The Portion of Labor Part 35

"I don't know but you've got to go back to G.o.d, then," said Andrew, soberly, pa.s.sing the biscuits. Miss Higgins took one.

"No, you haven't," said Ellen--"you haven't, because men are free.

You've got to stop before you get to G.o.d. When a man goes wrong, you have got to look and see if he is to blame, if he started himself, or other men have been pushing him into it. It seems to me that other men have been pushing Uncle Jim into it. I don't think factory-owners have any right to discharge a man without a good reason, any more than he has a right to run the shop."

"I don't think so, either," said f.a.n.n.y. "I think Ellen is right."

"I don't know. It is all a puzzle," said Andrew. "Something's wrong somewhere. I don't know whether it's because we are pushed or because we pull. There's no use in your worrying about it, Ellen.

You've got to study your books." Andrew said this with a look of pride at Ellen and sidelong triumph at the dressmaker to see if she rightly understood the magnitude of it all, of the whole situation of making dresses for this wonderful young creature who was going to Va.s.sar College.

"I don't know but this is more important than books," said Ellen.

"Oh, maybe you'll find out something in your books that will settle the whole matter," said Andrew. Ellen was not eating much supper, and that troubled him. Andrew always knew just how much Ellen ate.

"I don't know what Aunt Eva and poor little Amabel will do," said she. Ellen's lip quivered.

"Pa.s.s the cake to Miss Higgins," said f.a.n.n.y, sharply, to Andrew. She gave him a significant wink as she did so, not to talk more about it.

"Try some of that chocolate cake, Miss Higgins."

"Thank you," said Miss Higgins, unexcitedly.

Andrew had his own cause of worry, and finally reverted to it, eating his food with no more conception of the savor than if it were in another man's mouth. He was sorry enough for his wife's sister, and recognized it as an added weight to his own burden, but just at present all he could think of was the question if Miss Higgins would ask for her pay again that night. He had not a dollar in his pocket.

He had been dunned that afternoon by the man who had lent the money to buy Ellen's watch, there were two new dunning letters in his pocket, and now if that keen little dressmaker, who fairly looked to him like a venomous insect, as she sat eating rather voraciously of the chocolate cake, should ask him again for the three dollars due her that night! He would not have cared so much, if it were not for the fact that she would ask him before his wife and Ellen, and the question about the money in the savings-bank, which was a species of nightmare to him, would be sure to come to the front.

Suddenly it struck Andrew that he might run away, that he might slip out after supper, and either go into his mother's house or down the street. He finally decided on the former, since he reasoned, with a pitiful cunning, that if he went down the street he would have to take off his slippers and put on his shoes, and that would at once betray him and lead to the possible arrest of his flight.

So after supper, while Miss Higgins was trying a waist on Ellen, and f.a.n.n.y was clearing the table, Andrew, bareheaded and in his slippers, prepared to carry his plan into execution. He got out without being seen, and hurried around the rear of the house, out of view from the sitting-room windows, resolving on the way that in order to avert the danger of a possible following him to the sanctuary of his mother's house, he had perhaps better slip down into the orchard behind it and see if the porter apples were ripe.

But when, stooping as if beneath some invisible shield, and moving with a low glide of secrecy, he had gained the yard between the two houses, the yard where the three cherry-trees stood, he heard f.a.n.n.y's high, insistent voice calling him, and knew that it was all over. f.a.n.n.y had her head thrust out of her bedroom window. "Andrew!

Andrew!" she called.

Andrew stopped. "What is it?" he asked, in a gruff voice. He felt at that moment savage with her and with fate. He felt like some badgered animal beneath the claws and teeth of petty enemies which were yet sufficient to do him to death. He felt that retreat and defence were alike impossible and inglorious. He was aware of a monstrous impatience with it all, which was fairly blasphemy. "What is it?" he said, and f.a.n.n.y realized that something was wrong.

"Come here, Andrew Brewster," she said, from the bedroom window, and Andrew pressed close to the window through a growth of sweetbrier which rasped his hands and sent up a sweet fragrance in his face.

Andrew tore away the clinging vines angrily.

"Well, what is it?" he said again.

"Don't spoil that bush, Ellen sets a lot by it," said f.a.n.n.y. "What makes you act so, Andrew Brewster?" Then she lowered her voice.

"She wants to know if she can have her pay to-night," she whispered.

"I 'ain't got a cent," replied Andrew, in a dogged, breathless voice.

"You 'ain't been to the bank to-day, then?"

"No, I 'ain't."

f.a.n.n.y still suspected nothing. She was, in fact, angry with the dressmaker for insisting upon her pay in such a fashion. "I never heard of such a thing as her wantin' to be paid every night," she whispered, angrily, "and I'd tell her so, if I wasn't afraid she'd think we couldn't pay her. I'd never have had her; I'd had Miss Patch, if I'd know she'd do such a mean thing, but, as it is, I don't know what to do. I 'ain't got but a dollar and seventy-three cents by me. You 'ain't got enough to make it up?"

"No, I 'ain't."

"Well, all is, I've got to tell her that it ain't convenient for me to pay her to-night, and she shall have it all together to-morrow night, and to-morrow you'll have to go to the bank and take out the money, Andrew. Don't forget it."

"Well," said Andrew.

f.a.n.n.y retreated, and he heard her high voice explaining to Miss Higgins. He tore his way through the clinging sweetbrier bushes and ran with an unsteady, desperate gait down to the orchard behind his mother's home, and flung himself at full length in the dewy gra.s.s under the trees with all the abandon, under stress of fate, of a child.

Chapter XXVIII

Andrew Brewster, lying in the dewy gra.s.s under the apple-trees, giving way for almost the first time since his childhood to impulses which had hitherto, from his New England heredity, stiffened instead of relaxed his muscles of expression, felt as if he were being stung to death by ants. He was naturally a man of broad views, who felt the indignity of coping with such petty odds. "For G.o.d's sake, if I had to be done to death, why couldn't it have been for something?"

he groaned, speaking with his lips close to the earth as if it were a listening ear. "Why need it all have been over so little? It's just the little fight for enough to eat and wear that's getting the better of me that was a man, and able to do a man's work in the world. Now it has come to this! Here I am runnin' away from a woman because she wants me to pay her three dollars, and I am afraid of another woman because--I've been and fooled away a few hundred dollars I had in the savings-bank. I'm afraid--yes, it has come to this. I am afraid, afraid, and I'd run away out of life if I knew where it would fetch me to. I'm afraid of things that ain't worth being afraid of, and it's all over things that's beneath me." There came over Andrew, with his mouth to the moist earth, feeling the breath and the fragrance of it in his nostrils, a realization of the great motherhood of nature, and a contempt for himself which was scorching and scathing before it. He felt that he came from that mighty breast which should produce only sons of might, and was spending his whole life in an ignominy of fruitless climbing up mole-hills. "Why couldn't I have been more?" he asked himself. "Oh, my G.o.d, is it my fault?" He said to himself that if he had not yielded to the universal law and longing of his kind for a home and a family, it might have been better. He asked himself that question which will never be answered with a surety of correctness, whether the advancement of the individual to his furthest compa.s.s is more to the glory of life than the blind following out of the laws of existence and the bringing others into the everlasting problem of advance. Then he thought of Ellen, and a great warmth of conviction came over the loving heart of the man; all his self-contempt vanished. He had her, this child who was above pearls and rubies, he had her, and in her the furthest reach of himself and progression of himself to greater distances than he could ever have accomplished in any other way, and it was a double progress, since it was not only for him, but also for the woman he had married. A great wave of love for f.a.n.n.y came over him. He seemed to see that, after all, it was a shining road by which he had come, and he saw himself upon it like a figure of light. He saw that he lived and could never die. Then, as with a remorseless hurl of a high spirit upon needle-p.r.i.c.ks of petty cares, he thought again of the dressmaker, of the money for Ellen's watch, of the butcher's bill, and the grocer's bills, and the money which he had taken from the bank, and again he cowered beneath and loathed his ign.o.ble burden. He dug his hot head into the gra.s.s. "Oh, my G.o.d! oh, my G.o.d!" he groaned. He fairly sobbed. Then he felt a soft wind of feminine skirts caused by the sudden stoop of some one beside him, and Ellen's voice, shrill with alarm, rang in his ears.

"Father, what is the matter? Father!"

Such was the man's love for the girl that his first thought was for her alarm, and he pushed all his own troubles into the background with a lightning-like motion. He raised himself hastily, and smiled at her with his pitiful, stiff face. "It's nothing at all, Ellen, don't you worry," he said.

But that was not enough to satisfy her. She caught hold of his arm and clung to it. "Father," she said, in a tone which had in it, to his wonder, a firm womanliness--his own daughter seemed to speak to him as if she were his mother--"you are not telling me the truth.

Something is the matter, or you wouldn't do like this."

"No, there's nothin', nothin' at all, dear child," said Andrew. He tried to loosen her little, clinging hand from his arm. "Come, let's go back to the house," he said. "Don't you mind anything about it.

Sometimes father gets discouraged over nothin'."

"It isn't over nothing," said Ellen. "What is it about, father?"

Andrew tried to laugh. "Well, if it isn't over nothin', it's over nothin' in particular," said he; "it's over jest what's happened right along. Sometimes father feels as if he hadn't made as much as he'd ought to out of his life, and he's gettin' older, and he's feelin' kind of discouraged, that's all."

"Over money matters?" said Ellen, looking at him steadily.

"Over nothin'," said her father. "See here, child, father's ashamed that he gave way so, and you found him. Now don't you worry one mite about it--it's nothing at all. Come, let's go back to the house," he said.

Ellen said no more, but she walked up from the field holding tightly to her father's poor, worn hand, and her heart was in a tumult. To behold any convulsion of nature is no light experience, and when it is a storm of the spirit in one beloved the beholder is swept along with it in greater or less measure. Ellen trembled as she walked.

Her father kept looking at her anxiously and remorsefully. Once he reached around his other hand and chucked her playfully under the chin. "Scared most to death, was she?" he asked, with a shamefaced blush.

"I know something is the matter, and I think it would be better for you to tell me, father," replied Ellen, soberly.

"There's nothing to tell, child," said Andrew. "Don't you worry your little head about it." Between his anxiety lest the girl should be troubled, and his intense humiliation that she should have discovered him in such an abandon of grief which was almost like a disclosure of the nakedness of his spirit, he was completely unnerved. Ellen felt him tremble, and heard his voice quiver when he spoke. She felt towards her father something she had never felt before--an impulse of protection. She felt the older and stronger of the two. Her grasp on his hand tightened, she seemed in a measure to be leading him along.

When they reached the yard between the houses Andrew cast an apprehensive glance at the windows. "Has she gone?" he asked.

"Who, the dressmaker?"

"Yes."

"She hadn't when I came out. I saw you come past the house, and I thought you walked as if you didn't feel well, so I thought I would run out and see."

"I was all right," replied Andrew. "Have you got to try on anything more to-night?"