The Portion of Labor Part 5

Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the feel of her mother's arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of pa.s.sion which she had evoked.

"Give her to me!" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.

The crowd who had followed stood gaping with working faces. The mothers wept over their own children. Eva stood at her sister's elbow, with a hand on one of the child's, which was laid over f.a.n.n.y's shoulder. Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse's neck.

"Give her to me!" said Mrs. Zelotes again. "Give her to me, I say! I am her own grandmother!"

"And I am her own mother!" called out f.a.n.n.y, with a great master-note of love and triumph and defiance. "I'm her own mother, and I've got her, and n.o.body but G.o.d shall take her from me again."

The tears streamed down her cheeks; she kissed the child with pale, parted lips. She was at once pathetic and terrible. She was human love and selfishness incarnate.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly and softened. She turned and went back into her own house. Her gray head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight.

She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a perfume, when f.a.n.n.y, with Eva following, still clinging to the child's little hand over her sister's shoulder, went across the yard to her own house to tell her husband. The others followed, and stood about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest sympathy. One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead to peer in a window of the sitting-room, and when his mother pulled him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes, and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks. He was a young boy, very small and thin for his age. He whispered to his mother and she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home.

Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all-night's search, and he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and despair. Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled.

He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was looking for. He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others, had said: "Look at here, Andrew, old fellow; you'd better go home and rest a bit. We'll look all the harder while you're gone, and maybe she'll be found when you wake up."

"Who will be found?" Andrew asked, with a dazed look. He reeled as if he were drunk.

"Ain't had anything, has he?" one of the men whispered.

"Not a drop to my knowledge."

Andrew's lips trembled perceptibly; his forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder. "Come along with me, old man," he said, and Andrew obeyed.

When f.a.n.n.y and Eva came in with the child, he lay prostrate on the bed, and scarcely seemed to breathe. A great qualm of fear shot over f.a.n.n.y for a second. His father had died of heart-disease.

"Is he--dead?" she gasped to Eva.

"No, of course he ain't," said Eva. "He's asleep; he's wore out.

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, wake up! She's found, Andrew; Ellen's found." But Andrew did not stir.

"He is!" gasped f.a.n.n.y, again.

"No, he ain't. Andrew, Andrew Brewster, wake up, wake up! Ellen's here! She's found!"

f.a.n.n.y put Ellen down, and bent over Andrew and listened. "No, I can hear him breathe," she cried. Then she kissed him, and leaned her mouth close to his ear. "Andrew!" she said, in a voice which Eva and Ellen had never heard before. "Andrew, poor old man, wake up; she's found! Our child is found!"

When Andrew still did not wake, but only stirred, and moaned faintly, f.a.n.n.y lifted Ellen onto the bed. "Kiss poor father, and wake him," she told her.

Ellen, whose blue eyes were big with fright and wonder, whose lips were quivering, and whose little body was vibrating with the strain of her nerves, laid her soft cheek against her father's rough, pale one, and stole a little arm under his neck. "Father, wake up!" she called out in her little, trembling, sweet voice, and that reached Andrew Brewster in the depths of his own physical inertness. He opened his eyes and looked at the child, and the light came into them, and then the sound of his sobbing filled the house and reached the people out in the yard, and an echo arose from them. Gradually the crowd dispersed. Jim Tenny, before he drove away, went to the door and spoke to Eva.

"Anything I can do?" he asked, with a curious, tender roughness. He did not look at her as he spoke.

"No; thank you, Jim," replied Eva.

Suddenly the young man reached out a hand and stroked her rough hair. "Well, take care of yourself, old girl," he said.

Eva went to her sister as Jim went out of the yard. Ellen was in the sitting-room with her father, and f.a.n.n.y had gone to the kitchen to heat some milk for the child, whom she firmly believed to have had nothing to eat during her absence.

"f.a.n.n.y," said Eva.

"Well?" said f.a.n.n.y. "I can't stop; I must get some milk for her; she must be 'most starved."

f.a.n.n.y turned and looked at Eva, who cast down her eyes before her in a very shamefacedness of happiness and contrition.

"Why, what is it?" repeated f.a.n.n.y, staring at her.

"I've got Jim back, I guess, as well as Ellen," said Eva, "and I'm going to be a good woman."

After all the crowd of people outside had gone, the little nervous boy raced into the Brewster yard with a tin cup of chestnuts in his hand. He knocked at the side door, and when f.a.n.n.y opened it he thrust them upon her. "They're for her!" he blurted out, and was gone, racing like a deer.

"Don't you want the cup back?" f.a.n.n.y shouted after him.

"No, ma'am," he called back, and that, although his mother had charged him to bring back the cup or he would get a scolding.

Chapter VII

Ellen had clung fast all the time to her doll, her bunch of pinks, and her cup and saucer; or, rather, she had guarded them jealously.

"Where did you get all these things?" her aunt Eva had asked her, amazedly, when she first caught sight of her, and then had not waited for an answer in her wild excitement of joy at the recovery of the child. The great, smiling wax doll had ridden between Jim and Eva in the buggy, Eva had held the pink cup and saucer with a kind of mechanical carefulness, and Ellen herself clutched the pinks in one little hand, though she crushed them against her aunt's bosom as she sat in her lap. Ellen's grandmother and aunt had glanced at these treasures with momentary astonishment, and so had her mother, but curiosity was in abeyance for both of them for the time; rapture at the sight of the beloved child at whose loss they had suffered such agonies was the one emotion of their souls. But later investigation was to follow.

When Ellen did not seem to care for her hot milk liberally sweetened in her own mug, and griddle-cakes with plenty of syrup, her mother looked at her, and her eyes of love sharpened with inquiry. "Ain't you hungry?" she said. Ellen shook her head. She was sitting at the table in the dining-room, and her father, mother, and aunt were all hovering about her, watching her. Some of the neighbor women were also in the room, staring with a sort of deprecating tenderness of curiosity.

"Do you feel sick?" Ellen's father inquired, anxiously.

"You don't feel sick, do you?" repeated her mother.

Ellen shook her head.

Just then Mrs. Zelotes Brewster came in with her black-and-white-checked shawl pinned around her gaunt old face, which had in it a strange softness and sweetness, which made f.a.n.n.y look at her again, after the first glance, and not know why.

"We've got our blessing back again, mother," said her son Andrew, in a broken voice.

"But she won't eat her breakfast, now mother has gone and cooked it for her, so nice, too," said f.a.n.n.y, in a tone of confidence which she had never before used towards Mrs. Zelotes.

"You don't feel sick, do you, Ellen?" asked her grandmother.

Ellen shook her head. "No, ma'am," said she.

"She says she don't feel sick, and she ain't hungry," Andrew said, anxiously.

"I wonder if she would eat one of my new doughnuts. I've got some real nice ones," said a neighbor--the stout woman from the next house, whose breadth of body seemed to symbolize a corresponding spiritual breadth of motherliness, as she stood there looking at the child who had been lost and was found.

"Don't you want one of Aunty Wetherhed's nice doughnuts?" asked f.a.n.n.y.

"No; I thank you," replied Ellen. Eva started suddenly with an air of mysterious purpose, opened a door, ran down cellar, and returned with a tumbler of jelly, but Ellen shook her head even at that.