pretty dancing shadows. Harrie, all alone, turned her face weakly and
smiled.
Well, they made no fuss about it, after all. Her husband came and stood
beside her; a cricket on which one of the baby's dresses had been
thrown, lay between them; it seemed, for the moment, as if he dared not
cross the tiny barrier. Something of that old fancy about the lights
upon the altar may have crossed his thought.
"So Miss Dallas has fairly gone, Harrie," said he, pleasantly, after a
pause.
"Yes. She has been very kind to the children while I have been sick."
"Very."
"You must miss her," said poor Harrie, trembling; she was very weak yet.
The Doctor knocked away the cricket, folded his wife's two shadowy
hands into his own, and said:--
"Harrie we have no strength to waste, either of us, upon a scene; but I
am sorry, and I love you."
She broke all down at that, and, dear me! they almost had a scene in
spite of themselves. For O, she had always known what a little goose she
was; and Pauline never meant any harm, and how handsome she was, you
know! only _she_ didn't have three babies to look after, nor a snubbed
nose either, and the sachet powder was only American, and the very
servants knew, and, O Myron! she _had_ wanted to be dead so long, and
then--
"Harrie!" said the Doctor, at his wit's end, "this will never do in the
world. I believe--I declare!--Miss Hannah!--I believe I must send you to
bed."
"And then I'm SUCH a little skeleton!" finished Harrie, royally, with a
great gulp.
Dr. Sharpe gathered the little skeleton all into a heap in his arms,--it
was a very funny heap, by the way, but that doesn't matter,--and to the
best of my knowledge and belief he cried just about as hard as she did.
The Tenth of January.
The city of Lawrence is unique in its way.
For simooms that scorch you and tempests that freeze; for sand-heaps
and sand-hillocks and sand-roads; for men digging sand, for women
shaking off sand, for minute boys crawling in sand; for sand in the
church-slips and the gingerbread-windows, for sand in your eyes, your
nose, your mouth, down your neck? up your sleeves, under your _chignon_,
down your throat; for unexpected corners where tornadoes lie in wait;
for "bleak, uncomforted" sidewalks, where they chase you, dog you,
confront you, strangle you, twist you, blind you, turn your umbrella
wrong side out; for "dimmykhrats" and bad ice-cream; for unutterable
circus-bills and religious tea-parties; for uncleared ruins, and mills
that spring up in a night; for jaded faces and busy feet; for an air of
youth and incompleteness at which you laugh, and a consciousness of
growth and greatness which you respect,--it--
I believe, when I commenced that sentence, I intended to say that it
would be difficult to find Lawrence's equal.
Of the twenty-five thousand souls who inhabit that city, ten thousand
are operatives in the factories. Of these ten thousand two thirds are
girls.
These pages are written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I
linger over them as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well;
half sadly, half gladly,--more gladly than sadly,--but hushed.
The time to see Lawrence is when the mills open or close. So languidly
the dull-colored, inexpectant crowd wind in! So briskly they come
bounding out! Factory faces have a look of their own,--
not only their
common dinginess, and a general air of being in a hurry to find the
wash-bowl, but an appearance of restlessness,--often of envious
restlessness, not habitual in most departments of
"healthy labor." Watch
them closely: you can read their histories at a venture.
A widow this,
in the dusty black, with she can scarcely remember how many mouths to
feed at home. Worse than widowed that one: she has put her baby out to
board,--and humane people know what that means,--to keep the little
thing beyond its besotted father's reach. There is a group who have
"just come over." A child's face here, old before its time. That
girl--she climbs five flights of stairs twice a day--
will climb no more
stairs for herself or another by the time the clover-leaves are green.
"The best thing about one's grave is that it will be level," she was
heard once to say. Somebody muses a little here,--she is to be married
this winter. There is a face just behind her whose fixed eyes repel and
attract you; there may be more love than guilt in them, more despair
than either.
Had you stood in some unobserved corner of Essex Street, at four o'clock
one Saturday afternoon towards the last of November, 1859, watching the
impatient stream pour out of the Pemberton Mill, eager with a saddening
eagerness for its few holiday hours, you would have observed one girl
who did not bound.
She was slightly built, and undersized; her neck and shoulders were
closely muffled, though the day was mild; she wore a faded scarlet hood
which heightened the pallor of what must at best have been a pallid
face. It was a sickly face, shaded off with purple shadows, but with a
certain wiry nervous strength about the muscles of the mouth and chin:
it would have been a womanly, pleasant mouth, had it not been crossed by
a white scar, which attracted more of one's attention than either the
womanliness or pleasantness. Her eyes had light long lashes, and shone
through them steadily.
You would have noticed as well, had you been used to analyzing crowds,
another face,--the two were side by side,--dimpled with pink and white
flushes, and framed with bright black hair. One would laugh at this girl
and love her, scold her and pity her, caress her and pray for her,--then
forget her perhaps.
The girls from behind called after her: "Del! Del Ivory!
look over
there!"
Pretty Del turned her head. She had just flung a smile at a young clerk
who was petting his mustache in a shop-window, and the smile lingered.
One of the factory boys was walking alone across the Common in his
factory clothes.
"Why, there's Dick! Sene, do you see?"
Sene's scarred mouth moved slightly, but she made no reply. She had seen
him five minutes ago.
One never knows exactly whether to laugh or cry over them, catching
their chatter as they file past the show-windows of the long, showy
street.
"Look a' that pink silk with the figures on it!"
"I've seen them as is betther nor that in the ould counthree.--Patsy
Malorrn, let alon' hangin' onto the shawl of me!"
"That's Mary Foster getting out of that carriage with the two white
horses,--she that lives in the brown house with the cupilo."
"Look at her dress trailin' after her. I'd like my dresses trailin'
after me."
"Well, may they be good,--these rich folks!"
"That's so. I'd be good if I was rich; wouldn't you, Moll?"
"You'd keep growing wilder than ever, if you went to hell, Meg Match:
yes you would, because my teacher said so."
"So, then, he wouldn't marry her, after all; and she--"
"Going to the circus to-night, Bess?"
"I can't help crying, Jenny. You don't _know_ how my head aches! It
aches, and it aches, and it seems as if it would never stop aching. I
wish--I wish I was dead, Jenny!"
They separated at last, going each her own way,--pretty Del Ivory to
her boarding-place by the canal, her companion walking home alone.
This girl, Asenath Martyn, when left to herself, fell into a contented
dream not common to girls who have reached her age,--
especially girls
who have seen the phases of life which she had seen. Yet few of the
faces in the streets that led her home were more gravely lined. She
puzzled one at the first glance, and at the second. An artist, meeting
her musing on a canal-bridge one day, went home and painted a May-flower
budding in February.
It was a damp, unwholesome place, the street in which she lived, cut
short by a broken fence, a sudden steep, and the water; filled with
children,--they ran from the gutters after her, as she passed,--and
filled to the brim; it tipped now and then, like an over-full
soup-plate, and spilled out two or three through the break in the fence.
Down in the corner, sharp upon the water, the east-winds broke about a
little yellow house, where no children played; an old man's face watched
at a window, and a nasturtium-vine crawled in the garden. The broken
panes of glass about the place were well mended, and a clever little
gate, extemporized from a wild grape-vine, swung at the entrance. It
was not an old man's work.
Asenath went in with expectant eyes; they took in the room at a glance,
and fell.
"Dick hasn't come, father?"
"Come and gone child; didn't want any supper, he said.
Your 're an hour
before time, Senath."
"Yes. Didn't want any supper, you say? I don't see why not."
"No more do I, but it's none of our concern as I knows on; very like the
pickles hurt him for dinner; Dick never had an o'er-strong stomach, as
you might say. But you don't tell me how it m' happen you're let out at
four o'clock, Senath," half complaining.
"O, something broke in the machinery, father; you know you wouldn't
understand if I told you what."
He looked up from his bench,--he cobbled shoes there in the corner on
his strongest days,--and after her as she turned quickly away and up
stairs to change her dress. She was never exactly cross with her father;
but her words rang impatiently sometimes.
She came down presently, transformed, as only factory-girls are
transformed, by the simple little toilet she had been making; her thin,
soft hair knotted smoothly, the tips of her fingers rosy from the water,
her pale neck well toned by her gray stuff dress and cape;--Asenath
always wore a cape: there was one of crimson flannel, with a hood, that
she had meant to wear to-night; she had thought about it coming home
from the mill; she was apt to wear it on Saturdays and Sundays; Dick had
more time at home. Going up stairs to-night, she had thrown it away into
a drawer, and shut the drawer with a snap; then opened it softly, and
cried a little; but she had not taken it out.
As she moved silently about the room, setting the supper-table for two,
crossing and recrossing the broad belt of sunlight that fell upon the
floor, it was easy to read the sad story of the little hooded capes.
They might have been graceful shoulders. The hand which had scarred her
face had rounded and bent them,--her own mother's hand.
Of a bottle always on the shelf; of brutal scowls where smiles should
be; of days when she wandered dinnerless and supperless in the streets
through loathing of her home; of nights when she sat out in the
snow-drifts through terror of her home; of a broken jug one day, a blow,
a fall, then numbness, and the silence of the grave,--
she had her
distant memories; of waking on a sunny afternoon, in bed, with a little
cracked glass upon the opposite wall; of creeping out and up to it in
her night-dress; of the ghastly twisted thing that looked back at her.
Through the open window she heard the children laughing and leaping in
the sweet summer air. She crawled into bed and shut her eyes. She
remembered stealing out at last, after many days, to the grocery round
the corner for a pound of coffee. "Humpback! humpback!"
cried the
children,--the very children who could leap and laugh.
One day she and little Del Ivory made mud-houses after school.
"I'm going to have a house of my own, when I'm grown up," said pretty
Del; "I shall have a red carpet and some curtains; my husband will buy
me a piano."
"So will mine, I guess," said Sene, simply.
"_Yours!"_ Del shook back her curls; "who do you suppose would ever
marry _you_?"
One night there was a knocking at the door, and a hideous, sodden thing
borne in upon a plank. The crowded street, tired of tipping out little
children, had tipped her mother staggering through the broken fence. At
the funeral she heard some one say, "How glad Sene must be!"
Since that, life had meant three things,--her father, the mills, and
Richard Cross.
"You're a bit put out that the young fellow didn't stay to supper,--eh,
Senath?" the old man said, laying down his boot.
"Put out! Why should I be? His time is his own. It's likely to be the
Union that took him out,--such a fine day for the Union!
I'm sure I
never expected him to go to walk with me _every_
Saturday afternoon. I'm
not a fool to tie him up to the notions of a crippled girl. Supper is
ready, father."
But her voice rasped bitterly. Life's pleasures were so new and late
and important to her, poor thing! It went hard to miss the least of
them. Very happy people will not understand exactly how hard.
Old Martyn took off his leather apron with a troubled face, and, as he
passed his daughter, gently laid his tremulous, stained hand upon her
head. He felt her least uneasiness, it would seem, as a chameleon feels
a cloud upon the sun.
She turned her face softly and kissed him. But she did not smile.
She had planned a little for this holiday supper; saving three
mellow-cheeked Louise Bonnes--expensive pears just then-
-to add to their
bread and molasses. She brought them out from the closet, and watched
her father eat them.
"Going out again Senath?" he asked, seeing that she went for her hat and
shawl, u and not a mouthful have you eaten! Find your old father dull
company hey? Well, well!"
She said something about needing the air; the mill was hot; she should
soon be back; she spoke tenderly and she spoke truly, but she went out
into the windy sunset with her little trouble, and forgot him. The old
man, left alone, sat for a while with his head sunk upon his breast. She
was all he had in the world,--this one little crippled girl that the
world had dealt hardly with. She loved him; but he was not, probably
would never be, to her exactly what she was to him.
Usually he forgot
this. Sometimes he quite understood it, as to-night.
Asenath, with the purpose only of avoiding Dick, and of finding a still
spot where she might think her thoughts undisturbed, wandered away over
the eastern bridge, and down to the river's brink. It was a moody place;
such a one as only apathetic or healthy natures (I wonder if that is
tautology!) can healthfully yield to. The bank sloped steeply; a fringe
of stunted aspens and willows sprang from the frozen sand: it was a
sickening, airless place in summer,--it was damp and desolate now. There
was a sluggish wash of water under foot, and a stretch of dreary flats
behind. Belated locomotives shrieked to each other across the river, and
the wind bore down the current the roar and rage of the dam. Shadows
were beginning to skulk under the huge brown bridge. The silent mills
stared up and down and over the streams with a blank, unvarying stare.
An oriflamme of scarlet burned in the west, flickered dully in the
dirty, curdling water, flared against the windows of the Pemberton,
which quivered and dripped, Asenath thought, as if with blood.
She sat down on a gray stone, wrapped in her gray shawl, curtained about
by the aspens from the eye of passers on the bridge. She had a fancy for
this place when things went ill with her. She had always borne her
troubles alone, but she must be alone to bear them.
She knew very well that she was tired and nervous that afternoon, and
that, if she could reason quietly about this little neglect of Dick's,
it would cease to annoy her. Indeed, why should she be annoyed? Had he
not done everything for her, been everything to her, for two long, sweet
years? She dropped her head with a shy smile. She was never tired of
living over these two years. She took positive pleasure in recalling the
wretchedness in which they found her, for the sake of their dear relief.
Many a time, sitting with her happy face hidden in his arms, she had
laughed softly, to remember the day on which he came to her. It was at
twilight, and she was tired. Her reels had troubled her all the
afternoon; the overseer was cross; the day was hot and long. Somebody on
the way home had said in passing her: "Look at that girl! I'd kill
myself if I looked like that": it was in a whisper, but she heard it.
All life looked hot and long; the reels would always be out of order;
the overseer would never be kind. Her temples would always throb, and
her back would ache. People would always say, "Look at that girl!"
"Can you direct me to--". She looked up; she had been sitting on the
doorstep with her face in her hands. Dick stood there with his cap off.
He forgot that he was to inquire the way to Newbury Street, when he saw
the tears on her shrunken cheeks. Dick could never bear to see a woman
suffer.
"I wouldn't cry," he said simply, sitting down beside her. Telling a
girl not to cry is an infallible recipe for keeping her at it. What
could the child do, but sob as if her heart would break?
Of course he
had the whole story in ten minutes, she his in another ten. It was
common and short enough:--a "Down-East" boy, fresh from his father's
farm, hunting for work and board,--a bit homesick here in the strange,
unhomelike city, it might be, and glad of some one to say so to.
What more natural than that, when her father came out and was pleased
with the lad, there should be no more talk of Newbury Street; that the
little yellow house should become his home; that he should swing the
fantastic gate, and plant the nasturtiums; that his life should grow to
be one with hers and the old man's, his future and theirs unite
unconsciously?
She remembered--it was not exactly pleasant, somehow, to remember it
to-night--just the look of his face when they came into the house that
summer evening, and he for the first time saw what she was, her cape
having fallen off, in the full lamplight. His kindly blue eyes widened
with shocked surprise, and fell; when he raised them, a pity like a
mother's had crept into them; it broadened and brightened as time slid
by, but it never left them.
So you see, after that, life unfolded in a burst of little surprises for
Asenath. If she came home very tired, some one said, "I am sorry." If
she wore a pink ribbon, she heard a whisper, "It suits you." If she
sang a little song, she knew that somebody listened.
"I did not know the world was like this!" cried the girl.
After a time there came a night that he chanced to be out late,--they
had planned an arithmetic lesson together, which he had forgotten,--and
she sat grieving by the kitchen fire.
"You missed me so much then?" he said regretfully, standing with his
hand upon her chair. She was trying to shell some corn; she dropped the
pan, and the yellow kernels rolled away on the floor.
"What should I have if I didn't have you?" she said, and caught her
breath.
The young man paced to the window and back again. The firelight touched
her shoulders, and the sad, white scar.
"You shall have me always, Asenath," he made answer. He took her face
within his hands and kissed it; and so they shelled the corn together,
and nothing more was said about it.
He had spoken this last spring of their marriage; but the girl, like all
girls, was shyly silent, and he had not urged it.
Asenath started from her pleasant dreaming just as the oriflamme was
furling into gray, suddenly conscious that she was not alone. Below her,
quite on the brink of the water, a girl was sitting,--a girl with a
bright plaid shawl, and a nodding red feather in her hat. Her head was
bent, and her hair fell against a profile cut in pink-and-white.
"Del is too pretty to be here alone so late," thought Asenath, smiling
tenderly. Good-natured Del was kind to her in a certain way, and she
rather loved the girl. She rose to speak to her, but concluded, on a
second glance through the aspens, that Miss Ivory was quite able to take
care of herself.
Del was sitting on an old log that jutted into the stream, dabbling in
the water with the tips of her feet. (Had she lived on The Avenue she
could not have been more particular about her shoemaker.) Some one--it
was too dark to see distinctly--stood beside her, his eyes upon her
face. Asenath could hear nothing, but she needed to hear nothing to know
how the young fellow's eyes drank in the coquettish picture. Besides, it
was an old story. Del counted her rejected lovers by the score.
"It's no wonder," she thought in her honest way, standing still to watch
them with a sense of puzzled pleasure much like that with which she
watched the print-windows,--"it's no wonder they love her. I'd love her
if I was a man: so pretty! so pretty! She's just good for nothing, Del
is;--would let the kitchen fire go out, and wouldn't mend the baby's
aprons; but I'd love her all the same; marry her, probably, and be sorry
all my life."
Pretty Del! Poor Del! Asenath wondered whether she wished that she were
like her; she could not quite make out; it would be pleasant to sit on
a log and look like that; it would be more pleasant to be watched as Del
was watched just now; it struck her suddenly that Dick had never looked
like this at her.
The hum of their voices ceased while she stood there with her eyes upon
them; Del turned her head away with a sudden movement, and the young man
left her, apparently without bow or farewell, sprang up the bank at a
bound, and crushed the undergrowth with quick, uneasy strides.
Asenath, with some vague idea that it would not be honorable to see his
face,--poor fellow!--shrank back into the aspens and the shadow.
He towered tall in the twilight as he pa