Nahum Beals was a laster in Lloyd's. Late in the autumn, when Ellen had been in the factory a little over a year, there began to be a subtle condition of discontent and insubordination. Men gathered in muttering groups, of which Nahum Beals seemed always to be the nucleus. His high, rampant voice, restrained by no fear of consequences, always served as the key-note to the chorus of rebellion. Ellen paid little attention to it. She was earning good wages, and personally she had nothing of which to complain. She had come to regard Beals as something of a chronic fanatic, but as she knew that the lasters were fairly paid, she had not supposed it meant anything. However, one night, going home from the factory, her eyes were opened. Abby and Maria Atkins and Mamie Brady were with her, and shortly after they had left the shop Abby stopped Granville Joy, Frank Dixon, and Willy Jones, who with another young man were swinging past without noticing the girls, strange to say. Abby caught Joy by the arm.
“Hold on a minute, Granville Joy,” said she. “I want to know what's up with the lasters.”
Granville laughed, with an uneasy, sidelong, deprecating glance at Ellen. “Oh, nothing much,” said he.
Willy Jones stood still, coloring, gazing at Abby with a half-terrified expression. Dixon walked on, and the other young man, Amos Lee, who was dark and slight and sinewy, stared from one to the other with quick flashes of black eyes. He looked almost as if he had gypsy blood in him, and he came of a family which was further on the outskirts of society than the Louds had been.
When Granville replied “nothing much” to Abby's question, Amos Lee frowned with a swift contraction of dissent, but did not speak until Abby had retorted. “You needn't talk that way to me, Granville Joy,” said she. “You can't cheat me. I know something's up.”
“It ain't nothin', Abby,” said Granville, but it was quite evident that he was lying.
Then Lee spoke up, in a sudden fury of enthusiasm. “There is somethin' up,” said he, “and I don't care if you do know it. There's—” he stopped as Granville clutched his arm violently and whispered something.
“Well, maybe you're right,” said Lee to Joy. “Look here,” he continued to Abby, “you and Ellen come along here a little ways, and I'll tell you.”
After Maria and Mamie had passed on, Joy and Jones and Lee, standing close to the two girls, began to talk, Lee leading.
“Well, look here,” he said, in a hushed voice. “We've found out—no matter how, but we've found out—that the boss is goin' to dock the lasters' pay.”
“How much?” asked Abby.
“Fifteen per cent.”
“Good Lord!” said Abby.
“We ain't going to stand it,” said Lee.
“I don't see how we can stand it,” said Willy Jones, with a slightly interrogative tone directed towards Abby. Granville looked at Ellen.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Perfectly sure,” replied Granville. “What do you think about it, Ellen?”
“What are you going to do?” asked Ellen, thoughtfully.
“Strike for fifteen per cent. more before he has a chance to dock us,” cried Lee, with a hushed vehemence, looking about warily to make sure that no one overheard.
“The worst of it is, I know it all comes from Nahum Beals, and he's half cracked,” said Abby, bluntly.
“He's got the right of it, anyhow,” said Lee.
The two girls walked on, while the men lingered behind to talk.
“Do you suppose it is true, Abby?” asked Ellen.
“I don't know. I should, if it wasn't for that Lee fellow. I can't bear him. And that Nahum Beals, I believe he's half mad.”
“I feel the same way about him,” said Ellen; “but think what it would mean, fifteen per cent. less on their wages.”
“It doesn't mean so much for those young fellows, except Willy Jones; he's got enough on his shoulders.”
“No, but ever so many of the lasters have large families.”
“I hope they don't drag Willy Jones into it,” said Abby. She looked back as she spoke. Willy, in the little knot of men, was looking after her, and their eyes met. Abby colored.
“It's a shame to dock his wages,” she said.
“Whose—Willy Jones's?”
“Yes. I hope he won't get into any trouble. I can't bear that Lee.”
“Still, to dock their wages fifteen per cent.,” said Ellen, thoughtfully.
“What right has Mr. Lloyd?”
“I suppose he'd say he has the right because he has the capital.”
“I don't see why that gives him the right.”
“You'd better go and talk to him,” said Abby. “As for me, I made up my mind when I went to work in the shop that I'd got to be a bond-slave, all but my soul. That can kick free, thank the Lord.”
“I didn't make up my mind to it,” said Ellen. “I am not going to be a slave in any way, and I am not going to approve of others being slaves.”
“You think they ought to strike?”
“Yes, if it is true that Mr. Lloyd is going to dock their wages, but I don't feel sure that it is true. Mr. Beals is a queer man. Sometimes I have thought he was dangerous.”
Tuesday evening was one of those marvellously clear atmospheres of autumn which seem to be clearer from the contrast to the mists of the recent summer. The stars swarmed out in unnumbered hosts.
“Seems to me I never saw so many stars,” one would say to another. The air had the sharp cleave of the frost in it. Everything was glittering with a white rime—the house roofs, and the levels of fields on the outskirts of the little city.
Ellen had an errand down-town that evening, and she wrapped herself up warmly, putting on a fur collar which she had not worn since the winter before. She felt strangely nervous and disturbed as she set out.
“Don't you want your father to go with you?” asked Fanny, for in some occult fashion the girl's perturbation seemed to be communicated to her. She followed her to the door.
“Seems kind of lonesome for you to go alone,” she said, anxiously.
“As if I minded! Why, it is as bright as day with the electric-lights, and there are houses almost all the way,” laughed Ellen.
“Your father could go with you, or he could go for you.”
“No, he couldn't go for me. I want to get one of the new catalogues at the library and pick out a book, and there is no sense in dragging father out. He has a cold, too. Why, there is nothing in the world to be afraid of, mother.”
“Well, don't be any longer than you can help,” said Fanny.
Ellen, as she passed her grandmother's house, saw a curtain drawn with a quick motion. That happened nearly every time she passed. She knew that the old woman was always on the lookout for her, and always bent on concealing it. Mrs. Zelotes never went into her son's house, and never spoke to Ellen in those days. She had aged rapidly during the past year, and even her erect carriage had failed her. She stooped rigidly when she walked. She was fairly racked with love and hatred of Ellen. She adored her, she could have kissed the ground she walked on, and yet she was so full of wrath against her for thwarting her hopes for her own advancement that she was conscious of cruel impulses in her direction.
Ellen walked along rapidly under the vast canopy of stars, about which she presently began to have a singular impression. She felt as if they were being augmented, swelled as if by constantly oncoming legions of light from the space beyond space, and as if her little space of individuality, her tiny foothold of creation, was being constantly narrowed by them.
“I never saw so many stars,” she said to herself. She looked with wonder at the Milky Way, which was like a zone of diamond dust. Suddenly a mighty conviction of God, which was like the blazing forth of a new star, was in her soul. Ellen was not in a sense religious, and had never united with the Congregational Church, which she had always attended with her parents; she had never been responsive to efforts made towards her so-called conversion, but all at once, under the stars that night, she told herself with an absolute certainty of the truth of it. “There is something beyond everything, beyond the stars, and beyond all poor men, and beyond me, which is enough for all needs. We shall have our portion in the end.”
She had been feeling discouraged lately, although she would not own it even to herself. She saw Robert but seldom, and her aunt was no better. She often wondered if there could be anything before her but that one track of drudgery for daily bread upon which she had set out. She wondered if she ought not to say positively to Robert that there must be no thought of anything between them in the future. She wondered if she were not wronging him. Once or twice she had seen him riding with Miss Hemingway, and thought that, after all, that was a girl better suited to him, and perhaps if he had no hope whatever of her he might turn to the other to his own advantage. But to-night, with the clear stimulus of the frost in her lungs, and her eyes and soul dazzled with the multiplicity of stars, she began to have a great impetus of courage, like a soldier on the morning of battle. She felt as if she could fight for her joy and the joy of others, and victory would in the end be certain; that the chances of victory ran to infinity, and could not be measured.
However, all the while, in spite of her stimulation of spirits, there was that vague sense of excitement, as over some impending crisis. That she could not throw off. Suddenly she found herself searching the road ahead of her, and often turning at the fancied sound of a footstep. She began to wish that her father had come with her; then she told herself how foolish she was, for he had a cold, and this keen air would have been sure to give him more. The electric-car passed her, and she had a grateful sense of companionship. She looked after its diminishing light in the distance, and almost wished that she had stopped it, but car-fares had to be counted carefully.
She began to dread unspeakably passing the factories. She told herself that there was no sense in it, that it was not late, that the electric-light made it like high noon, that there was a watchman in each building, that there was nothing whatever to fear; but it was in vain. It was only by a great effort of her will that she did not turn and go back home when she reached Lloyd's.
Lloyd's came first; then, a few rods farther, on the other side of the street, McGuire's, and then Briggs's.
Ellen had a library book under her arm, and she clutched her dress-skirt firmly. A terror as to the supernatural was stealing over her. She felt as she had when waking in the night from some dreadful dream, though all the time she was dinning in her ears how foolish she was. She saw the lantern of the night-watchman in Lloyd's moving down a stair which crossed a window.
She came opposite Lloyd's, and, just as she did so, saw a dark figure descending the right-hand flight of stairs from the entrance platform. She thought, from something in the carriage, that it was Mr. Lloyd, and hung back a little, reflecting that she would keep behind him all the way to town.
The man reached the ground at the foot of the stairs, then there was a flash of fire from the shadow underneath, and a shot rang out. Ellen did what she could never have counted upon herself for doing. She ran straight towards the man, who had fallen prostrate like a log, and was down on the ground beside him, with his head on her lap, shouting for the night-watchman, whose name was McLaughlin.
“McLaughlin!” she shouted. But there was no need of it, for he had heard the shot. The cry had not left Ellen's lips before she was surrounded by men, one of whom was Granville Joy, one was Dixon, and one was John Sargent.
Joy and Sargent had met down-town, and were walking home together, when the shot rang out, and they had rushed forward. Then there was McLaughlin, the watchman of Lloyd's, and the two watchmen from Briggs's and McGuire's came pelting down their stairs, swinging their lanterns.
They all stood around the wounded man and Ellen, and stared for a second. They were half stupefied.
“My God! this is a bad job,” said Dixon.
“Go for a doctor,” cried Ellen, hoarsely.
“We're a pack of fools,” ejaculated Sargent, suddenly. Then he gave Granville Joy a push on the back. “Run for your life for the first doctor,” he cried, and was down on his knees beside the wounded man. Lloyd seemed to be quite insensible. There was a dark spot which was constantly widening in a hideous circle of death on his shirt-front when Sargent opened his coat and vest tenderly.
“Is he—” whispered Ellen. She held one of Lloyd's hands in a firm clutch as if she would in such wise hold him to life.
“No, not yet,” whispered Sargent. Dixon knelt down on the other side, and took Lloyd's other hand and felt his pulse. McLaughlin was rushing aimlessly up and down, talking as he went.
“I never heard a thing till that shot came,” he kept repeating. “He'd jest been in to get his pocketbook he'd left in the office. I never heard a thing till I heard that shot.”
Sargent was opening Lloyd's shirt. “McLaughlin, for God's sake stop talking and run for another doctor, in case Joy does not get one at once,” he cried; “then go to his house, and tell young Lloyd, but don't say anything to his wife.”
“Poor Mrs. Lloyd,” whispered Ellen.
The sick man sighed audibly. It seemed as if he had heard. The other watchmen stood looking on helplessly.
“Why in thunder don't you two scatter, and see if you can't catch him,” cried Dixon to them. “He can't be far off.”
But the words had no sooner left his mouth than up came a great Swede who was one of the workmen in Lloyd's, and he had Nahum Beals in a grasp as imperturbable as fate. The assassin, even with the strength of his fury of fanaticism, was as a reed in the grasp of this Northern giant. The Swede held him easily, walking him before him in a forced march. He had a hand of Nahum's in each of his, and he compelled Nahum's right hand to retain the hold of the discharged pistol. There was something terrible about the Swede as he drew near, a captor as unyielding and pitiless as justice itself. He was even smiling with a smile which showed his gums from ear to ear, but there was no joy in his smile, and no triumph. His blue eyes surveyed them all with the placid content of achievement.
“I have him,” he said. “I heard him shoot, and I heard him run, and I stood still until he ran into my arms. I have him.”
Nahum, in the grasp of this fate, was quivering from head to foot, but not from fear.
“Is he dead?” he shouted, eagerly.
“Hush up, you murderer,” cried Dixon. “We didn't want any such work as this, damn you. Keep fast hold of him, Olfsen.”
“I will keep him fast,” replied the Swede, smiling.
Then there was a swift clatter of wheels, and two doctors drove up, and men came running. The space in front of Lloyd's was black with men. Robert Lloyd was among them. Granville Joy had met him on the street.
“You'd better go down to the factory, quick,” he had said, hoarsely. “There's trouble there; your uncle—”
Robert pushed through the crowd, which made way respectfully for him. He knelt down beside the wounded man. “Is he—” he whispered to Sargent.
“Not yet,” whispered Sargent, “but I'm afraid it's pretty bad.”
“You here?” Robert said to Ellen.
“Yes,” she answered, “I was passing when I heard the shot.”
“See here,” said Robert, “I don't know but I am asking a good deal, but will you get into Dr. James's buggy, and let his man drive you to my aunt's, and you break it to her? She likes you. I must stay with him. I don't want her to know it first when he is brought home.”
“Yes, that will be the best way,” said the other physician, who was the one regularly employed by the Lloyds. “Some one must tell her first, and if she knows this young lady—”
“I will go,” said Ellen.
Dr. Story whispered something to Ellen as she was getting into the buggy. Then Dr. James's man drove her away down the street.
There was a little black mare harnessed to the buggy, and she went with nervous leaps of speed. When Ellen reached the Lloyd house she saw that it was blazing with light. Norman Lloyd was fond of brilliant light, and would have every room in his house illuminated from garret to cellar.
As Ellen went up the stone steps she saw a woman's figure in the room at the right, which moved to an attitude of attention when she rang the bell.
Before Ellen could inquire for Mrs. Lloyd of the maid who answered her ring there was a shrill cry from the room on the right.
“Who is it? Who is it?” demanded the voice.
Then, before Ellen could speak, Mrs. Lloyd came running out.
“What is it?” she said. “Tell me quick. I know something has happened. Tell me quick. You came in Dr. James's buggy, and the man was driving fast. Tell me.”
“Oh, Mrs. Lloyd,” said Ellen. Then she could say no more, but the other woman knew.
“Is he dead?” she asked, hoarsely.
“Oh, no, no, not dead.”
“Hurt?”
Ellen nodded, trembling.
“How?”
“He was shot.”
“Who shot him?”
“One of the workmen. They have him. Carl Olfsen found him.”
“One of the workmen, when he has always been so good!”
Suddenly Mrs. Lloyd seemed to gather herself together into the strength of action.
“Are they bringing him home?” she asked Ellen, in a sharp, decisive voice.
“I think they must be by this time.”
“Then I've got to get ready for him. Come, quick.”
There was by that time a man and two women servants standing near them, aghast. Mrs. Lloyd turned to the man.
“Go down to the drug-store and get some brandy, there isn't any in the house,” said she; “then come back as quick as you can. Maggie, you see that there is plenty of hot water. Martha, you and Ellen come up-stairs with me, quick.”
Ellen followed Mrs. Lloyd and the maid up-stairs, and, before she knew what she was doing, was assisting to put the room in perfect readiness for the wounded man. The maid was weeping all the time she worked, although she had never liked Mr. Lloyd. There was something about her mistress which was fairly abnormal. She kept looking at her. This gentle, soft-natured woman had risen above her own pain and grief to a sublime strength of misery.
“Get the camphor, quick, Martha,” she said to the maid, who flew out, with the tears streaming. Ellen stood on one side of the bed, and Mrs. Lloyd on the other. Mrs. Lloyd had stripped off the blankets, and was pinning the sheet tightly over the mattress. She seemed to know instinctively what to do.
“I wish you would bring that basin over here, and put it on the stand,” said Mrs. Lloyd. “Martha, you fetch more towels, and, Maggie, you run up garret and bring down some of those old sheets from the trunk under the window, quick.”
This maid, who was as large and as ample as her mistress, fled out of the room with heavy, noiseless pads of flat feet.
All the time Mrs. Lloyd worked she was evidently listening. She paid no attention to Ellen except to direct her. All at once she gave a great leap and stood still.
“They're coming,” said she, though Ellen had heard nothing. Ellen went close to her, and took her two fat, cold hands. She could say nothing. Then she heard the roll of carriage-wheels in the street below.
Mrs. Lloyd pulled her hands away from Ellen's and went to the head of the stairs.
“Bring him right up here,” she ordered, in a loud voice.
Ellen stood back, and the struggling procession with the prostrate man in the midst labored up the broad stairs.
“Bring him in here,” said Mrs. Lloyd, “and lay him on the bed.”
When Lloyd was stretched on the bed, the crowd drew back a little, and she bent over him.
Then she turned with a sort of fierceness to the doctors.
“Why don't you do something?” she demanded. She raised a hand with a repellant gesture towards the other men.
“You had better go now,” said she. “I thank you very much. If there is anything you can do, I will let you know.”
When Mrs. Lloyd was left with the two doctors and a young assistant, Robert, and Ellen, she said, cutting her words short as if she released every one from a mental grip:
“I have got everything ready. Shall I go out now?”
“I think you had better, Mrs. Lloyd,” said the family physician, pityingly. He went close to Ellen.
“Can't you stay with her a little while?” he whispered.
Ellen nodded.
Then the physician spoke quite loudly and cheerfully to Mrs. Lloyd.
“We are going to probe for the ball,” he said. “We must all hope for the best, Mrs. Lloyd.”
Mrs. Lloyd made no reply. She bent again over her husband with a rigid face, and kissed him on his white lips, then she went out, with Ellen following.
Norman Lloyd lived only two hours after he was shot. The efforts to remove the ball had to be abandoned. He was conscious only a few minutes. He suddenly began to look about him with comprehension.
“Robert,” he said, in a far-away voice.
Robert stooped closely over his uncle. The dying man looked up at him with an expression which he had never worn in life.
“That man was insane,” whispered he, faintly. Then he added, “Look out for her, if she has to go through the operation. Take care of her. Make it as easy for her as you can.”
“Then you know, Uncle Norman,” gasped Robert.
“All the time, but it—pleased her to think I—did not. Don't let her know I knew. Take care—”
Then Norman Lloyd relapsed into unconsciousness, and the whole room and the whole house became clamorous with his stertorous breathing. Mrs. Lloyd and Ellen came and stood in the doorway. The doctor whispered to them. Then the breathing ceased, although at first it was inconceivable that the silence did not continue to ring with it, and Mrs. Lloyd came into the room.
When Mrs. Lloyd entered the room, the attention of every one was taken from the dead man on the bed and concentrated upon the woman. Dr. Story, a nervous, intense, elderly man with a settled frown of perplexity over keen eyes, which he had gotten from a struggle of forty years with unanswerable problems of life and death, stepped towards her hastily. Robert pressed close to her side. Ellen came behind her, holding in a curious, instinctive fashion to a fold of the older woman's gown, as if she had been a mother holding back a child from a sudden topple to its hurt. Everybody expected her to make some heart-breaking manifestation. She did nothing. At that moment the sublime unselfishness of the woman, which was her one strength of character, seemed actually to spread itself, as with wings, before them all. She moved steadily, close to her husband on the bed. She gazed at that profile of rigid calmness and enforced peace, which, although the head lay low, seemed to have an effect of upward motion, as if it were cleaving the mystery of space. Mrs. Lloyd laid her hand upon her husband's forehead; she felt a slight incredulousness of death, because it was still warm. She took his hands, drew them softly together, and folded them upon his breast. Then she turned and faced them all with an angelic expression.
“He did not realize it to suffer much?” she said.
“No, Mrs. Lloyd,” replied Dr. Story, quickly. “No, I assure you that he suffered very little.”
“He seemed very happy when he died, Aunt Lizzie,” said Robert, huskily.
Mrs. Lloyd looked away from them all around the room. It was a magnificent apartment. Norman Lloyd had had an artistic taste as well as wealth. The furnishings had always been rather beyond Mrs. Lloyd's appreciation, but she admired them kindly. She took in every detail; the foam of rich curtains at the great windows, the cut-glass and silver on the dressing-table, the pale softness of a polar-bear skin beside the bed, the lifelike insistence of the costly pictures on the walls.
“He's gone where it is a great deal more beautiful,” she said to them, like a child. “He's gone where there's better treasures than these which he had here.”
They all looked at her in amazement. It actually seemed as if, for the moment, the woman's sole grief was over the loss to her husband of those things which he had on earth—the treasures of his mortal state.
Robert took hold of his aunt's arm and led her, quite unresisting, from the room, and as she went she felt for Ellen's hand. “It is time she was home,” she said to Robert. “Her folks will be worried about her. She's been a real comfort to me.”
It was the first time that Ellen had ever seen death, that she had ever seen the living confronted with it. She felt as if a wave were breaking over her own head as she clung fast to Mrs. Lloyd's hand.
“Sha'n't I stay?” she whispered, pitifully, to her. “If I can send word to my mother—”
“No, you dear child,” replied Mrs. Lloyd, “you've done enough, and you will have to be up early in the morning.” Then she checked herself. “I forgot,” said she to Robert; “the factory will be closed till after the funeral, won't it?”
“Of course it will, Aunt Lizzie.”
“And the workmen will be paid just the same, of course,” said Mrs. Lloyd. “Now, can't you take her home, Robert?”
“Oh, don't mind about me,” cried Ellen.
“You can have a horse put into the buggy,” said Mrs. Lloyd.
“Oh, you mustn't leave her now,” Ellen whispered to Robert. “Let somebody else take me—Dr. James—”
“I would rather you took her,” said Mrs. Lloyd. “And you needn't worry about his leaving me, dear child; the doctor will stay until he comes back.”
As Robert was finally going out his aunt caught his arm and looked at him with a radiant expression. “He will never know aboutmenow,” said she, “and it won't be long before I— Oh, I feel as if I had gotten rid of my own death.”
She was filled with inexpressible thankfulness that she had herself to bear what she had dreaded for her husband. “Only think how hard it would have been for Norman,” she said to Cynthia, the next day.
Cynthia looked at her wonderingly. She could have understood this feeling over a dearly beloved child. “You are a good woman, Lizzie,” she said, in a tone of pitiful respect.
“Not half as good a woman as he was a man,” returned Mrs. Lloyd, jealously. “Norman wasn't a professor, I know, but he was a believer. You don't think it is necessary to be a professor in order to be saved, do you, Cynthia?”
“I certainly do not,” Cynthia replied. “I wish you would go and lie down, Lizzie.”
“Oh, I can't. I wouldn't let anybody do these things but me, for the whole world.” Mrs. Lloyd was arranging flowers, tuberoses and white carnations, in vases, and the whole house was scented with them. She looked ghastly, yet still unconquerably happy. She had now no reason to conceal the ravages of disease, and her color was something frightful. Still, she did not suffer as much, for her mind had overborne her body to such an extent that she had the mastery for the time, to a certain extent, of those excruciating stabs of pain. People looked at her incredulously. They could not believe that she felt as she talked, that she was as happy and resigned as she looked, but it was all true. It was either an abnormal state into which her husband's death had thrown her, or one too normal to be credited. She looked at it all with a supreme childishness and simplicity. She simply believed that her husband was in heaven, where she should join him; that he was beyond all suffering which might have come to him through her, and all that troubled her was the one consideration of his having been forced to leave his treasures of earth. She looked at various things which had been prized by the dead man, and found her chief comfort in saying to the minister or Cynthia or Robert that Norman had loved these, but he would have that which was infinitely more precious. She even gazed out of the window, that Tuesday night, and saw her nephew driving away with Ellen, and reflected, with pain, that her husband had been fond and proud of that bay. She was a little at a loss to conceive what could make up to her husband for that in another world, but she succeeded, and evolved from her own loving fancy, and her recollection of the Old Testament, a conception of some wonderful creature, shod with thunder and maned with a whirlwind. Her disease, and a drug she had been taking of late, stimulated her imagination to results of grotesque pathos, but she was comforted.
That night when they were alone, Robert turned to the girl at his side with a sudden motion. It was no time for love-making, for that was in the mind of neither of them, but the bereavement of this other woman, and the tragedy of her state, filled him with a sort of protective pain towards the girl who might some time have to suffer through him the same loss.
“Are you all tired out, dear?” he said, and passed his free arm around her waist.
“No,” replied Ellen. Then, since she was only a girl, and overwrought, having been through a severe strain, she broke down, and began to cry.
Robert drew her closer, and she hid her face on his shoulder. “Poor little girl, it has been very hard for you,” he whispered.
“Oh, don't think of me,” sobbed Ellen. “But I can't bear it, the way she acts and looks. It is sadder than grief.”
“She is not going to live long herself, dear,” said Robert, in a stifled voice.
“And he—did not know?”
“Hush! yes; but you must never tell any one. She tried to keep it from him. That is her comfort.”
“Oh,” said Ellen. She looked up at the white face of the young man bending over her, and suddenly the realization of a love that was mightier than all the creatures who came of it and all who followed it was over her.
When Ellen did not return, there was some alarm in the Brewster household. Mrs. Zelotes came over, finally, in a quiver of anxiety.
“Maybe I had better start out and see if I can find her,” said Andrew.
“I think you had better,” returned his mother. “She went before eight o'clock, and it's most midnight, and I've set at my window watchin' ever since. I don't see what you've been thinkin' about, waitin' all this time. I guess if I was a man I shouldn't have waited.”
“I think she may have gone in to see Abby Atkins—it's on the way—and not realized how late it was,” said Fanny, obstinately, but with a very white face. She drew her thread through with a jerk. It knotted, and she broke it off viciously.
“Fiddlesticks!” said her mother-in-law.
“There's no use imaginin' things,” said Fanny, angrily; “but I think myself you'd better go now, Andrew, and see if you can see anything of her.”
“I'm goin' with him,” announced Mrs. Zelotes.
“Now, mother, you'd better stay where you be,” said Andrew, putting on his hat. Then the door flew open, and Amos Lee, who had seen the light in the windows, and was burning to impart the news of the tragedy, rushed in.
“Heard what's happened?” he cried out.
They all thought of Ellen. “What?” demanded Andrew, in a terrible voice. Fanny dropped her work and stared at him, with her chin falling as if she were dying. Mrs. Zelotes made a queer gurgling noise in her throat. Lee stared at them a second, bewildered by the effect of his own words, although they had for him such a tragic import. Andrew caught hold of him in a grasp like the clamp of a machine. “What?” he demanded again.
“The boss has been shot,” cried Lee, getting his breath.
Andrew dropped his arm, and they all stared at him. Lee went on fluently, as if he were a fakir at a fair.
“Nahum Beals did it. The boss went back to the office to get his pocketbook; McLaughlin saw him; then he went down the stairs; Nahum, he—he fired; he had been hidin' underneath the stairs. Carl Olfsen caught him, and he's in jail. Your daughter she was there when the shot came, and run up and held his head. The young boss he sent her in Dr. James's buggy to Mrs. Lloyd to break the news. She 'ain't got home?”
“No,” gasped Andrew.
“The boss has been shot; he's dead by this time,” repeated Lee. “Beals did it; they've got him.” There was the most singular evenness and impartiality in his tone, although he was evidently strained to a high pitch of excitement. It was impossible to tell whether he exulted in or was aghast at the tragedy.
“Oh, that poor woman!” cried Fanny.
“I'd like to know what they'll do next,” cried Mrs. Zelotes. “I should call it pretty work.”
“Nahum Beals has acted to me as if he was half crazy for some time,” said Fanny.
“No doubt about it,” said Lee; “but I shouldn't wonder if he had to swing.”
“It's dreadful,” said Fanny. “I wonder when she's comin' home.”
“Seems as if they might have got somebody besides that girl to have gone there,” said Mrs. Zelotes.
“She happened to be right on the spot,” said Lee, importantly.
Andrew seemed speechless; he leaned against the mantel-shelf, gazing from one to the other, breathing hard. He had had bitter feelings against the murdered man, and a curious sense of guilt was over him. He felt almost as if he were the murderer.
“Andrew, I dun'no' but you'd better go up there and see if she's comin' home,” said Fanny; and he answered heavily that maybe he had better, when they heard wheels, which stopped before the house.
“They're bringin' her home,” said Lee.
Andrew ran and threw open the front door. He had a glimpse of Robert's pale face, nodding to him from the buggy as he drove away, and Ellen came hastening up the walk.
“Well, Ellen, this is pretty dreadful news,” said her father, tremulously.
“So you have heard?”
“Amos Lee has just come in. It's a terrible thing, Ellen.”
“Yes, it's terrible,” returned Ellen, in a quick, strained voice. She entered the sitting-room, and when she met her mother's anxious, tender eyes, she stood back against the wall, with her hands to her face, sobbing. Fanny ran to her, but her grandmother was quicker. She had her arms around the girl before the mother had a chance.
“If they couldn't get somebody besides you,” she said, in a voice of intensest love and anger, “I should call it pretty work. Now you go straight to bed, Ellen Brewster, and I'm goin' to make a bowl of sage tea, and bring it up, and see if it won't quiet your nerves. I call it pretty work.”
“Yes, you'd better go to bed, Ellen,” said Andrew, gulping as if he were swallowing a sob.
Mrs. Zelotes fairly forced Ellen towards the door, Fanny following.
“Don't talk and wake Amabel,” whispered Ellen, forcing back her sobs.
“Was he dead when you got there, Ellen?” called out Lee.
Mrs. Zelotes turned back and looked at him. “It's after midnight, and time for you to be goin' home,” she said. Then the three disappeared. Lee grinned sheepishly at Andrew.
“Your mother is a stepper of an old woman,” said he.
“It's awful news,” said Andrew, soberly. “Whatever anybody may have felt, nobody expected—”
“Of course they didn't,” retorted Lee, quickly. “Nahum went a step too far.” He started for the door as he spoke.
“Well, he was crazy, without any doubt!” said Andrew.
“He'll have to swing for it all the same,” said Lee, going out.
“It don't seem right, if he wasn't himself when he did it.”
“Lord, we're all crazy when it comes to things like that,” returned Lee. Before closing the door he flashed his black eyes and white teeth at Andrew, who felt repelled.
He sat down beside the table and leaned his head upon it. To his fancy all creation seemed to circle about that one dead man. Mr. Lloyd had been for years the arbiter of his destiny, almost of his life. Andrew had regarded him with almost feudal loyalty and admiration, and lately with bitter revolt and hatred, and now he was dead. He felt no sorrow, but rather a terrible remorse because he felt no sorrow. All the bitter thoughts which he had ever had against Lloyd seemed to marshal themselves before him like an accusing legion of ghosts. And with it all there was a sense of desolation, as if some force which had been necessary to his full living had gone out of creation.
“It's over thirty years since I went to work under him,” Andrew thought, and he gave a dry sob. At that moment a wonderful pity and sorrow for the dead man seemed to spring up in his soul like a light. He felt as if he loved him.
Norman Lloyd's funeral was held in the First Baptist Church of Rowe. It was crowded. Mr. Lloyd had been the most prominent manufacturer and the wealthiest man in the city. His employés filled up a great space in the body of the church.
Andrew went with his mother and wife. They arrived quite early. When Andrew saw the employés of Lloyd's marching in, he drew a great sigh. He looked at the solemn black thing raised on trestles before the pulpit with an emotion which he could not himself understand. “That man 'ain't treated me well enough for me to care anything about him,” he kept urging upon himself. “He never paid any more attention to me than a gravel-stone under his feet; there ain't any reason why I should have cared about him, and I don't; it can't be that I do.” Yet arguing with himself in this way, he continued to eye the casket which held his dead employer with an unyielding grief.
Mrs. Zelotes sat like a black, draped statue at the head of the pew, but her eyes behind her black veil were sharply observant. She missed not one detail. She saw everything; she counted the wreaths and bouquets on the casket, and stored in her mind, as vividly as she might have done some old mourning-piece, the picture of the near relatives advancing up the aisle.
Mrs. Lloyd came leaning on her nephew's arm, and there were Cynthia Lennox and a distant cousin, an elderly widow who had been summoned to the house of death.
Ellen sat in the body of the church, with the employés of Lloyd's, between Abby Atkins and Maria. She glanced up when the little company of mourners entered, then cast her eyes down again and compressed her lips. Maria began to weep softly, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes. Ellen's mother had begged her not to sit with the employés, but with her and her father and grandmother in their own pew, but the girl had refused.
“I must sit where I belong,” said she.
“Maybe she thinks it would look as if she was putting on airs on account of—” Fanny said to Andrew when Ellen had gone out.
“I guess she's right,” returned Andrew.
The employés had contributed money for a great floral piece composed of laurel and white roses, in the shape of a pillow. Mamie Brady, who sat behind Ellen, leaned over, and in a whisper whistled into her ear.
“Ain't it handsome?” said she. “Can you see them flowers from the hands?”
Ellen nodded impatiently. The great green and white decoration was in plain view from her seat, and as she looked at it she wondered if it were a sarcasm or poetic truth beyond the scope of the givers, the pillow of laurel and roses, emblematic of eternal peace, presented by the hard hands of labor to dead capital.
Of course the tragic circumstances of Norman Lloyd's death increased the curiosity of the public. Gradually the church became crowded by a slow and solemn pressure. The aisles were filled. The air was heavy with the funeral flowers. The minister spoke at length, descanting upon the character of the deceased, his uprightness and strict integrity in business, avoiding pitfalls of admissions of weaknesses with the expertness of a juggler. He was always regarded as very apt at funerals, never saying too much and never too little. The church was very still, the whole audience wrapped in a solemn hush, until the minister began to pray; then there was a general bending of heads and devout screening of faces with hands. Then all at once a sob from a woman sounded from the rear of the church. It was hysterical, and had burst from the restraint of the weeper. People turned about furtively.
“Who was that?” whispered Mamie Brady, after a prolonged stare over her shoulders from under her red frizzle of hair. “It ain't any of the mourners.”
Ellen shook her head.
“Do keep still, Mamie Brady,” whispered Abby Atkins.
The sob came again, and this time it was echoed from the pew where sat the members of the dead man's family. Mrs. Lloyd began weeping convulsively. Her state of mind had raised her above natural emotion, and yet her nerves weakly yielded to it when given such an impetus. She wept like a child, and now and then a low murmur of heart-broken complaint came from her lips, and was heard distinctly over the church. Other women began to weep. The minister prayed, and his words of comfort seemed like the air in a discordant medley of sorrow.
Andrew Brewster's face twitched; he held his hands clutched tightly. Fanny was weeping, but the old woman at the head of the pew sat immovable.
When the services were over, and the great concourse of people had passed around the casket and viewed the face of the dead, with keen, sidewise observation of the funeral flowers, Mrs. Zelotes pressed out as fast as she was able without seeming to crowd, and caught up with Mrs. Pointdexter, who had sat in the rear of the church.
She came alongside as they left the church, and the two old women moved slowly down the sidewalk, with lingering glances at the funeral procession drawn up in front of the church.
“Who was that cryin' so in back; did you see?” asked Mrs. Zelotes of Mrs. Pointdexter, whose eyes were red, and whose face bore an expression of meek endurance of a renewal of her own experience of sorrow.
“It was Joe Martin's wife,” said she. “I sat just behind her.”
“What made her?”
Then both started, for the woman who had sobbed came up behind them, her brother, an elderly man, trying to hold her back.
“You stop, John,” she cried. “I heard what she said, and I'm goin' to tell her. I'm goin' to tell everybody. Nobody shall stop me. There the minister spoke and spoke and spoke, and he never said a word as to any good he'd done. I'm goin' to tell. I wanted to stan' right up in the church an' tell everybody. He told me not to say a word about it, an' I never did whilst he was livin', but now I'm goin' to stan' up for the dead.” The woman pulled herself loose from her brother, who stood behind her, frightened, and continually thrusting out a black-gloved hand of remonstrance. People began to gather. The woman, who was quite old, had a face graven with hard lines of habitual restraint, which was now, from its utter abandon, at once pathetic and terrible. She made a motion as if she were thrusting her own self into the background.
“I'm goin' to speak,” she said, in a high voice. “I held my tongue for the livin', but I'm goin' to speak for the dead. My poor husband died twenty years ago, got his hand cut in a machine in Lloyd's, and had lockjaw, and I was left with my daughter that had spinal disease, and my little boy that died, and my own health none too good, and—and he—he—came to my house, one night after the funeral, and—and told me he was goin' to look out for me, and he has, he has. That blessed man gave me five dollars every week of my life, and he buried poor Annie when she died, and my little boy, and he made me promise never to say a word about it. Five dollars every week of my life—five dollars.”
The woman's voice ended in a long-drawn, hysterical wail. The other women who had been listening began to weep. Mrs. Pointdexter, when she and Mrs. Zelotes moved on, was sobbing softly, but Mrs. Zelotes's face, though moved, wore an expression of stern conjecture.
“I'd like to know how many things like that Norman Lloyd did,” said she. “I never supposed he was that kind of a man.”
She had a bewildered feeling, as if she had to reconstruct her own idea of the dead man as a monument to his memory, and reconstruction was never an easy task for the old woman.
A Short time after Norman Lloyd's death, Ellen, when she had reached the factory one morning, met a stream of returning workmen. They swung along, and on their faces were expressions of mingled solemnity and exultation, as of children let out to play because of sorrow in the house, which will not brook the jarring inconsequence of youth.
Mamie Brady, walking beside a young man as red-haired as herself, called out, with ill-repressed glee, “Turn round, Ellen Brewster; there ain't no shop to-day.”
The young man at her side, nervously meagre, looked at Ellen with a humorous contortion of this thin face, then he caught Mamie Brady by the arm, and swung her into a hopity-skip down the sidewalk. Just behind them came Granville Joy, with another man. Ellen stopped. “What is it?” she said to him. “Why is the shop closed?”
Granville stopped, and let the stream of workmen pass him and Ellen. They stood in the midst of it, separating it, as rock will separate a current. “Mrs. Lloyd is dead,” Granville replied, soberly.
“I heard she was very low last night,” Ellen returned, in a hushed voice.
Then she passed Granville, who stood a second gazing wistfully after her, before he resumed his homeward way. He told himself quite accurately that she had purposely refrained from turning, in order to avoid walking with himself. A certain resentment seized him. It seemed to him that something besides his love had been slighted. “She needn't have thought I was going to make love to her going home in broad daylight with all these folks,” he reflected, and he threw up his head impatiently.
The man with whom he had been walking when Ellen appeared lingered for him to rejoin him. “Wonder how many shops they'd shut up for you and me,” said the man, with a sort of humorous bitterness. He had a broad face, seemingly fixed in an eternal mask of laughter, and yet there were hard lines in it, and a forehead of relentless judgment overhung his wide bow of mouth and his squat and wrinkled nose.
“Guess not many,” replied Granville, echoing the man in a way unusual to him.
“And yet if it wa'n't for us they couldn't keep the shop running at all,” said the man, whose name was Tom Peel.
“That's so,” said Granville, with a slight glance over his shoulder.
Ellen had met the Atkins girls, and had turned, and was coming back with them. It was as he had thought.
“If the new boss cuts down fifteen per cent., as the talk is, what be you goin' to do?” asked Tom Peel.
“I ain't goin' to stand it,” replied Granville, fiercely.
“Ain't goin' to be swept clean by the new broom, hey?” said the man, with a widened grin.
“No!” thundered Granville—“not by him, nor any one like him. Damn him!”
Tom Peel's grin widened still further into an intense but silent laugh.
Meantime Ellen was walking with Abby and Maria.
“I wonder how we're going to get along with young Lloyd,” said Abby.
Ellen looked at her keenly. “Why?” she said.
“Oh, I heard the men talking the other night after I'd gone to bed. Maybe it isn't true that he's thinking of cutting down the wages.”
“It can't be,” said Ellen.
“I say so, too,” said Maria.
“Well, I hope not,” said Abby. “You can't tell. Some chimneys always have the wind whistling in them, and I suppose it's about so with a boot and shoe shop. It don't follow that there's going to be a hurricane.”
They had come to the entrance of the street where the Atkins sisters lived, and Ellen parted from them.
She kept on her way quite alone. They had walked slowly, and the other operatives had either boarded cars or had gone out of sight.
Ellen, when she turned, faced the northwest, out of which a stiff wind was blowing. She thrust a hand up each jacket-sleeve, folding her arms, but she let the fierce wind smite her full in the face without blenching. She had a sort of delight in facing a wind like that, and her quick young blood kept her from being chilled. The sidewalk was frozen. There was no snow, and the day before there had been a thaw. One could see on this walk, hardened into temporary stability, the footprints of hundreds of the sons and daughters of labor. Read rightly, that sidewalk in the little manufacturing city was a hieroglyphic of toil, and perhaps of toil as tending to the advance of the whole world. Ellen did not think of that, for she was occupied with more personal considerations, thinking of the dead woman in the great Lloyd house. She pictured her lying dead on that same bed whereon she had seen her husband lie dead. All the ghastly concomitants of death came to her mind. “They will turn off all that summer heat, and leave her alone in this freezing cold,” she thought. She remembered the sound of that other woman's kind voice in her ears, and she saw her face when she told her the dreadful news of her husband's death. She felt a sob rising in her throat, but forced it back. What Abby had told concerning Mrs. Lloyd's happiness in the face of death seemed to her heart-breaking, though she knew not why. That enormous, almost transcendent trust in that which was absolutely unknown seemed to engulf her.
When she reached home, her mother looked at her in astonishment. She was sewing on the interminable wrappers. Andrew was paring apples for pies. “What be you home for—be you sick?” asked Fanny. Andrew gazed at her in alarm.
“No, I am not sick,” replied Ellen, shortly. “Mrs. Lloyd is dead, and the factory's closed.”
“I heard she was very low—Mrs. Jones told me so yesterday,” said Fanny, in a hushed voice. Andrew began paring another apple. He was quite pale.
“When is the funeral to be, did you hear?” asked Fanny. Ellen was hanging up her hat and coat in the entry.
“Day after to-morrow.”
“Have you heard anything about the hands sending flowers?”
“No.”
“I suppose they will,” said Fanny, “as long as they sent one to him. Well, she was a good woman, and it's a mark of respect, and I 'ain't anything to say against it, but I can't help feeling as if it was a tax.”
It was some time after Mrs. Lloyd's death. Ellen had not seen Robert except as she had caught from time to time a passing glimpse of him in the factory. One night she overheard her father and mother talking about him after she had gone to bed, the sitting-room door having been left ajar.
“I thought he'd come and call after his aunt died,” she heard Fanny say. “I've always thought he liked Ellen, an' here he is now, with all that big factory, an' plenty of money.”
“Mebbe he will,” replied Andrew, with a voice in which were conflicting emotions, pride and sadness, and a struggle for self-renunciation.
“It would be a splendid thing for her,” said Fanny.
“It would be a splendid thing forhim,” returned Andrew, with a flash.
“Land, of course it would! You needn't be so smart, Andrew Brewster. I guess I know what Ellen is, as well as you. Any man might be proud to get her—I don't care who—whether he's Robert Lloyd, or who, but that don't alter what I say. It would be a splendid chance for Ellen. Only think of that great Lloyd house, and it must be full of beautiful things—table linen, and silver, and what-not. I say it would be a splendid thing for her, and she'd be above want all her life—that's something to be considered when we 'ain't got any more than we have to leave her, and she workin' the way she is.”
“Yes, that's so,” assented Andrew, with a heavy sigh, as of one who looks upon life from under the mortification of an incubus of fate.
“We'd ought to think of her best good,” said Fanny, judiciously. “I've been thinkin' every evening lately that he'd be comin'. I've had the fire in the parlor stove all ready to touch off, an' I've kept dusted in there. I know he liked her, but mebbe he's like all the rest of the big-bugs.”
“What do you mean?” asked Andrew, with an inward qualm of repulsion. He always hated unspeakably to hear his wife say “big-bugs” in that tone. Although he was far from being without humility, he was republican to the core in his estimate of his own status in his own free country. In his heart, as long as he kept the law of God and man, he recognized no “big-bugs.” It was one of the taints of his wife's ancestry which grated upon him from time to time.
“Oh, well, mebbe he don't want to be seen callin' on a shop-girl.”
“Then he'd better keep away, that's all!” cried Andrew, furiously.
“Oh, well, mebbe it ain't so,” said Fanny. “He's always seemed to me like a sensible feller, and I know he's liked Ellen, an' lots of girls that work in shops marry rich. Look at Annie Graves, married that factory boss over to Pemberton, an' has everythin'. She'd worked in his factory years. Mebbe it ain't that.”
“Ellen don't act as if she minded anything about his not comin',” said Andrew, anxiously.
“Land, no; she ain't that kind. She's too much like her grandmother, but there 'ain't been a night lately that she 'ain't done her hair over when she got home from the shop and changed her dress.”
“She always changes her dress, don't she?” said Andrew.
“Oh yes, she always has done that. I guess she likes to get rid of the leather smell for a while; but she has put on that pretty, new, red silk waist, and I've seen her watchin', though she's never said anything.”
“You don't suppose she—” began Andrew, in a voice of intensest anxiety and indignant tenderness.
“Land, no; Ellen Brewster ain't a girl to fret herself much over any man unless she's sure he wants her; trust her. Don't you worry about that. All I mean is, I know she's had a kind of an idea that he might come.”
Ellen, up-stairs, lay listening against her will, and felt herself burning with mortified pride and shame. She said to herself that she would never put on that red silk waist again of an evening; she would not even do her hair over. It was quite true that she had thought that Robert might come, that he might renew his offer, now that he was so differently situated, and the obstacles, on his side, at least, removed. She told herself all the time that the obstacles on her own were still far from removed. She asked herself how could she, even if this man loved her and wished to marry her, allow him to support all her family, although he might be able to do so. She often told herself that she ought perhaps to have pride enough to refuse, and yet she watched for him to come. She had reflected at first that it was, of course, impossible for him to seem to take advantage of the deaths which had left him with this independence, that he must stay away for a while from motives of delicacy; but now the months were going, and she began to wonder if he never would come. Every night, when she took off the pretty, red silk waist, donned in vain, and let down her fair lengths of hair, it was with a sinking of her heart, and a sense of incredulous unhappiness. Ellen had always had a sort of sanguinity of happiness and of the petting of Providence as well as of her friends. However, the girl had, in spite of her childlike trust in the beauty of her life, plenty of strength to meet its refutal, and a pride equal to her grandmother's. In case Robert Lloyd should never approach her again, she would try to keep one face of her soul always veiled to her inmost consciousness.
The next evening she was careful not to put on her red silk waist, but changed her shop dress for her old blue woollen, and only smoothed her hair. She even went to bed early in order to prove to her mother that she expected nobody.
“You ain't goin' to bed as early as this, Ellen?” her mother said, as she lighted her lamp.
“Yes, I'm going to bed and read.”
“Seems as if somebody might be in,” said Fanny, awkwardly.
“I don't know who,” Ellen returned, with a gentle haughtiness.
Andrew colored. He was at his usual task of paring apples. Andrew, in lieu of regular work outside, assisted in these household tasks, that his wife might have more time to sew. He looked unusually worn and old that night.
“If anybody does come, Ellen will have to get up, that's all,” said Fanny, when the girl had gone up-stairs. Then she pricked up her ears, for the electric-car had stopped before the house. Then it went on, with a sharp clang of the bell and a gathering rush of motion.
“That car stopped,” Fanny said, breathlessly, her work falling from her fingers. Andrew and she both listened intently, then footsteps were heard plainly coming around the path at the side of the house.
Fanny's face fell. “It's only some of the men,” said she, in a low voice. Then there came a knock on the side door, and Andrew ushered in John Sargent, Joe Atkins, and Amos Lee. Nahum Beals did not come in those days, for he was in prison awaiting trial for the murder of Norman Lloyd. However, Amos Lee's note was as impressive as his. He called often with Sargent and Atkins. They could not shake him off. He lay in wait for them at street corners, and joined them. He never saw Ellen alone, and did not openly proclaim his calls as meant for her. She prevented him from doing that in a manner which he could not withstand, full of hot and reckless daring as he was. When he entered that night he looked around with keen furtiveness, and was evidently listening and watching for her, though presently his voice rose high in discussion with the others. After a while the man who lived next door dropped in, and his wife with him. She and Fanny withdrew to the dining-room with their sewing—for the woman also worked on wrappers—and left the sitting-room to the men.
“It beats all how they like to talk,” said the woman, with a large-minded leniency, “and they never get anywhere,” she added. “They work themselves all up, and never get anywhere; but men are all like that.”
“Yes, they be,” assented Fanny.
“Jest hear that Lee feller,” said the woman.
Amos Lee's voice was audible over the little house, and could have been heard in the yard, for it had an enormous carrying quality. It was the voice of a public ranter. Ellen, up in her chamber, lying in her bed, with a lamp at her side, reading, closely covered from the cold—for the room was unheated—heard him with a shiver of disgust and repulsion, and yet with a fierce sympathy and loyalty. She could not distinguish every word he said, but she knew well what he was talking about.
Mrs. Lloyd's death had made a certain hush in the ferment of revolt at Lloyd's, but now it was again on the move. There was a strong feeling of dislike to young Lloyd among the workmen. His uncle had heaped up ill-feeling as well as wealth as a heritage for him. The older Lloyd had never been popular, and Robert had succeeded to all his unpopularity, and was fast gathering his own. He was undoubtedly disposed to follow largely his uncle's business methods. He had admired them, they had proved successful, and he had honestly seen nothing culpable in them as business methods go; so it was not strange that he tried to copy them when he came into charge of Lloyd's. He was inclined to meet opposition with the same cool inflexibility of persistency in his own views, and was disposed to consult his own interests and carry out his own plans with no more brooking of interference than the skipper of a man-o'-war. Therefore, when it happened, shortly after his aunt's death, that he conceived a dissatisfaction with some prominent spirits among union men, he discharged them without the slightest reference to the fact that they were old and skilful workmen, and employed non-union men from another town in their places. He had, indeed, the object of making in time his factory entirely non-union. He said to himself that he would be dictated to by no labor organization under the sun, and that went a step beyond his uncle, inasmuch as the elder Lloyd had always made his own opinion subservient to good business policy; but Robert was younger and his blood hotter. It happened, also, a month later, when he began to see that business had fallen off considerably (indeed, it was the beginning of a period of extreme business depression), and that he could no longer continue on the same scale with the same profits, that instead of assembling the men in different departments, communicating the situation to them, and submitting them a reduced price-list for consideration, as was the custom with the more pacific of the manufacturers in the vicinity, he posted it up in the different rooms with no ado whatever. That had been his uncle's method, but never in the face of such brewing discontent as was prevalent in Lloyd's at that time. It was an occasion when the older man would have shut down, but Robert had, along with his arbitrary impetuosity, a real dislike to shut down on account of the men, for which they would have been the last to give him credit. “Poor devils,” he told himself, standing in the office window one night, and seeing them pour out and disappear into the early darkness beyond the radius of the electric-lights, “I can't turn them adrift without a dollar in midwinter. I'll try to run the factory a while longer on a reduced scale, if I only meet expenses.”
He saw Ellen going out, descending the steps with the Atkins girls, and as she passed the light, her fair head shone out for a second like an aureole. A great wave of tenderness came over him. He reflected that it would make no difference to her, that it was only a question of time before he lifted her forever out of the ranks of toil. The impulse was strong upon him to go to see her that night, but he had set himself to wait three months after his aunt's death, and the time was not yet up. He had a feeling that he might seem to be, and possibly would be, taking advantage of his bereavement if he went sooner, and that Ellen herself might think so.
It was that very night that Ellen had gone to bed early, to prove not only to her mother but to herself that she did not expect him, and the men came to see Andrew. Once she heard Amos Lee's voice raised to a higher pitch than ever, and distinguished every word.
“I tell you he's goin' to cut the wages to-morrow,” said he.
There was a low rumble of response, which Ellen could not understand, but Lee's answer made it evident.
“How do I know?” he thundered. “It is in the air. He don't tell any more than his uncle did; but you wait and see, that's all.”
“I don't believe it,” the girl up-stairs said to herself, indignantly and loyally. “He can't cut the wages of all those poor men, he with all his uncle's money.”
But the next morning the reduced price-list was posted on the walls of the different rooms in Lloyd's.