Eva sprang forward and clutched him by the arm
Andrew shook his head, and moved her hand from his arm, and pushed past her roughly.
Fanny stood in his way, and threw her arms around him with a wild, sobbing cry, but he pushed her away also with sternness, and went to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. The four women—his wife, her sister, and the two neighbors—stood staring at him; his face was terrible as he dipped the water from the pail on the sink corner, and the terribleness of it was accentuated by the homely and every-day nature of his action.
They all stared, then Fanny burst out with a loud and desperate wail. “He won't speak to me, he pushes me away, when it is our child that's lost—his as well as mine. He hasn't any feelings for me that bore her. He only thinks of himself. Oh, oh, my own husband pushes me away.”
Andrew went on washing his hands and his ghastly face, and made no reply. He had actually at that moment not the slightest sympathy with his wife. All his other outlets of affection were choked by his concern for his lost child; and as for pity, he kept reflecting, with a cold cruelty, that it served her right—it served both her and her sister right. Had not they driven the child away between them?
He would not eat the supper which the neighbors had prepared for him; finally he went across the yard to his mother's. It seemed to him at that time that his mother could enter into his state of mind better than any one else.
When he went out, Fanny called after him, frantically, “Oh, Andrew, you ain't going to leave me?”
When he made no response, she gazed for a second at his retreating back, then her temper came to her aid. She caught her sister's arm, and pulled her away out of the kitchen. “Come with me,” she said, hoarsely. “I've got nobody but you. My own husband leaves me when he is in such awful trouble, and goes to that old woman, that has always hated me, for comfort.”
The sisters went into Fanny's bedroom, and sat down on the edge of the bed, with their arms round each other. “Oh, Fanny!” sobbed Eva; “poor, poor Fanny! if Andrew turns against you, I will stand by you as long as I live. I will work my fingers to the bone to support you and Ellen. I will never get married. I will stay and work for you and her. And I will never get mad with you again as long as I live, Fanny. Oh, it was all my fault, every bit my fault, but, but—” Eva's voice broke; suddenly she clasped her sister tighter, and then she went down on her knees beside the bed, and hid her tangled head in her lap. “Oh, Fanny,” she sobbed out miserably, “there ain't much excuse for me, but there's a little. When Jim Tenny stopped goin' with me last summer, my heart 'most broke. I don't care if you do know it. That's what made me so much worse than I used to be. Oh, my heart 'most broke, Fanny! He's treated me awful, but I can't get over it; and now little Ellen's gone, and I drove her away!”
Fanny bent over her sister, and pressed her head close to her bosom. “Don't you feel so bad, Eva,” said she. “You wasn't any more to blame than I was, and we'll stand by each other as long as we live.”
“I'll work my fingers to the bone for you and Ellen, and I'll never get married,” said Eva again.
Ellen Brewster was two nights and a day at Cynthia Lennox's, and no one discovered it. All day the searching-parties passed the house. Once Ellen was at the window, and one of the men looked up and saw her, and since his solicitude for the lost child filled his heart with responsiveness towards all childhood, he waved his hand and nodded, and bade another man look at that handsome little kid in the window.
“Guess she's about Ellen's size,” said the other.
“Shouldn't wonder if she looked something like her,” said the first.
“Answers the description well enough,” said the other, “same light hair.”
Both of the men waved their hands to Ellen as they passed on, but she shrank back afraid. That was about ten o'clock of the morning of the day after Miss Lennox had taken her into her house. She had waked at dawn with a full realization of the situation. She remembered perfectly all that had happened. She was a child for whom there were very few half-lights of life, and no spiritual twilights connected her sleeping and waking hours. She opened her eyes and looked around the room, and remembered how she had run away and how her mother was not there, and she remembered the strange lady with that same odd combination of terror and attraction and docility with which she had regarded her the night before. It was a very cold morning, and there was a delicate film of frost on the windows between the sweeps of the muslin curtains, and the morning sun gave it a rosy glow and a crusting sparkle as of diamonds. The sight of the frost had broken poor Andrew Brewster's heart when he saw it, and reflected how it might have meant death to his little tender child out under the blighting fall of it, like a little house-flower.
Ellen lay winking at it when Cynthia Lennox came into the room and leaned over her. The child cast a timid glance up at the tall, slender figure clad in a dressing-gown of quilted crimson silk which dazzled her eyes, accustomed as she was to morning wrappers of dark-blue cotton at ninety-eight cents apiece; and she was filled with undefined apprehensions of splendor and opulence which might overwhelm her simple grasp of life and cause her to lose all her old standards of value.
She had always thought her mother's wrappers very beautiful, but now look at this! Cynthia's face, too, in the dim, rosy light, looked very fair to the child, who had no discernment for those ravages of time of which adults either acquit themselves or by which they measure their own. She did not see the faded color of the woman's face at all; she did not see the spreading marks around mouth and eyes, or the faint parallels of care on the temples; she saw only that which her unbiased childish vision had ever sought in a human face, love and kindness, and tender admiration of herself; and her conviction of its beauty was complete. But at the same time a bitter and piteous jealousy for her mother and home, and all that she had ever loved and believed in, came over her. What right had this strange woman, dressed in a silk dress like that, to be leaning over her in the morning, and looking at her like that—to be leaning over her in the morning instead of her own mother, and looking at her in that way, when she was not her mother? She shrank away towards the other side of the bed with that nestling motion which is the natural one of all young and gentle children even towards vacancy, but suddenly Cynthia was leaning close over her, and she was conscious again of that soft smother of violets, and Cynthia's arms were embracing all her delicate little body with tenderest violence, folding her against the soft red silk over her bosom, and kissing her little, blushing cheeks with the lightest and carefulest kisses, as though she were a butterfly which she feared to harm with her adoring touch.
“Oh, you darling, you precious darling!” whispered Cynthia. “Don't be afraid, darling; don't be afraid, precious; you are very safe; don't be afraid. You shall have such a little, white, new-laid egg for your breakfast, and some slices of toast, such a beautiful brown, and some honey. Do you love honey, sweet? And some chocolate, all in a little pink-and-gold cup which you shall have for your very own.”
“I want my mother!” Ellen cried out suddenly, with an exceedingly bitter and terrified and indignant cry.
“There, there, darling!” Cynthia whispered; “there is a beautiful red-and-green parrot down-stairs in a great cage that shines like gold, and you shall have him for your own, and he can talk. You shall have him for your very own, sweetheart. Oh, you darling! you darling!”
Ellen felt herself overborne and conquered by this tide of love, which compelled like her mother's, though this woman was not her mother, and her revolt of loyalty was subdued for the time. After all, whether we like it or not, love is somewhat of an impersonal quality to all children, and perhaps to their elders, and it may be in such wise that the goddess is evident.
She did not shrink from Cynthia any more then, but suffered her to lift her out of bed as if she were a baby and set her on a white fur rug, into which her feet sank, to her astonishment. Her mother had only drawn-in rugs, which Ellen had watched her make. She was a little afraid of the fur rug.
Ellen was very small, and seemed much younger than she was by reason of her baby silence and her little clinging ways. Then, too, she had always been so petted at home, and through never going to school had not been in contact with other children. Often the bloom of childhood is soonest rubbed off by friction with its own kind. Diamond cut diamond holds good in many cases.
Cynthia did not think she was more than six years old, and never dreamed of allowing her to dress herself, and indeed the child had always been largely assisted in so doing. Cynthia washed her and dressed her, and curled her hair, and led her down-stairs into the dining-room of the night before, which Ellen still regarded with wise eyes as the store. Then she sat in the tall chair which must have been vacated by that mysterious other child, and had her breakfast, eating her new-laid egg, which the black woman broke for her, while she leaned delicately away as far as she could with a timid shrug of her little shoulder, and sipping her chocolate out of the beautiful pink-and-gold cup. That, however, Ellen decided within herself was not nearly as pretty as one with “A Gift of Friendship” on it in gilt letters which her grandmother kept on the whatnot in her best parlor. This had been given to her aunt Ellen, who died when she was a young girl, and was to be hers when she grew up. She did not care as much for the egg and toast either as for the griddle-cakes and maple syrup at home. All through breakfast Cynthia talked to her, and in such manner as the child had never heard. That fine voice, full of sweetest modulations and cadences, which used the language with the precision of a musician, was as different from the voices at home with their guttural slurs and maimed terminals as the song of a spring robin from the scream of the parrot which Ellen could hear in some distant room. And what Cynthia said was as different from ordinary conversation to the child as a fairy tale, being interspersed with terms of endearment which her mother and grandmother would have considered high-flown, and have been shamefaced in employing, and full of a whimsical playfulness which had an undertone of pathos in it. Cynthia was not still for a minute, and seemed to feel that much of her power lay in her speech and voice, like some enchantress who cast her spell by means of her silver tongue. Nobody knew how she dreaded that outcry of Ellen's, “I want my mother!” It gave her the sensations of a murderess, even while she persisted in her crime. So she talked, diverting the child's mind from its natural channel by sheer force of eloquence. She told a story about the parrot, which caused Ellen's eyes to widen with thoughtful wonder; she promised her treasures and pleasures which made her mouth twitch into smiles in spite of herself; but with all her efforts, when after breakfast they went into another room, Ellen broke out again, “I want my mother!”
Cynthia turned white and struggled with herself for a moment, then she spoke. That which she was doing of the nature of a crime was in reality more foreign to her nature than virtue, and her instinct was to return to her narrow and straight way in spite of its cramping of love and natural longings. “Who is your mother, darling?” she asked. “And what is your name?”
But Ellen was silent, except for that one cry, “I want my mother!” The persistency of the child, in spite of her youth and her distress, was almost invulnerable. She came of a stiff-necked family on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more pronounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered by experience and policy. “I want my mother! I want my mother!” Ellen repeated in her gentle wail as plaintively inconsequent as the note of a bird, and would say no more.
Then Cynthia displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and fierce a bird for Ellen. She would have preferred him as a subject for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires, against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and glared with his yellow eyes.
Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired at her a volley of harsh “How do's” and “Good-mornings,” and “Good-nights,” and “Polly want a cracker's,” then finished with a wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth. “I want my mother!” she panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted. Then Cynthia took her away from the parrot and produced the doll. Then truly did the sentiment of emulative motherhood in her childish breast console her for the time for her need of her own mother. Such a doll as that she had never seen, not even in the store-windows at Christmas-time. Still, she had very fine dolls for a little girl whose relatives were not wealthy, but this doll was like a princess, and nearly as large as Ellen.
Ellen held out her arms for this ravishing creature in a French gown, looked into its countenance of unflinching infantile grace and amiability and innocence, and her fickle heart betrayed her, and she laughed with delight, and the tension of anxiety relaxed in her face.
“Where is her mother?” she asked of Cynthia, having a very firm belief in the little girl-motherhood of dolls. She could not imagine a doll without her little mother, and even in the cases of the store-dolls, she wondered how their mothers could let them be sold, and mothered by other little girls, however poor they might be. But she never doubted that her own dolls were her very own children even if they had been bought in a store. So now she asked Cynthia with an indescribably pitying innocence, “Where is her mother?”
Cynthia laughed and looked adoringly at the child with the doll in her arms. “She has no mother but you,” said she. “She is yours, but once she belonged to a dear little boy, who used to live with me.”
Ellen stared thoughtfully: she had never seen a little boy with a doll. The lady seemed to read her thought, for she laughed again.
“This little boy had curls, and he wore dresses like a little girl, and he was just as pretty as a little girl, and he loved to play with dolls like a little girl,” said she.
“Where is he?” asked Ellen, in a small, gentle voice. “Don't he want her now?”
“No, darling,” said Cynthia; “he is not here; he has been gone away two years, and he had left off his baby curls and his dresses, and stopped playing with her for a year before that.” Cynthia sighed and drew down her mouth, and Ellen looked at her lovingly and wonderingly.
“Be you his mother?” she asked, piteously; then, before Cynthia could answer, her own lip quivered and she sobbed out again, even while she hugged her doll-child to her bosom, “I want my mother! I want my mother!”
All that day the struggle went on. Cynthia Lennox, leading her little guest, who always bore the doll, traversed the fine old house in search of distraction, for the heart of the child was sore for its mother, and success was always intermittent. The music-box played, the pictures were explained, and even old trunks of laid-away treasures ransacked. Cynthia took her through the hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment was 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.
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 to cough, then he worked faster.
“That's so,” said the first man.
“Yes, that is so,” said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head.
“And now to lose this young one that she set her life by,” said the first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny's side. Jim Tenny paled under his grime; the hand which held the knife clinched.
“What do you s'pose has become of the young one?” said the first girl. “There's a good many out from the shop huntin' this mornin', ain't there?”
“Fifty,” said the first man, laconically.
“You three were out all day yesterday, wa'n't you?”
“Yes, Jim and Carl and me were out till after midnight.”
“Well, I wonder whether the poor little young one is alive? Don't seem as if she could be—but—”
“Look there! look there!” screamed the elderly girl suddenly. “Look atthere!” She began to dance, she laughed, she sobbed, she waved her lean hands frantically out of the window, leaning far over the bench. “Look at there!” she kept crying. Then she turned and ran out of the room, with the other girls and half the cutting-room after her.
“Damn it, she's got the child!” said the thin man. He kept on working, his dark, sinewy hands flying over the sheets of leather, but the tears ran down his cheeks. Lloyd's emptied itself into the street, and surrounded Eva Loud and Ellen, who, running aimlessly, had come straight to her aunt. Jim Tenny was first.
Eva stood clasping the child, who was too frightened to cry, and was breathing in hushed gasps, her face hidden on her aunt's broad bosom. Eva had caught her up at the first sight of her, and now she stood clasping her fiercely, and looking at them all as if she thought they wanted to rob her of the child. Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd, and was echoed by another from the factory, with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and hands, that expression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of recovery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny's face working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory of old comradeship. Then her bold heart and her pride all melted and she burst out in a great wail before them all.
“Oh, Jim!” she cried out. “Oh, Jim, I lost you, and then I thought I'd lost her! Oh, Jim!”
Then there was a chorus of feminine sobs, for Eva's wild weeping had precipitated the ready sympathy of half the girls present. The men started a cheer to cover a certain chivalrous shamefacedness which was upon them at the sight of the girl's grief, and another cheer from the factory echoed it. Then came another sound, the great steam-whistle of Lloyd's; then the whistles of the other neighboring factories responded, and people began to swarm out of them, and the windows to fill with eager faces. Jim Tenny grasped Eva's arm with a grasp like a vise. “Come this way,” said he, sharply. “Come this way, Eva.”
“Oh, Jim! oh, Jim!” Eva sobbed again; but she followed him, little Ellen's golden fleece tossing over her shoulder.
“She's got her; she's got her!” shouted the people.
'She's got her!' Shouted the people
Then the leather-stained hands gyrated, the cheers went up, and again the whistles blew.
Jim Tenny, with his hand on Eva's arm, pushed his way through the crowd.
“Where you goin', Jim?” asked the pretty girl at his elbow, but he pushed past her roughly, and did not seem to hear. Eva's face was all inflamed and convulsed with sobs, but she did not dream of covering it—she was full of the holy shamelessness of grief and joy. “Let me see her! let me see her! Oh, the dear little thing, only look at her! Where have you been, precious? Are you hungry? Oh, Nellie, she is hungry, I know! She looks thin. Run over to the bakery and buy her some cookies, quick! Are you cold? Give her this sacque. Only look at her! Kate, only look at her! Are you hurt, darling? Has anybody hurt you? If anybody has, he shall be hung! Oh, you darling! Only see her, 'Liza.”
But Jim Tenny, his mouth set, his black brows scowling, his hard grasp on Eva's arm, pushed straight through the gathering crowd until they came to Clarkson's stables at the rear of Lloyd's, where he kept his horse and buggy—for he lived at a distance from his work, and drove over every morning. He pointed to a chair which a hostler had occupied, tilted against the wall, for a morning smoke, after the horses were fed and watered, and which he had vacated to join the jubilant crowd. “Sit down there,” he said to Eva. Then he hailed a staring man coming out of the office. “Here, help me in with my horse, quick!” said he.
The man stared still, with slowly rising indignation. He was portly and middle-aged, the senior partner of the firm, who seldom touched his own horses of late years, and had a son at Harvard. “What's to pay? What do you mean? Anybody sick?” he asked.
“Help me into the buggy with my horse!” shouted Jim Tenny. “I tell you the child is found, and I've got to take it home to its folks.”
“Don't they know yet? Is that it?”
“Yes, I tell you.” Jim was backing out his horse as he spoke.
Mr. Clarkson seized a harness and threw the collar over the horse's head, while Jim ran out the buggy. When Mr. Clarkson lifted Eva and Ellen into the buggy he gave the child's head a pat. “God bless it!” he said, and his voice broke.
The horse was restive. Jim took a leap into the buggy at Eva's side, and they were out with a dash and a swift rattle. The crowd parted before them, and cheer after cheer went up. The whistles sounded again. Then all the city bells rang out. They were signalling the other searchers that the child was found. Jim and Eva and Ellen made a progress of triumph down the street. The crowd pursued them with cheers of rejoicing; doors and windows flew open; the house-yards were full of people. Jim drove as fast as he could, scowling hard to hide his tenderness and pity. Eva sat by his side, weeping in her terrible candor of grief and joy, and Ellen's golden locks tossed on her shoulder.
As Jim Tenny, with Eva Loud and the child, drove down the road towards the Brewster house, his horse and buggy became the nucleus of a gathering procession, shouting and exclaiming, with voices all tuned to one key of passionate sympathy. There were even many women of the poorer class who had no sense of indecency in following the utmost lead of their tender emotions. Some of them bore children of their own in their arms, and were telling them with passionate croonings to look at the other little girl in the carriage who had been lost, and gone away a whole day and two nights from her mother. They often called out fondly to Ellen and Eva, and ordered Jim to wait a moment that they might look at the poor darling. But Jim drove on as fast as he was able, though he had sometimes to rein his horse sharply to avoid riding down some lean racing boys, who would now and then shoot ahead of him with loud whoops of triumph. Once as he drove he laid one hand caressingly over Eva's. “Poor girl!” he said, hoarsely and shamefacedly, and Eva sobbed loudly. When Jim reached Mrs. Zelotes Brewster's house there was a swift displacement of lights and shadows in a window, a door flew open, and the gaunt old woman was at the wheel.
“Stop!” she cried. “Stop! Bring her in here to me! Let me have her! Give her to me; I have got everything ready! Come, Ellen—come to grandmother!”
Then there was a mad rush from the opposite direction, and the child's mother was there, reaching into the buggy with fierce arms of love and longing. “Give her to me!” she shrieked out. “Give me my baby, Eva Loud! Oh, Ellen, where have you been?”
Fanny Brewster dragged her child from her sister's arms so forcibly that she seemed fairly to fly over the wheel. Then she strained her to her hungry bosom, covering her with kisses, wetting her soft face and yellow hair with tears.
“My baby, mother's darling, mother's baby!” she gasped out with great pants of satisfied love; but another pair of lean, wiry old arms stole around the child's slender body.
“Give her to me!” demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. “She is my son's child, and I have a right to her! You will kill her, goin' on so over her. Give her to me! I have everything all ready in my house to take care of her. Give her to me, Fanny Loud!”
“Keep your hands off her!” cried Fanny. “She's my own baby, and nobody's goin' to take her away from me, I guess.”
“Give her to me this minute!” said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. “You'll kill her, goin' on so. You're frightenin' her to death. Give her to me this minute!”
Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the feel of her mother's arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of passion which she had evoked.
“Give her to me!” demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.
The crowd who had followed stood gaping with working faces. The mothers wept over their own children. Eva stood at her sister's elbow, with a hand on one of the child's, which was laid over Fanny's shoulder. Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse's neck.
“Give her to me!” said Mrs. Zelotes again. “Give her to me, I say! I am her own grandmother!”
“And I am her own mother!” called out Fanny, with a great master-note of love and triumph and defiance. “I'm her own mother, and I've got her, and nobody but God shall take her from me again.” The tears streamed down her cheeks; she kissed the child with pale, parted lips. She was at once pathetic and terrible. She was human love and selfishness incarnate.
Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly and softened. She turned and went back into her own house. Her gray head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight. She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a perfume, when Fanny, with Eva following, still clinging to the child's little hand over her sister's shoulder, went across the yard to her own house to tell her husband. The others followed, and stood about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest sympathy. One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead to peer in a window of the sitting-room, and when his mother pulled him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes, and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks. He was a young boy, very small and thin for his age. He whispered to his mother and she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home.
Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all-night's search, and he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and despair. Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled. He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was looking for. He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others, had said: “Look at here, Andrew, old fellow; you'd better go home and rest a bit. We'll look all the harder while you're gone, and maybe she'll be found when you wake up.”
“Who will be found?” Andrew asked, with a dazed look. He reeled as if he were drunk.
“Ain't had anything, has he?” one of the men whispered.
“Not a drop to my knowledge.”
Andrew's lips trembled perceptibly; his forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder. “Come along with me, old man,” he said, and Andrew obeyed.
When Fanny and Eva came in with the child, he lay prostrate on the bed, and scarcely seemed to breathe. A great qualm of fear shot over Fanny for a second. His father had died of heart-disease.
“Is he—dead?” she gasped to Eva.
“No, of course he ain't,” said Eva. “He's asleep; he's wore out. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, wake up! She's found, Andrew; Ellen's found.” But Andrew did not stir.
“He is!” gasped Fanny, again.
“No, he ain't. Andrew, Andrew Brewster, wake up, wake up! Ellen's here! She's found!”
Fanny put Ellen down, and bent over Andrew and listened. “No, I can hear him breathe,” she cried. Then she kissed him, and leaned her mouth close to his ear. “Andrew!” she said, in a voice which Eva and Ellen had never heard before. “Andrew, poor old man, wake up; she's found! Our child is found!”
When Andrew still did not wake, but only stirred, and moaned faintly, Fanny lifted Ellen onto the bed. “Kiss poor father, and wake him,” she told her.
Ellen, whose blue eyes were big with fright and wonder, whose lips were quivering, and whose little body was vibrating with the strain of her nerves, laid her soft cheek against her father's rough, pale one, and stole a little arm under his neck. “Father, wake up!” she called out in her little, trembling, sweet voice, and that reached Andrew Brewster in the depths of his own physical inertness. He opened his eyes and looked at the child, and the light came into them, and then the sound of his sobbing filled the house and reached the people out in the yard, and an echo arose from them. Gradually the crowd dispersed. Jim Tenny, before he drove away, went to the door and spoke to Eva.
“Anything I can do?” he asked, with a curious, tender roughness. He did not look at her as he spoke.
“No; thank you, Jim,” replied Eva.
Suddenly the young man reached out a hand and stroked her rough hair. “Well, take care of yourself, old girl,” he said.
Eva went to her sister as Jim went out of the yard. Ellen was in the sitting-room with her father, and Fanny had gone to the kitchen to heat some milk for the child, whom she firmly believed to have had nothing to eat during her absence.
“Fanny,” said Eva.
“Well?” said Fanny. “I can't stop; I must get some milk for her; she must be 'most starved.”
Fanny turned and looked at Eva, who cast down her eyes before her in a very shamefacedness of happiness and contrition.
“Why, what is it?” repeated Fanny, staring at her.
“I've got Jim back, I guess, as well as Ellen,” said Eva, “and I'm going to be a good woman.”
After all the crowd of people outside had gone, the little nervous boy raced into the Brewster yard with a tin cup of chestnuts in his hand. He knocked at the side door, and when Fanny opened it he thrust them upon her. “They're for her!” he blurted out, and was gone, racing like a deer.
“Don't you want the cup back?” Fanny shouted after him.
“No, ma'am,” he called back, and that, although his mother had charged him to bring back the cup or he would get a scolding.
Ellen had clung fast all the time to her doll, her bunch of pinks, and her cup and saucer; or, rather, she had guarded them jealously. “Where did you get all these things?” her aunt Eva had asked her, amazedly, when she first caught sight of her, and then had not waited for an answer in her wild excitement of joy at the recovery of the child. The great, smiling wax doll had ridden between Jim and Eva in the buggy, Eva had held the pink cup and saucer with a kind of mechanical carefulness, and Ellen herself clutched the pinks in one little hand, though she crushed them against her aunt's bosom as she sat in her lap. Ellen's grandmother and aunt had glanced at these treasures with momentary astonishment, and so had her mother, but curiosity was in abeyance for both of them for the time; rapture at the sight of the beloved child at whose loss they had suffered such agonies was the one emotion of their souls. But later investigation was to follow.
When Ellen did not seem to care for her hot milk liberally sweetened in her own mug, and griddle-cakes with plenty of syrup, her mother looked at her, and her eyes of love sharpened with inquiry. “Ain't you hungry?” she said. Ellen shook her head. She was sitting at the table in the dining-room, and her father, mother, and aunt were all hovering about her, watching her. Some of the neighbor women were also in the room, staring with a sort of deprecating tenderness of curiosity.
“Do you feel sick?” Ellen's father inquired, anxiously.
“You don't feel sick, do you?” repeated her mother.
Ellen shook her head.
Just then Mrs. Zelotes Brewster came in with her black-and-white-checked shawl pinned around her gaunt old face, which had in it a strange softness and sweetness, which made Fanny look at her again, after the first glance, and not know why.
“We've got our blessing back again, mother,” said her son Andrew, in a broken voice.
“But she won't eat her breakfast, now mother has gone and cooked it for her, so nice, too,” said Fanny, in a tone of confidence which she had never before used towards Mrs. Zelotes.
“You don't feel sick, do you, Ellen?” asked her grandmother.
Ellen shook her head. “No, ma'am,” said she.
“She says she don't feel sick, and she ain't hungry,” Andrew said, anxiously.
“I wonder if she would eat one of my new doughnuts. I've got some real nice ones,” said a neighbor—the stout woman from the next house, whose breadth of body seemed to symbolize a corresponding spiritual breadth of motherliness, as she stood there looking at the child who had been lost and was found.
“Don't you want one of Aunty Wetherhed's nice doughnuts?” asked Fanny.
“No; I thank you,” replied Ellen. Eva started suddenly with an air of mysterious purpose, opened a door, ran down cellar, and returned with a tumbler of jelly, but Ellen shook her head even at that.
“Have you had your breakfast?” said Fanny.
Then Ellen was utterly quiet. She did not speak; she made no sign or motion. She sat still, looking straight before her.
“Don't you hear, Ellen?” said Andrew. “Have you had your breakfast this morning?”
“Tell Auntie Eva if you have had your breakfast,” Eva said.
Mrs. Zelotes Brewster spoke with more authority, and she went further.
“Tell grandmother if you have had your breakfast, and where you had it,” said she.
But Ellen was dumb and motionless. They all looked at one another. “Tell Aunty Wetherhed: that's a good girl,” said the stout woman.
“Where are those things she had when I first saw her?” asked Mrs. Zelotes, suddenly. Eva went into the sitting-room, and fetched them out—the bunch of pinks, the cup and saucer, and the doll. Ellen's eyes gave a quick look of love and delight at the doll.
“She had these, luggin' along in her little arms, when I first caught sight of her comin',” said Eva.
“Where did you get them, Ellen?” asked Fanny. “Who gave them to you?”
Ellen was silent, with all their inquiring eyes fixed upon her face like a compelling battery. “Where have you been, Ellen, all the time you have been gone?” asked Mrs. Zelotes. “Now you have got back safe, you must tell us where you have been.”
Andrew stooped his head down to the child's, and rubbed his rough cheek against her soft one, with his old facetious caress. “Tell father where you've been,” he whispered. Ellen gave him a little piteous glance, and her lip quivered, but she did not speak.
“Where do you s'pose she got them?” whispered one neighbor to another.
“I can't imagine; that's a beautiful doll.”
“Ain't it? It must have cost a lot. I know, because my Hattie had one her aunt gave her last Christmas; that one cost a dollar and ninety-eight cents, and it didn't begin to compare with this. That's a handsome cup and saucer, too.”
“Yes, but you can get real handsome cups and saucers to Crosby's for twenty-five cents. I don't think so much of that.”
“Them pinks must have come from a greenhouse.”
“Yes, they must.”
“Well, there's lots of greenhouses in the city besides the florists. That don't help much.” Then the first woman inclined her lips closely to the other woman's ear and whispered, causing the other to start back. “No, I can't believe she would,” said she.
“She came from those Louds on her mother's side,” whispered the first woman, guardedly, with dark emphasis.
“Ellen,” said Fanny, suddenly, and almost sharply, “you didn't take those things in any way you hadn't ought to, did you? Tell mother.”
“Fanny!” cried Andrew.
“If she did, it's the first time a Brewster ever stole,” said Mrs. Zelotes. Her face was no longer strange with unwonted sweetness as she looked at Fanny.
Andrew put his face down to Ellen's again. “Father knows she didn't steal the things; never mind,” he whispered.
Suddenly the stout woman made a soft, ponderous rush out of the room and the house. She passed the window with oscillating swiftness.
“Where's Miss Wetherhed gone?” said one woman to another.
“She's thought of somethin'.”
“Maybe she left her bread in the oven.”
“No, she's thought of somethin'.”
A very old lady, who had been sitting in a rocking-chair on the other side of the room, rose trembling and came to Ellen and leaned over her, looking at her with small, black, bright eyes through gold-rimmed spectacles. The old woman was deaf, and her voice was shrill and high-pitched to reach her own consciousness. “What did such a good little girl as you be run away from father and mother for?” she piped, going back to first principles and the root of the whole matter, since she had heard nothing of the discussion which had been going on about her, and had supposed it to deal with them.
Ellen gasped. Suddenly all her first woe returned upon her recollection. She turned innocent, accusing eyes upon her father's loving face, then her mother's and aunt's. “You said—you said—you—” she stammered out, but then her father and mother were both down upon their knees before her in her chair embracing her, and Eva, too, seized her little hands. “You mustn't ever think of what you heard father and mother say, Ellen,” Andrew said, solemnly. “You must forget all about it. Father and mother were both very wrong and wicked—”
“And Aunt Eva, too,” sobbed Eva.
“And they didn't mean what they said,” continued Andrew. “You are the greatest blessing in this whole world to father and mother; you're all they have got. You don't know what father and mother have been through, thinking you were lost and they might never see their little girl again. Now you mustn't ever think of what they said again.”
“And you won't ever hear them say it again, Ellen,” Fanny Brewster said, with a noble humbling of herself before her child.
“No, you won't,” said Eva.
“Mother is goin' to try to do better, and have more patience, and not let you hear such talk any more,” said Fanny, kissing Ellen passionately, and rising with Andrew's arm around her.
“I'm going to try, too, Ellen,” said Eva.
The stout woman came padding softly and heavily into the room, and there was a bright-blue silken gleam in her hand. She waved a whole yard of silk of the most brilliant blue before Ellen's dazzled eyes. “There!” said she, triumphantly, “if you will tell Aunty Wetherhed where you've been, and all about it, she'll give you all this beautiful silk to make a new dress for your new dolly.”
Ellen looked in the woman's face, she looked at the blue silk, and she looked at the doll, but she was silent.
“Only think what a beautiful dress it will make!” said a woman.
“And see how pretty it goes with the dolly's light hair,” said Fanny.
“Ellen,” whispered Andrew, “you tell father, and he'll buy you a whole pound of candy down to the store.”
“I shouldn't wonder if I could find something to make your dolly a cloak,” said a woman.
“And I'll make her a beautiful little bonnet, if you'll tell,” said another.
“Only think, a whole pound of candy!” said Andrew.
“I'll buy you a gold ring,” Eva cried out—“a gold ring with a little blue stone in it.”
“And you shall go to ride with mother on the cars to-morrow,” said Fanny.
“Father will get you some oranges, too,” said Andrew.
But Ellen sat silent and unmoved by all that sweet bribery, a little martyr to something within herself; a sense of honor, love for the lady who had concealed her, and upon whom her confession might bring some dire penalty; or perhaps she was strengthened in her silence by something less worthy—possibly that stiff-neckedness which had descended to her from a long line of Puritans upon her father's side. At all events she was silent, and opposed successfully her one little new will to the onslaught of all those older and more experienced ones before her, though nobody knew at what cost of agony to herself. She had always been a singularly docile and obedient child; this was the first persistent disobedience of her whole life, and it reacted upon herself with a cruel spiritual hurt. She sat clasping the great doll, the pinks, and the pink cup and saucer before her on the table—a lone little weak child, opposing her single individuality against so many, and to her own hurt and horror and self-condemnation, and she did not weaken; but all at once her head drooped on one side, and her father caught her.
“There! you can all stop tormentin' this blessed child!” he cried. “Ellen, Ellen, look at Father! Oh, mother, look here; she's fainted dead away!”
“Fanny!”
When Ellen came to herself she was on the bed in her mother's room, and her aunt Eva was putting some of her beautiful cologne on her head, and her mother was trying to make her drink water, and her grandmother had a glass of her currant wine, and they were calling to her with voices of far-off love, as if from another world.
And after that she was questioned no more about her mysterious journey.
“Wherever she has been, she has got no harm,” said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, “and there's no use in trying to drive a child, when it comes of our family. She's got some notion in her head, and you've got to leave her alone to get over it. She's got back safe and sound, and that's the main thing.”
“I wish I knew where she got those things,” Fanny said. Looseness of principle as to property rights was not as strange to her imagination as to that of her mother-in-law.
For a long time afterwards she passed consciously and uneasily by cups and saucers in stores, and would not look their way lest she should see the counterpart of Ellen's, which was Sèvres, and worth more than the whole counterful, had she only known it, and she hurried past the florists who displayed pinks in their windows. The doll was evidently not new, and she had not the same anxiety with regard to that.
No one was allowed to ask Ellen further questions that day, not even the reporters, who went away quite baffled by this infantile pertinacity in silence, and were forced to draw upon their imaginations, with results varying from realistic horrors to Alice in Wonderland. Ellen was kissed and cuddled by some women and young girls, but not many were allowed to see her. The doctor had been called in after her fainting-fit, and pronounced it as his opinion that she was a very nervous child, and had been under a severe strain, and he would not answer for the result if she were to be further excited.
“Let her have her own way: if she wants to talk, let her, and if she wants to be silent, let her alone. She is as delicate as that cup,” said the doctor, looking at the shell-like thing which Ellen had brought home, with some curiosity.
That evening Lyman Risley came to see Cynthia. He looked at her anxiously and scrutinizingly when he entered the room, and did not respond to her salutation.
“Well, I have seen the child,” he said, in a hushed voice, with a look towards the door as he seated himself before the fire and spread out his hands towards the blaze. He looked nervous and chilly.
“How did she look?” asked Cynthia.
“Why in the name of common-sense, Cynthia,” he said, abruptly, without noticing her query, “if you had to give that child china for a souvenir, didn't you give her something besides Royal Sèvres?” Lyman Risley undoubtedly looked younger than Cynthia, but his manner even more than his looks gave him the appearance of comparative youth. There was in it a vehemence and impetuosity almost like that of a boy. Cynthia, with her strained nervous intensity, seemed very much older.
“Why not?” said she.
“Why not? Well, it is fortunate for you that those people have a knowledge for the most part of the fundamental properties of the drama of life, such as bread-and-butter, and a table from which to eat it, and a knife with which to cut it, and a bed in which to sleep, and a stove and coal, and so on, and so on, and that the artistic accessories, such as Royal Sèvres, which is no better than common crockery for the honest purpose of holding the tea for the solace of the thirsty mouth of labor, is beneath their attention.”
“How does the child look, Lyman?” asked Cynthia Lennox. She was leaning back in a great crimson-covered chair before the fire, a long, slender, graceful shape, in a clinging white silk gown which was a favorite of hers for house wear. The light in the room was subdued, coming mostly through crimson shades, and the faint, worn lines on Cynthia's face did not show; it looked, with her soft crown of gray hair, like a cameo against the crimson background of the chair. The man beside her looked at her with that impatience of his masculine estate and his superior youth, and yet with the adoration which nothing could conquer. He had passed two-thirds of his life, metaphorically, at this woman's feet, and had formed a habit of admiration and lovership which no facts nor developments could ever alter. He was frowning, he replied with a certain sharpness, and yet he leaned towards her as he spoke, and his eyes followed her long, graceful lines and noted the clear delicacy of her features against the crimson background. “How the child looked—how the child looked; Cynthia, you do not realize what you did. You have not the faintest realization of what it means for a woman to keep a lost child hidden away as you did, when its parents and half the city were hunting for it. I tell you I did not know what the consequences might be to you if it were found out. There is wild blood in a city like this, and even the staid old New England stream is capable of erratic currents. I tell you I have had a day of dreadful anxiety, and it was worse because I had to be guarded. I dared scarcely speak to any one about the matter. I have listened on street corners; I have made errands to newspaper offices. I meant to get you away if— Well, never mind—I tell you, you do not realize what you did, Cynthia.”
Cynthia glanced at him without moving her head, then she looked away, her face quivering slightly, more as if from a reflection of his agitation than from her own. “You say you saw her,” she said.
“This afternoon,” the man went on, “I got fairly desperate. I resolved to go to the fountain-head for information, and take my chances. So down I went to Maple Street, where the Brewsters live, and I rang the front-door bell, and the child's aunt, a handsome, breathless kind of creature, came and ushered me into the best parlor, and went into the next room—the sitting-room—to call the others. I caught sight of enough women for a woman's club in the sitting-room. Then Andrew Brewster came in, and I offered my legal services out of friendly interest in the case, and in that way I found out what I wanted to. Cynthia, that child has not told.”
Cynthia raised herself and sat straight, and her face flashed like a white flame. “Were they harsh to her?” she demanded. “Were they cruel? Did they question her, and were they harsh and cruel because she would not tell? Why did you not tell them yourself? Why did you not, Lyman Risley? Why did you not tell the whole story rather than have that child blamed? Well, I will go myself. I will go this minute. They shall not blame that darling. What do you think I care for myself? Let them lynch me if they want to. I will go this minute!” Cynthia sprang to her feet, but Risley, with a hoarse shout under his breath, caught hold of her and forced her back.
“For God's sake, sit down, Cynthia!” he said. “Didn't you hear the door-bell? Somebody is coming.”
The door-bell had in fact rung, and Cynthia had not noticed it. She lay back in her chair as the door opened, and Mrs. Norman Lloyd entered. “Good-evening, Cynthia,” she said, beamingly. “I thought I would stop a few minutes on my way to meeting. I'm rather early. No, don't get up,” as Cynthia rose. “Don't get up; I can only stay a minute. Never mind about giving me a chair, Mr. Risley—thank you. Yes, this is a real comfortable chair.” Mrs. Lloyd, seated where the firelight played over her wide sweep of rich skirts, and her velvet fur-trimmed cloak and plumed bonnet, beamed upon them with an expansive benevolence and kindliness. She was a large, handsome, florid woman. Her grayish-brown hair was carefully crimped, and looped back from her fat, pink cheeks, a fine shell-and-gold comb surmounted her smooth French twist, and held her bonnet in place. She unfastened her cloak, and a diamond brooch at her throat caught the light and blazed red like a ruby. She was the wife of Norman Lloyd, the largest shoe-manufacturer in the place. There was between her and Cynthia a sort of relationship by marriage. Norman Lloyd's brother George had married Cynthia's sister, who had died ten years before, and of whose little son, Robert, Cynthia had had the charge. Now George, who was a lawyer in St. Louis, had married again. Mrs. Norman had sympathized openly with Cynthia when the child was taken from Cynthia at his father's second marriage. “I call it a shame,” she had said, “giving that child to a perfect stranger to bring up, and I don't see any need of George's marrying again, anyway. I don't know what I should do if I thought Norman would marry again if I died. I think one husband and one wife is enough for any man or woman if they believe in the resurrection. It has always seemed to me that the answer to that awful question in the New Testament, as to whose wife that woman who had so many husbands would be in the other world, meant that people who had done so much marrying on earth would have to be old maids and old bachelors in heaven. George ought to be ashamed of himself, and Cynthia ought to keep that child.”
Ever since she had been very solicitously friendly towards Cynthia, who had always imperceptibly held herself aloof from her, owing to a difference in degree. Cynthia had no prejudices of mind, but many of nerves, and this woman was distinctly not of her sort, though she had a certain liking for her. Every time she was brought in contact with her she had a painful sense of a grating adjustment as of points of meeting which did not dovetail as they should. Norman Lloyd represented one of the old families of the city, distinguished by large possessions and college training, and he was the first of his race to engage in trade. His wife came from a vastly different stock, being the daughter of a shoe-manufacturer herself, and the granddaughter of a cobbler who had tapped his neighbor's shoes in his little shop in the L of his humble cottage house. Mrs. Norman Lloyd was innocently unconscious of any reason for concealing the fact, and was fond, when driving out to take the air in her fine carriage, of pointing out to any stranger who happened to be with her the house where her grandfather cobbled shoes and laid the foundation of the family fortune. “That all came from that little shop of my grandfather,” she would say, pointing proudly at Lloyd's great factory, which was not far from the old cottage. “Mr. Lloyd didn't have much of anything when I married him, but I had considerable, and Mr. Lloyd went into the factory, and he has been blessed, and the property has increased until it has come to this.” Mrs. Lloyd's chief pride was in the very facts which others deprecated. When she considered the many-windowed pile of Lloyd's, and that her husband was the recognized head and authority over all those throngs of grimy men, walking with the stoop of daily labor, carrying their little dinner-boxes with mechanical clutches of leather-tanned fingers, she used to send up a prayer for humility, lest evil and downfall of pride come to her. She was a pious woman, a member of the First Baptist Church, and active in charitable work. Mrs. Norman Lloyd adored her husband, and her estimate of him was almost ludicrously different from that of the grimy men who flocked to his factory, she seeing a most kindly spirited and amiable man, devoting himself to the best interests of his employés, and striving ever for their benefit rather than his own, and the others seeing an aristocrat by birth and training, who was in trade because of shrewd business instincts and a longing for wealth and power, but who despised, and felt himself wholly superior to, the means by which it was acquired.
“We ain't anything but the rounds of the ladder for Norman Lloyd to climb by, and he only sees and feels us with the soles of his patent-leathers,” one of the turbulent spirits in his factory said. Mrs. Norman Lloyd would not have believed her ears had she heard him.
Mrs. Lloyd had not sat long before Cynthia's fire that evening before she opened on the subject of the lost child. “Oh, Cynthia, have you heard—” she began, but Risley cut her short.
“About that little girl who ran away?” he said. “Yes, we have; we were just talking about her.”
“Did you ever hear anything like it?” said Mrs. Lloyd. “They say they can't find out where she's been. She won't tell. Don't you believe somebody has threatened her if she does?”
Cynthia raised herself and began to speak, but a slight, almost imperceptible gesture from the man beside her stopped her.
“What did you say, Cynthia?”
“There is no accounting for children's freaks,” said Risley, shortly and harshly. Mrs. Lloyd was not thin-skinned; such a current of exuberant cordiality emanated from her own nature that she was not very susceptible to any counter-force. Now, however, she felt vaguely and wonderingly, as a child might have done, that for some reason Lyman Risley was rude to her, and she had a sense of bewildered injury. Mrs. Lloyd was always, moreover, somewhat anxious as to the relations between Cynthia and Lyman Risley. She heard a deal of talk about it first and last; and while she had no word of unkind comment herself, yet she felt at times uneasy. “Folks do talk about Cynthia and Lyman Risley keeping company so long,” she told her husband; “it's as much as twenty years. It does seem as if they ought to get married, don't you think so, Norman? Do you suppose it is because the property was left that way—for you know Lyman hasn't got anything besides what he earns—or do you suppose it is because Cynthia doesn't want to marry him? I guess it is that. Cynthia never seemed to me as if she would ever care enough about any man to marry him. I guess that's it; but I do think she ought to stop his coming there quite so much, especially when people know that about her property.”
Cynthia's property was hers on condition that her husband took her name if she married, otherwise it was forfeited to her sister's child. “Catch a Risley ever taking his wife's name!” said Mrs. Lloyd. “Of course Cynthia would be willing to give up the money if she loved him, but I don't believe she does. It seems as if Lyman Risley ought to see it would be better for him not to go there so much if they weren't going to be married.”
So it happened when Risley caught up her question to Cynthia in that peremptory fashion, Mrs. Lloyd felt in addition to the present cause some which had gone before for her grievance. She addressed herself thereafter entirely and pointedly to Cynthia. “Did you ever see that little girl, Cynthia?” said she.
“Yes,” replied Cynthia, in a voice so strange that the other woman stared wonderingly at her.
“Ain't you feeling well, Cynthia?” she asked.
“Very well, thank you,” said Cynthia.
“When did you see her?” asked Mrs. Lloyd. Cynthia opened her mouth as if to speak, then she glanced at Risley, whose eyes held her, and laughed instead—a strange, nervous laugh. Happily, Mrs. Lloyd did not wait for her answer. She had her own important information to impart. She had in reality stopped for that purpose. “Well, I have seen her,” she said. “I met her in front of Crosby's one day last summer. And she was so sweet-looking I stopped and spoke to her—I couldn't help it. She had beautiful eyes, and the softest light curls, and she was dressed so pretty, and the flowers on her hat were nice. The embroidery on her dress was very fine, too. Usually, you know, those people don't care about the fineness, as long as it is wide, and showy, and bright-colored. I asked her what her name was, and she answered just as pretty, and her mother told me how old she was. Her mother was a handsome woman, though she had an up-and-coming kind of way with her. But she seemed real pleased to have me notice the child. Where do you suppose she was all that time, Cynthia?”
“She was in some safe place, undoubtedly,” said Risley, and again Mrs. Lloyd felt that she was snubbed, though not seeing how nor why, and again she rebelled with that soft and gentle persistency in her own course which was the only rebellion of which she was capable.
“Where do you suppose she was, Cynthia?” said she.
“I think some woman must have seen her, and coaxed her in and kept her, she was such a pretty child,” said Cynthia, defiantly and desperately. But the other woman looked at her in wonder.
“Oh, Cynthia, I can't believe that,” said she. “It don't seem as if any woman could be so bad as that when the child's mother was in such agony over her.” And then she added, “I can't believe it, because it seems to me that if any woman was bad enough to do that, she couldn't have given her up at all, she was such a beautiful child.” Mrs. Norman Lloyd had no children of her own, and was given to gazing with eyes of gentle envy at pretty, rosy little girls, frilled with white embroidery like white pinks, dancing along in leading hands of maternal love. “It don't seem to me I could ever have given her up, if I had once been bad enough to steal her,” she said. “What put such an idea into your head, Cynthia?”
When the church-bell clanged out just then Lyman Risley had never been so thankful in his life. Mrs. Lloyd rose promptly, for she had to lead the meeting, that being the custom among the sisters in her church. “Well,” said she, “I am thankful she is found, anyway; I couldn't have slept a wink that night if I had known she was lost, the dear little thing. Good-night, Cynthia; don't come to the door. Good-night, Mr. Risley. Come and see me, Cynthia—do, dear.”
When Mrs. Norman Lloyd was gone, Risley looked at Cynthia with a long breath of relief, but she turned to him with seemingly no appreciation of it, and repeated her declaration which Mrs. Lloyd's coming had interrupted: “Lyman, I am going there to-night—this minute. Will you go with me? No, you must not go with me. I am going!” She sprang to her feet.
“Sit down, Cynthia,” said Risley. “I tell you they were not harsh to her. You don't seem to consider that they love the child—possibly better than you can—and would not in the nature of things be harsh to her under such circumstances. Sit down and hear the rest of it.”
“But they will be harsh by-and-by, after the first joy of finding her is over,” said Cynthia. “I will go and tell them the first thing in the morning, Lyman.”
“You will do nothing so foolish. They are not only not insisting upon her telling her secret, but announced to me their determination not to do so in the future. I wish you could have seen that man's face when he told me what a delicate, nervous little thing his child was, and the doctor said she must not be fretted if she had taken a notion not to tell; and I wish you could have seen the mother and the aunt, and the grandmother, Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. They would all give each other and themselves up to be torn of wild beasts first. It is easy to see where the child got her extraordinary strength of will. They took me out in the sitting-room, and there was a wild flurry of feminine skirts before me. I had previously overheard myself announced as Lawyer Risley by the aunt, and the response from various voices that they were ‘goin' if he was comin' out in the sittin'-room.’ It always made them nervous to see lawyers. Well, I followed the parents and the grandmother and the aunt out. I dared not refuse when they suggested it, and I hoped desperately that the child would not remember me from that one scared glance she gave at me this morning. But there she sat in her little chair, holding the doll you gave her, and she looked up at me when I entered, and I have never in the whole course of my existence seen such an expression upon the face of a child. Remember me? Indeed she did, and she promised me with the faithfulest, stanchest eyes of a woman set in a child's head that she would not tell; that I need not fear for one minute; that the lady who had given her the doll was quite safe. She knew, and she must have heard what I said to you this morning. She is the most wonderful child I have ever seen.”