was reflected in a glorious multiple of ideals in no one could tell how many boyish hearts. Floretta Vining began to imitate her, and kept close to Ellen with supremest diplomacy, that she might thereby catch some of the crumbs of attention which fell from Ellen's full table. Often when some happy boy had secured a short monopoly of Ellen, his rival took up with Floretta, and she was content, being one of those purely feminine things who have no pride when the sweets of life are concerned.

Floretta dressed her hair like Ellen's, and tied her neck-ribbons the same way; she held her head like her, she talked like her, except when the two girls were absolutely alone; then she sometimes relapsed suddenly, to Ellen's bewilderment, into her own ways, and her blue eyes took on an expression as near animosity as her ingratiating politic nature could admit.

Ellen did not affiliate as much with Floretta as with Maria Atkins.

Abby had gone to work in the shop, and so Ellen did not see so much of her. Maria was not as much a favorite with the boys as she had been since they had pa.s.sed and not yet returned to that stage when feminine comradeship satisfies; so Ellen used to confide in her with a surety of sympathy and no contention. Once, when the girls were sleeping together, Ellen made a stupendous revelation to Maria, having first bound her to inviolable secrecy. "I love a boy," said she, holding Maria's little arm tightly.

"I know who," said Maria, with a hushed voice.

"He kissed me once, and then I knew it," said Ellen.

"Well, I guess he loves you," said Maria. Ellen shivered and drew a fluttering sigh of a.s.sent. Then the two girls lay in each other's arms, looking at the moonlight which streamed in through the window.

G.o.d knew in what realms of pure romance, and of pa.s.sion so sublimated by innocence that no tinge of earthliness remained, the two wandered in their dreams.

At last, that afternoon in February, Ellen put down little Amabel and got out her needle-work. She was making a lace neck-tie for her own adornment. She showed it to her grandmother at her mother's command. "It's real pretty," said Mrs. Zelotes. "Ellen takes after the Brewsters; they were always handy with their needles."