In a few weeks, she had her rooms rented to gentlemen, but they only
stayed one week at a time. She saw it was on account of the children,
who would cry at night sometimes. Her friend and adviser then said,
“Take women, for you must live and no one wants them in rooms; do your
best and give them the use of your kitchen.” The house filled; she could
pay her rent and gas bill, with a little over. Her husband had been
keeping sober now for a long time. Perhaps he had reformed—how she hoped
that he had. A friend took him up again and got him something to do, but
he had to travel and that left her alone with the children. Six weeks
had passed since he had left. All the money she had to live upon for the
four of them, counting the baby, was $3.00 per week and they lived in an
expensive city. She had eaten bread enough to keep her alive, no butter,
not even syrup. She drank the weakest tea, sweetened to soak the bread
in. For six long weeks nothing else had passed her lips. One evening one
of the roomers found her sitting with her baby in her lap, her elbows on
the table, her hands holding her temples, while her poor little baby was
trying to nurse her dry breast, tugging and pounding it with his little
fists, kicking, and occasionally giving vent in a disappointed, pitiful
cry. The roomer spoke to her, but she was unconscious from the pain in
her head, caused by starvation. The woman took the baby and fed it and
got it to sleep, then did what she could for the mother, working over
her all night. In a few days her husband came home, but only for a day.
He had brought her a few dollars, all he could spare, he had said, after
paying his own board and expenses. In leaving, he took a heavier coat
and left the one he had been wearing hanging up among her things. In
taking it down, a letter dropped from its pocket that she found was
addressed to herself. The stamp showed that it had been received a year
before. She found that it was an answer supposed to have come from her
to a money lender who got their piano. She went to him to see what it
meant and found that her husband had imitated her writing and had
received from him about a fifth of the money she was to have received
from her father’s estate; by this act the money lender was able to
secure it all. What had Jack done with it? In the midst of all the rest
of her poverty he had robbed her of that! The money lender could send
him to prison if she demanded it from him. This was the last straw! She
wrote to him never to come back.
It had been hard enough to bear children and then support them, but
injury to insult had followed. What was she now? A drunken gambler’s
wife—ah, even worse than that—he was a forger as well. Her twenty-first
birthday would soon be here. Oh, how she had looked forward to that
time! She had intended going to her mother and telling her all and
asking what she should do for her children, but it was impossible now.
One day a new roomer told her she wished she knew of some one who could
sew fur, as she needed help.
Mira said, “I would like to learn it if you will teach me.” That was the
first time she had ever seen it done but she went at it diligently until
she was as proficient as her teacher. It was paying work and she soon
found that she could make her living by it.
We left her reading her mother’s letter filled with messages of love and
begging her to come back to them once more, if only for a short visit.
Oh, if she only could! How little they knew at home of her hard
struggle! Possibly they thought she was as selfish as she had been when
she left them all. When it was over she would tell them, but not before.
Only one year before, she shuddered as she remembered how she had walked
through the streets of the wealthy and fashionable people, trying to
find the person who had answered her advertisement for fur work. As she
passed the well lighted homes on the streets and saw the luxury, she
realized how she had become year by year poorer. Happy faces, free from
care, were in those homes.
Finally she found the place. The lady had given the work to another, so
she had her walk for nothing. Weary in mind and body, she returned home.
There were her children huddled together on the couch. Evidently they
had cried themselves to sleep. The oldest had the baby in her arms. “My
God! what a contrast to the homes I have just had a glimpse of,” she
thought. “How I have worked and struggled and tried to live in the last
two years. Did I say ‘two’? It seems a century. What is the use of it
all? These children may have to do the same as I when they grow up. I
would sooner see them dead than go through it. I don’t wonder at people
taking the lives of those they are responsible for, as well as their
own, and yet how could they?”
Just as this thought had crossed her mind, little Freddie aroused and
was in her arms in a moment. “Oh, mamma, I did cry so hard for you and
you didn’t come. Little baby cried and Nellie, her cried, too. I’se
hungry, mamma, awful hungry.”
“My darling, I don’t wonder you cried. I have been gone a long time, but
mother couldn’t help it, darling; mother couldn’t help it. There, you
have awakened the baby. Oh, children, do be quiet,” for all three were
crying by this time.
It took her fully an hour to get them all quiet and asleep. Next day,
first one and then another of her roomers came to tell her that they had
to leave. Some made one excuse, some another; only one told her the
truth, saying, “You ought to know better than to keep people in your
house when your children cry as they did last night. I hate to leave
you, but it unnerves me to hear such a racket. I work hard all day and
must rest at night. This is the third time now. You ought to put them in
a home like other women do.” It was this that made her decide to go to
the colony that was near the city she had been living in. It was one of
the many branches that had been successful and had been exchanging with
the original society in its productions.
That spring found her living comfortably among green fields and free to
earn a living by renting tents to those who only wished to stay in the
country a few weeks at a time. Her baby was then two years old and she
kept him in the nursery; this left her free to attend to her business,
as the other children were in the boarding school.