The Portion of Labor Part 20

"Can uncle sew?" asked little Amabel, suddenly, from her corner, in a tone big with wonder.

Eva and the others chuckled, but Mrs. Zelotes eyed the child severely. "Little girls shouldn't ask silly questions," said she.

Andrew pa.s.sed his hand with a rough caress over the small flaxen head. "Uncle Andrew can't sew anything but shoes," said he.

Little Amabel's question had aroused in Mrs. Zelotes a carping spirit even against Ellen. Presently she turned to her. "I heard something about you," said she. "I want to know if it is true. I heard that you were walking home from school with that Joy boy one day last week." Ellen looked at her grandmother without flinching, though the pink was over her face and neck.

"Yes'm, I did," said she.

"Well, I think it's about time it was put a stop to," said Mrs.

Zelotes. "That Joy boy!"

Then f.a.n.n.y lost her temper. "I can manage my own daughter, Grandma Brewster," said she, "and I'll thank you to attend to your own affairs."

"You don't seem to know enough to manage her," retorted Mrs.

Zelotes, "if you let her go traipsin' round with that Joy boy."

The warfare waged high for a time. Andrew withdrew to the kitchen.

Ellen took little Amabel up in her own chamber and showed her her beautiful doll, which looked not a day older, so carefully had she been cherished, than when she first had her. Ellen felt both resentment and shame, and also a fierce dawning of partisans.h.i.+p towards Granville Joy. "Why should my grandmother speak of him so scornfully?" she asked herself. "He is a real good boy."

That night was very cold, a night full of fierce white glitter of frost and moonlight, and raging with a turbulence of winds. Ellen lay awake listening to them. Presently between the whistle of the wind she heard another, a familiar pipe from a boyish throat. She sprang out of bed and peeped from her window, and there was a dark, slight figure out in the yard, and he was looking up at her window, whistling. Shame, and mirth, and also exultation, which overpowered them both, stirred within the child's breast. She had read of things like this. Here was her boy lover coming out this bitter night just for the sake of looking up at her window. She adored him for it.

Then she heard a window raised with a violent rasp across the yard, and saw her grandmother's night-capped head thrust forth. She heard her shrill, imperious voice call out quite distinctly, "Boy, who be you?"

The lovelorn whistler ceased his pipe, and evidently, had he consulted his own discretion, would have shown a pair of flying heels, but he walked bravely up to the window and the night-capped head and replied. Ellen could not hear what he said, but she distinguished plainly enough her grandmother's concluding remarks.

"Go home," cried Mrs. Zelotes; "go home just as fast as you can and go to bed. Go home!" Mrs. Zelotes made a violent shooting motion with her hands and her white head as if he were a cat, and Granville Joy obeyed. However, Ellen heard his brave, retreating whistle far down the road. She went back to bed, and lay awake with a fervor of young love roused into a flame by opposition swelling high in her heart. But the next afternoon, after school, Ellen, to Granville Joy's great bliss and astonishment, insinuated herself, through the crowd of out-going scholars, close to him, and presently, had he not been so incredulous, for he was a modest boy, he would have said it was by no volition of his own that he found himself walking down the street with her. And when they reached his house, which was only half-way to her own, she looked at him with such a wistful surprise as he motioned to leave her that he could not mistake it, and he walked on at her side quite to her own house. Granville Joy was a gentle boy, young for his age, which was a year more than Ellen's.

He had a face as gentle as a girl's, and really beautiful. Women all loved him, and the school-girls raised an admiring treble chorus in his praise whenever his name was spoken. He was saved from effeminacy by nervous impulses which pa.s.sed for sustained manly daring. "He once licked a boy a third bigger than he was, and you needn't call him sissy," one girl said once to a decrying friend.

To-day, as the boy and girl neared Mrs. Zelotes's house, Granville was conscious of an inward shrinking before the remembrance of the terrible old lady. He expected every minute to hear the grating upward slide of the window and that old voice, which had in it a terrible intimidation of feminine will. Granville had a mother as gentle as himself, and a woman with the strength of her own conviction upon her filled him with awe as of something anomalous.

He wondered uneasily what he should do if the old lady were to hail him and call him to an account again, whether it would be a more manly course to face her, or obey, since she was Ellen's grandmother. He kept an uneasy eye upon the house, and presently, when he saw the stern old face at the window, he quailed a little.

But Ellen for the first time in her life took his arm, and the two marched past under the fire of Mrs. Zelotes's gaze. Ellen had retaliated, not n.o.bly, but as naturally under the conditions of her life at that time as the branch of a tree blows east before the west wind.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He found himself walking home from school with her]

Chapter XVI

Ellen, when she graduated, was openly p.r.o.nounced the flower of her cla.s.s. Not a girl equalled her, not a boy surpa.s.sed her. When Ellen came home one night about two months before her graduation, and announced that she was to have the valedictory, such a light of pure joy flashed over her mother's face that she looked ten years younger.

"Well, I guess your father will be pleased enough," she said. She was hard at work, finis.h.i.+ng women's wrappers of cheap cotton. The hood industry had failed some time before, since the hoods had gone out of fas.h.i.+on. The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury.

Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could s.n.a.t.c.h from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it. "That woman is cheating you," he would say, to be met with the argument that she herself was only making ten cents on a wrapper.

Looked at in that light, the wretched profit of the workers did not seem so out of proportion. It was usury in a nutsh.e.l.l, so infinitesimal as almost to escape detection. f.a.n.n.y worked every minute which she could secure on these wrappers--the ungainly, slatternly home-gear of other poor women. There was an air of dejected femininity and slipshod drudgery about every fold of one of them when it was hung up finished. f.a.n.n.y used to keep them on a row of hooks in her bedroom until a dozen were completed, when she carried them to her employer, and Ellen used to look at them with a sense of depression. She imagined worn, patient faces of the sisters of poverty above the limp collars, and poor, veinous hands dangling from the clumsy sleeves.

f.a.n.n.y would never allow Ellen to a.s.sist her in this work, though she begged hard to do so. "Wait till you get out of school," said she.

"You've got enough to do while you are in school."

When Ellen told her about the valedictory, f.a.n.n.y was so overjoyed that she lost sight of her work, and sewed in the sleeves wrong.

"There, only see what you have made me do!" she cried, laughing with delight at her own folly. "Only see, you have made me sew in both these sleeves wrong. You are a great child. Another time you had better keep away with your valedictories till I get my wrapper finished." Ellen looked up from the book which she had taken.

"Let me rip them out for you, mother," she said.

"No, you keep on with your study--it won't take me but a minute. I don't know what your father will say. It is a great honor to be chosen to write the valedictory out of that big cla.s.s. I guess your father will be pleased."

"I hope I can write a good one," said Ellen.

"Well, if you can't, I'd give up my beat," said the mother, looking at her with enthusiasm, and speaking with scornful chiding. "Why don't you go over and tell your grandmother Brewster? She'll be tickled 'most to death."

Ellen had not been gone long when Andrew came home, coming into the yard, bent as if beneath some invisible burden of toil. Just then he had work, but not in Lloyd's. He had grown too old for Lloyd's, and had been discharged long ago.

He had so far been able to conceal from f.a.n.n.y the fact that he had withdrawn all his little savings to invest in that mining stock. The stock had not yet come up, as he had expected. He very seldom had a circular reporting progress nowadays. When he did have one in the post-office his heart used to stand still until he had torn open the envelope and read it. It was uniformly not so hopeful as formerly, while speciously apologetic. Andrew still had faith, although his heart was sick with its long deferring. He could not actually believe that all his savings were gone, sunken out of sight forever in this awful shaft of miscalculation and misfortune. What he dreaded most was that f.a.n.n.y should find out, as she would have to were he long out of employment.

Andrew, when he entered the house on his return from work, had come to open a door into the room where his wife was, with a deprecating and apologetic air. He gained confidence when, after a few minutes, the sore subject had not been broached.

To-night, as usual, when he came into the sitting-room where f.a.n.n.y was sewing it was with a sidelong glance of uneasy deprecation towards her, and an attempt to speak easily, as if he had nothing on his mind.

"Pretty warm day," he began, but his wife cut him short. She faced around towards him beaming, her work--a pink wrapper--slid from her lap to the floor.

"What do you think, Andrew?" she said. "What do you s'pose has happened? Guess." Andrew laughed gratefully, and with the greatest alacrity. Surely this was nothing about mining-stocks, unless, indeed, she had heard, and the stocks had gone up, but that seemed to much like the millennium. He dismissed that from his mind before it entered. He stood before her in his worn clothes. He always wore a collar and a black tie, and his haggard face was carefully shaven.

Andrew was punctiliously neat, on Ellen's account. He was always thinking, suppose he should meet Ellen coming home from school, with some young ladies whose fathers were rich and did not have to work in the shop, how mortified she might feel if he looked shabby and unkempt.

"Guess, Andrew," she said.

"What is it?" said Andrew.

"Oh, you guess."

"I don't see what it can be, f.a.n.n.y."

"Well, Ellen has got the valedictory. What's the matter with you? Be you deaf? Ellen has got the valedictory out of all them girls and boys."

"She has, has she?" said Andrew. He dropped into a chair and looked at his wife. There was something about the intense interchange of confidence of delight between these two faces of father and mother which had almost the unrestraint of lunacy. Andrew's jaw fairly dropped with his smile, which was a silent laugh rather than a smile; his eyes were wild with delight. "She has, has she?" he kept repeating.

"Yes, she has," said f.a.n.n.y. She tossed her head with an incomparable pride; she coughed a little, affected cough. "I s'pose you know what a compliment it is?" said she. "It means that she's smarter than all them boys and girls--the smartest one in her whole cla.s.s."

"Yes, I s'pose it does," said Andrew. "So she has got it! Well!"

"There she comes now," said f.a.n.n.y, "and Grandma Brewster."

Andrew borrowed money to buy a gold watch and chain for a graduating gift for his daughter. He would scarcely have essayed anything quite so magnificent, but f.a.n.n.y innocently tempted him. The two had been sitting in the door in the cool of the evening, one day in June, about two weeks before the graduation, and had just watched Ellen's light muslin skirts flutter out of sight. She had gone down-town to purchase some ribbon for her graduating dress--she and Floretta Vining, who had come over to accompany her. "I feel kind of anxious to have her have something pretty when she graduates," f.a.n.n.y said, speaking as if she were feeling her way into a mind of opposition.

Neither she nor Andrew had ever owned a watch, and the scheme seemed to her breathless with magnificence.

"Yes, she ought to have something pretty," agreed Andrew.

"I don't want her to feel ashamed when she sees the other girls'

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