The Portion of Labor. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old colored couple had lived in her family since she was born, and would have been silent had she stolen a whole family of children. Ellen caught a glimpse of a bent, dark figure at one end of the pink-house as they entered; he glanced up at her with no appearance of surprise, only a broad, welcoming expansion of his whole face, which caused her to shrink; then he shuffled out in response to an order of his mistress.
Ellen stared at the pinks, swarming as airily as butterflies in motley tints of palest rose to deepest carmine over the blue-green jungle of their stems; she sniffed the warm, moist, perfumed atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom, then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia led her into the rose-house, then into one where the grapes hung low overhead and the air was as sweet and strong as wine, but even there Ellen wanted her mother.
But it was not until the next morning when she was eating her breakfast that the climax came. Then the door-bell rang, and presently Cynthia was summoned into another room. She kissed Ellen, and bade her go on with her breakfast and she would return shortly; but before she had quite left the room a man stood unexpectedly in the door-way, a man who looked younger than Cynthia. He had a fair mustache, a high forehead scowling over near-sighted blue eyes, and stood with a careless slouch of shoulders in a gray coat.
“Good-morning,” he began. Then he stopped short when he saw Ellen in her tall chair staring shyly around at him through her soft golden mist of hair. “What child is that?” he demanded; but Cynthia with a sharp cry sprang to him, and fairly pulled him out of the room, and closed the door.
Then Ellen heard voices rising higher and higher, and Cynthia say, in a voice of shrill passion: “I cannot, Lyman. I cannot give her up. You don't know what I have suffered since George married and took little Robert away. I can't let this child go.”
Then came the man's voice, hoarse with excitement: “But, Cynthia, you must; you are mad. Think what this means. Why, if people know what you have done, kept this child, while all this search has been going on, and made no effort to find out who she was—”
“I did ask her, and she would not tell me,” Cynthia said, miserably.
“Good Lord! what of that? That is nothing but a subterfuge. You must have seen in the papers—”
“I have not looked at a paper since she came.”
“Of course you have not. You were afraid to. Why, good God! Cynthia Lennox, I don't know but you will stand in danger of lynching if people ever find this out, that you have taken in this child and kept her in this way—I don't know what people will do.”
Ellen waited for no more; she rose softly, she gathered up her great doll which sat in a little chair near by, she gathered up her pink-and-gold cup which had been given her, and the pinks which had been brought from the hot-house the day before, which Cynthia had arranged in a vase beside her plate, then she stole very softly out of the side door, and out of the house, and ran down the street as fast as her little feet could carry her.
Chapter V
That morning, after the street in front of Lloyd's factory had been cleared of the flocking employés with their little dinner-boxes, and the great broadside of the front windows had been set with faces of the workers, a distracted figure came past. A young fellow at a window of the cutting-room noticed her first. “Look at that, Jim Tenny,” said he, with a shove of an elbow towards his next neighbor.
“Get out, will ye?” growled Jim Tenny, but he looked.
Then three girls from the stitching-room came crowding up behind with furtively tender pressings of round arms against the shoulders of the young men. “We come in here to see if that was Eva Loud,” said one, a sharp-faced, alert girl, not pretty, but a favorite among the male employés, to the constant wonder of the other girls.
“Yes, it's her fast enough,” rejoined another, a sweet-faced blonde with an exaggeratedly fashionable coiffure and a noticeable smartness in the tie of her neck-ribbon and the set of her cotton waist. “Just look at the poor thing's hair. Only see how frowsly it is, and she has come out without her hat.”
“Well, I don't wonder,” said the third girl, who was elderly and whose complexion was tanned and weather-beaten almost to the color of the leather upon which she worked. Yet through this seamed and discolored face, with thin grayish hair drawn back tightly from the temples, one could discern, as through a transparent mask, a past prettiness and an exceeding gentleness and faithfulness. “If my sister's little Helen was to be lost I shouldn't know whether my hat was on or not,” said she. “I believe I should go raving mad.”
“You wouldn't have to slave as you have done supportin' it ever since your sister's husband died,” said the pretty girl. “Only look how Eva's waist bags in the back and she 'ain't got any belt on. I wouldn't come out lookin' so.”
“I should die if I didn't have something to work for. That's the difference between being a worker and a slave,” said the other girl, simply. “Poor Eva!”
“Well, it was a pretty young one,” said the first girl.
“Looks to me as if Eva Loud's skirt was comin' off,” said the pretty girl. She pressed close to Jim Tenny with a familiar air of proprietorship as she spoke, but the young man did not seem to heed her. He was looking over his bench at the figure on the street below, and his heavy black eyebrows were scowling, and his mouth set.
Jim Tenny was handsome after a swarthy and grimy fashion, for the tint of the leather seemed to have become absorbed into his skin. His black mustache bristled roughly, but his face was freer than usual from his black beard-stubble, because the day before had been Sunday and he had shaved. His black right hand with its squat discolored nails grasped his cutting-knife with a hard clutch, his left held the piece of leather firmly in place, while he stared out with that angry and anxious scowl at Eva, who had paused on the street below, and was staring up at the windows, as if she meditated a wild search in the factory for the lost child. There was a curious likeness between the two faces; people had been accustomed to say that Eva Loud and her gentleman looked more like brother and sister than a courting couple, and there was, moreover, a curious spirit of comradeship between the two. It asserted itself now with the young man, in opposition to the more purely sexual attraction of the pretty girl who was leaning against him, and for whom he had deserted Eva.
After all, friendship and good comradeship are a steadier force than love, if not as overwhelming, and it may be that tortoise of the emotions which outruns the hare.
“Well, for my part, I think a good deal more of Eva Loud than if she had come out all frizzed and ruffled—shows her heart is in the right place,” said the man who had spoken first. He spoke with a guttural drawl, and kept on with his work, but there was a meaning in his words for the pretty girl, who had coquetted with him before taking up with Jim Tenny.
“That is so,” said another man at Jim Tenny's right. “She is right to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child.” This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried, slurring intonations of the other men. He had been taught the language by a philanthropic young lady, a college graduate, in whose father's family he had lived when he first came to America, and in consequence he spoke like a gentleman and had some considerable difficulty in understanding his companions.
“Eva Loud has had a damned hard time, take it all together,” spoke out another man, looking over is bench at the girl on the street. He was small and thin and wiry, a mass of brown-coated muscles under his loose-hanging gingham shirt. He plied feverishly his cutting-knife with his lean, hairy hands as he spoke. He was accounted one of the best and swiftest cutters in Lloyd's, and he worked unceasingly, for he had an invalid wife and four children to support. Now and then he had to stop