The Portion of Labor Part 12

cried Nahum--"before I'd touch a dollar of her money or anything that was bought with her money, her money or any other rich person's. I want what I earn. I don't want a gift with a curse on it. Let her keep her fine things. She and her kind are responsible for all the misery of the poor on the face of the earth."

"Seems to me you're reasonin' in a circle, Nahum," Andrew said, good-humoredly.

"Look here, Andrew, if you're on the side of the rich, why don't you say so?" cried Eva.

"He ain't," returned f.a.n.n.y--"you know better, Eva Loud."

"No, I ain't," declared Andrew. "You all of you know I'm with the cla.s.s I belong to; I ain't a toady to no rich folks; I don't think no more of 'em than you do, and I don't want any favors of 'em--all I want is pay for my honest work, and that's an even swap, and I ain't beholden, but I want to look at things fair and square. I don't want to be carried away because I'm out of work, though, G.o.d knows, it's hard enough."

"I don't know what's goin' to become of us," said Joseph Atkins--then he coughed.

"I don't," Jim Tenny said, bitterly.

"And G.o.d knows I don't," cried Eva, and she sat down in the nearest chair, flung up her hands before her face, and wept.

Then f.a.n.n.y spoke to Ellen, who had been sitting very still and attentive, her eyes growing larger, her cheeks redder with excitement. f.a.n.n.y had often glanced uneasily at her, and wished to send her to bed, but she was in the habit of warming Ellen's little chamber at the head of the stairs by leaving open the sitting-room door for a while before she went to it, and she was afraid of cooling the room too much for Joseph Atkins, and had not ventured to interrupt the conversation. Now, seeing the child's fevered face, she made up her mind. "Come, Ellen, it's your bed-time," she said, and Ellen rose reluctantly, and, kissing her father, she went to her aunt Eva, who caught at her convulsively and kissed her, and sobbed against her cheek. "Oh, oh!" she wailed, "you precious little thing, you precious little thing, I don't know what's goin' to become of us all."

"Don't, Eva," said f.a.n.n.y, sharply; "can't you see she's all wrought up? She hadn't ought to have heard all this talk."

Andrew looked anxiously at his wife, rose, and caught up Ellen in his arms with a hug of fervent and protective love. "Don't you worry, father's darlin'," he whispered. "Don't you worry about anythin' you have heard. Father will always have enough to take care of you with."

Jim Tenny, when Andrew set the child down, caught her up again with a sounding kiss. "Don't you let your big ears ache, you little pitcher," said he, with a gay laugh. "Little doll-babies like you haven't anythin' to worry about if Lloyd's shut down every day in the year."

"They're the very ones whom it concerns," said Nahum Beals, when Ellen and her mother had gone up-stairs.

"Well, I wouldn't have had that little nervous thing hear all this, if I'd thought," Andrew said, anxiously.

Joseph Atkins, whom f.a.n.n.y had stationed in a sheltered corner near the stove when she opened the door, peered around at Andrew.

"Seems as if she was too young to get much sense of it," he remarked. "My Maria, that's her age, wouldn't."

"Ellen hears everything and makes her own sense of it," said Andrew, "and the Lord only knows what she's made of this. I hope she won't fret over it."

"I wish my tongue had been cut off before I said anything before her," cried Eva. "I know just what that child is. She'll find out what a hard world she's in soon enough, anyway, and I don't want to be the one to open her eyes ahead of time."

Ellen went to bed quietly, and her mother did not think she had paid much attention to what had been going on, and said so when she went down-stairs after Ellen had been kissed and tucked in bed and the lamp put out. "I guess she didn't mind much about it, after all,"

she said to Andrew. "I guess the room was pretty warm, and that was what made her cheeks so red."

But Ellen, after her mother left her, turned her little head towards the wall and wept softly, lest some one hear her, but none the less bitterly that she had no right conception of the cause of her grief.

There was over her childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and poverty of the world. She knew naught of the substance behind the shadow, but the darkness terrified her all the more, and she cried and cried as if her heart would break. Then she, with a sudden resolution, born she could not have told of what strange understanding and misunderstanding of what she had heard that evening, slipped out of bed, groped about until she found her cherished doll, sitting in her little chair in the corner. She was accustomed to take the doll to bed with her, and had undressed her for that purpose early in the evening, but she had climbed into bed and left her sitting in the corner.

"Don't you want your dolly?" her mother had asked.

"No, ma'am; I guess I don't want her to-night," Ellen had replied, with a little break in her voice. Now, when she reached the doll, she gathered her up in her little arms, and groped her way with her into the closet. She hugged the doll, and kissed her wildly, then she shook her. "You have been naughty," she whispered--"yes, you have, dreadful naughty. No, don't you talk to me; you have been naughty. What right had you to be livin' with rich folks, and wearin' such fine things, when other children don't have anything.

What right had that little boy that was your mother before I was, and that rich lady that gave you to me? They had ought to be put in the closet, too. G.o.d had ought to put them all in the closet, the way I'm goin' to put you. Don't you say a word; you needn't cry; you've been dreadful naughty."

Ellen set the doll, face to the wall, in the corner of the closet, and left her there. Then she crept back into bed, and lay there crying over her precious baby s.h.i.+vering in her thin night-gown all alone in the dark closet. But she was firm in keeping her there, since, with that strange, involuntary grasp of symbolism which has always been maintained by the baby-fingers of humanity for the satisfying of needs beyond resources and the solving of problems outside knowledge, she had a conviction that she was, in such fas.h.i.+on, righting wrong and punis.h.i.+ng evil. But she wept over the poor doll until she fell asleep.

Chapter X

When Ellen woke the next morning she had a curious feeling, as if she were blinded by the glare of many hitherto unsuspected windows opening into the greatness outside the little world, just large enough to contain them, in which she had dwelt all her life with her parents, her aunt, her grandmother, and her doll. She tried to adjust herself to her old point of view with her simple childish recognition of the most primitive facts as a basis for dreams, but she remembered what Mr. Atkins, who coughed so dreadfully, had said the night before; she remembered what the young man with the bulging forehead, who frightened her terribly, had said; she remembered the gloomy look in her father's face, the misery in her aunt Eva's; and she remembered her doll in the closet--and either everything was different or had a different light upon it. In reality Ellen's evening in the sound and sight of that current of rebellion against the odds of life which has taken the poor off their foot hold of understanding since the beginning of the world had aged her. She had lost something out of her childhood. She dreaded to go down-stairs; she had a feeling of shamefacedness struggling within her; she was afraid that her father and mother would look at her sharply, then look again, and ask her what the matter was, and she would not know what to say. When she went down, and backed about for her mother to fasten her little frock as was her wont, she was careful to keep her face turned away; but f.a.n.n.y caught her up and kissed her in her usual way, and then her aunt Eva sung out to know if she wanted to go on a sleigh-ride, and had she seen the snow; and then her father came in and that look of last night had gone from his face, and Ellen was her old self again until she was alone by herself and remembered.

f.a.n.n.y and Andrew and Eva had agreed to say nothing before the child about the shutting-up of Lloyd's, and their troubles in consequence.

"She heard too much last night," Andrew said; "there's no use in her botherin' her little head with it. I guess that baby won't suffer."

"She's jest the child to fret herself most to pieces thinkin' we were awful poor, and she would starve or somethin'," f.a.n.n.y said.

"Well, she sha'n't be worried if I can help it, no matter what happens to me," Eva said.

After breakfast that morning Eva went to work on a little dress of Ellen's. When f.a.n.n.y told her not to spend her time over that, when she had so much sewing of her own to do, Eva replied with a gay, hard laugh, that she guessed she'd wait and finish her weddin'-fix when she was goin' to be married.

"Eva Loud, you ain't goin' to be so silly as to put off your weddin'," f.a.n.n.y cried out.

"I dunno as I've put it off; I dunno as I want to get married, anyhow," Eva said, still laughing. "I dunno, but I'd rather be old maid aunt to Ellen."

"Eva Loud," cried her sister; "do you know what you are doin'?"

"Pretty well, I reckon," said Eva.

"Do you know that if you put off Jim Tenny, and he not likin' it, ten chances to one Aggie Bemis will get hold of him again?"

"Well," said Eva, "let her. I won't have been the one to drag him into misery, anyhow."

"Well, if you can feel that way," f.a.n.n.y returned, looking at her sister with a sort of mixed admiration and pity.

"I can. I tell you what 'tis, f.a.n.n.y. When I look at Jim, handsome and head up in the air, and think how he'd look all bowed down, hair turnin' gray, and not carin' whether he's shaved and has on a clean s.h.i.+rt or not, 'cause he's got loaded down with debt, and the grocery-man and the butcher after him, and no work, and me and the children draggin' him down, I can bear anything. If another girl wants to do it, she must, though I'd like to kill her when I think of it. I can't do it, because--I think too much of him."

"He might lose his work after he was married, you know."

"Well, I suppose we'd have to run the risk of that; but I'm goin' to start fair or not at all."

"Well, maybe he'll get work," f.a.n.n.y said.

"He won't," said Eva. She began to sing "Nancy Lee" over Ellen's dress.

After breakfast Ellen begged a piece of old brown calico of her mother. "Why, of course you can have it, child," said her mother; "but what on earth do you want it for? I was goin' to put it in the rag-bag."

"I want to make my dolly a dress."

"Why, that ain't fit for your dolly's dress. Only think how queer that beautiful doll would look in a dress made of that. Why, you 'ain't thought anything but silk and satin was good enough for her."

"I'll give you a piece of my new blue silk to make your doll a dress," said Eva.

But Ellen persisted. When the doll came out of her closet of vicarious penance she was arrayed like a very scullion among dolls, in the remnant of the dress in which f.a.n.n.y Brewster had done her house-work all summer.