The Portion of Labor. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
steps; she measured her dress skirt every step she took, and she spoke gruff. I said then I knew she was a man dressed up. Ellen was playing out in the yard, and she saw the child as she went out, and I see her stoop and look at her real sharp, and my blood run kind of cold then, and I called Ellen away as quick as I could; and the woman, she turned round and gave me a look that I won't ever forget as long as I live. My belief is that that woman was laying in wait when Ellen was going across the yard home from here last night, and she has got her safe somewhere till a reward is offered. Or maybe she wants to keep her, Ellen is such a beautiful child. You needn't put in your papers that my grandchild run away because of quarrelling in our family, because she didn't. Eva and Fanny don't know what they are talking about, they are so wrought up; and, coming from the family they do, they don't know how to control themselves and show any sense. I feel it as much as they do, but I have been sitting here all the morning; I know I can't do anything to help, and I am working a good deal harder, waiting, than they are, rushing from pillar to post and taking on, and I'm doing more good. I shall be the only one fit to do anything when they find the poor child. I've got blankets warming by the fire, and my tea-kettle on, and I'm going to be the one to depend on when she's brought home.” Mrs. Zelotes gave a glance of defiant faith from the window down the road as she spoke. Then she settled back in her chair and resumed her Bible, and dismissed the tall and forbidding woman whom she had summoned to save the honor of her family resolutely from her conscience. The editors of The Spy and The Observer had a row of ingratiating photographs of little Ellen from three weeks to seven years of age; and their opinions as to the cause of her disappearance, while fully agreeing in all points of sensationalism with those of young Bemis, of The Star, differed in detail.
Young Bemis read about the mysterious kidnapper, and wondered, and the demand for The Star was chiefly among the immediate neighbors of the Brewsters. Both The Observer and The Spy doubled their circulation in one day, and every face on the night cars was hidden behind poor little Ellen's baby countenances and the fairy-story of the witch-woman who had lured her away. Mothers kept their children carefully in-doors that evening, and pulled down curtains, fearful lest She look in the windows and be tempted. Mrs. Zelotes also waylaid both of the Boston reporters, but with results upon which she had not counted. One presented her story and Fanny's and Eva's with impartial justice; the other kept wholly to the latter version, with the addition of a shrewd theory of his own, deduced from the circumstances which had a parallel in actual history, and boldly stated that the child had probably committed suicide on account of family troubles. Poor Fanny and Eva both saw that, when night was falling and Ellen had not been found. Eva rushed out and secured the paper from the newsboy, and the two sisters gasped over the startling column together.
“It's a lie! oh, Fanny, it's a lie!” cried Eva. “She never would; oh, she never would! That little thing, just because she heard you and me scoldin', and you said that to her, that if it wasn't for her you'd go away. She never would.”
“Go away?” sobbed Fanny—“go away? I wouldn't go away from hell if she was there. I would burn; I would hear the clankin' of chains, and groans, and screeches, and devils whisperin' in my ears what I had done wrong, for all eternity, before I'd go where they were playin' harps in heaven, if she was there. I'd like it better, I would. And I'd stay here if I had twenty sisters I didn't get along with, and be happier than I would be anywhere else on earth, if she was here. But she couldn't have done it. She didn't know how. It's awful to put such things into papers.”
Eva jumped up with a fierce gesture, ran to the stove, and crammed the paper in. “There!” said she; “I wish I could serve all the papers in the country the same way. I do, and I'd like to put all the editors in after 'em. I'd like to put 'em in the stove with their own papers for kindlin's.” Suddenly Eva turned with a swish of skirts, and was out of the room and pounding up-stairs, shaking the little house with every step. When she returned she bore over her arm her best dress—a cherished blue silk, ornate with ribbons and cheap lace. “Where's that pattern?” she asked her sister.
“She wouldn't ever do such a thing,” moaned Fanny.
“Where's that pattern?”
“What pattern?” Fanny said, faintly.
“That little dress pattern. Her little dress pattern, the one you cut over my dress for her by.”
“In the bureau drawer in my room. Oh, she wouldn't.”
Eva went into the bedroom, returned with the pattern, got the scissors from Fanny's work-basket, and threw her best silk dress in a rustling heap upon the table.
Fanny stopped moaning and looked at her with wretched wonder. “What be you goin' to do?”
“Do?” cried Eva, fiercely—“do? I'm goin' to cut this dress over for her.”
“You ain't.”
“Yes, I be. If I drove her away from home, scoldin' because you cut over that other old thing of mine for her, I'm goin' to make up for it now. I'm goin' to give her my best blue silk, that I paid a dollar and a half a yard for, and 'ain't worn three times. Yes, I be. She's goin' to have a dress cut out of it, an' she's comin' back to wear it, too. You'll see she is comin' home to wear it.”
Eva cut wildly into the silk with mad slashes of her gleaming shears, while two neighboring women, who had just come into the room, stared aghast, and even Fanny was partly diverted from her sorrow.
“She's crazy,” whispered one of the women, backing away as she spoke.
“Oh, Eva, don't; don't do so,” pleaded Fanny, tremulously.
“I be,” said Eva, and she cut recklessly up the front breadth.
“You ain't cutting it right,” said the other neighbor, who was skilful in such matters, and never fully moved from her own household grooves by any excitement. “If you are a-goin' to cut it at all, you had better cut it right.”
“I don't care how I cut it,” returned Eva, thrusting the woman away. “Oh, I don't care how I cut it; I want to waste it. I will waste it.”
The other neighbor backed entirely out of the room, then turned and fled across the yard, her calico wrapper blowing wildly and lashing about her slender legs, to her own house, the doors of which she locked. Presently the other woman followed her, stepping with the ponderous leisure which results from vastness of body and philosophy of mind. The autumn wind, swirling in impetuous gusts, had little effect upon her broadside of woollen shawl. She had not come out on that raw evening with nothing upon her head. She shook the kitchen door of her friend, and smiled with calm reassurance when it was cautiously set ajar to disclose a wide-eyed and open-mouthed face of terror. “Who is it?”
“It's me. What have you got your door locked for?”
“I think that Eva Loud is raving crazy. I'm afraid of her.”
“Lord! you 'ain't no reason to be 'fraid of her. She ain't crazy. She's only lettin' the birds that fly over your an' my heads settle down to roost. You and me, both of us, if we was situated jest as she is, might think of doin' jest what she's a-doin', but we won't neither of us do it. We'd let our best dresses hang in the closet, safe and sound, while we cut them up in our souls; but Eva, she's different.”
“Well, I don't care. I believe she's crazy, and I'm going to keep my doors locked. How do you know she hasn't killed Ellen and put her in the well?”
“Stuff! Now you're lettin' your birds roost, Hattie Monroe.”
“I read something that wasn't any worse than that in the paper the other day. I should think they would look in the well. Have Mrs. Jones and Miss Cross gone home?”
“No; they are over there. There's poor Andrew coming now; I wonder if he has heard anything?”
Both women eyed hesitatingly poor Andrew Brewster's dejected figure creeping up the road in the dark.
“You holler and ask him,” said the woman in the door.
“I hate to, for I know by his looks he 'ain't heard anything of her. I know he's jest