The purchase of Evelina's clock had been a more important event in the
life of Ann Eliza Bunner than her younger sister could divine. In the
first place, there had been the demoralizing satisfaction of finding
herself in possession of a sum of money which she need not put into the
common fund, but could spend as she chose, without consulting Evelina,
and then the excitement of her stealthy trips abroad, undertaken on the
rare occasions when she could trump up a pretext for leaving the shop;
since, as a rule, it was Evelina who took the bundles to the dyer's,
and delivered the purchases of those among their customers who were too
genteel to be seen carrying home a bonnet or a bundle of pinking--so
that, had it not been for the excuse of having to see Mrs. Hawkins's
teething baby, Ann Eliza would hardly have known what motive to allege
for deserting her usual seat behind the counter.
The infrequency of her walks made them the chief events of her life.
The mere act of going out from the monastic quiet of the shop into the
tumult of the streets filled her with a subdued excitement which grew
too intense for pleasure as she was swallowed by the engulfing roar
of Broadway or Third Avenue, and began to do timid battle with their
incessant cross-currents of humanity. After a glance or two into the
great show-windows she usually allowed herself to be swept back into the
shelter of a side-street, and finally regained her own roof in a state
of breathless bewilderment and fatigue; but gradually, as her nerves
were soothed by the familiar quiet of the little shop, and the click
of Evelina's pinking-machine, certain sights and sounds would detach
themselves from the torrent along which she had been swept, and she
would devote the rest of the day to a mental reconstruction of the
different episodes of her walk, till finally it took shape in her
thought as a consecutive and highly-coloured experience, from which, for
weeks afterwards, she would detach some fragmentary recollection in the
course of her long dialogues with her sister.
But when, to the unwonted excitement of going out, was added the
intenser interest of looking for a present for Evelina, Ann Eliza's
agitation, sharpened by concealment, actually preyed upon her rest;
and it was not till the present had been given, and she had unbosomed
herself of the experiences connected with its purchase, that she could
look back with anything like composure to that stirring moment of
her life. From that day forward, however, she began to take a certain
tranquil pleasure in thinking of Mr. Ramy's small shop, not unlike her
own in its countrified obscurity, though the layer of dust which
covered its counter and shelves made the comparison only superficially
acceptable. Still, she did not judge the state of the shop severely, for
Mr. Ramy had told her that he was alone in the world, and lone men, she
was aware, did not know how to deal with dust. It gave her a good deal
of occupation to wonder why he had never married, or if, on the other
hand, he were a widower, and had lost all his dear little children;
and she scarcely knew which alternative seemed to make him the more
interesting. In either case, his life was assuredly a sad one; and she
passed many hours in speculating on the manner in which he probably
spent his evenings. She knew he lived at the back of his shop, for she
had caught, on entering, a glimpse of a dingy room with a tumbled bed;
and the pervading smell of cold fry suggested that he probably did his
own cooking. She wondered if he did not often make his tea with water
that had not boiled, and asked herself, almost jealously, who looked
after the shop while he went to market. Then it occurred to her as
likely that he bought his provisions at the same market as Evelina;
and she was fascinated by the thought that he and her sister might
constantly be meeting in total unconsciousness of the link between them.
Whenever she reached this stage in her reflexions she lifted a furtive
glance to the clock, whose loud staccato tick was becoming a part of her
inmost being.
The seed sown by these long hours of meditation germinated at last in
the secret wish to go to market some morning in Evelina's stead. As
this purpose rose to the surface of Ann Eliza's thoughts she shrank back
shyly from its contemplation. A plan so steeped in duplicity had never
before taken shape in her crystalline soul. How was it possible for her
to consider such a step? And, besides, (she did not possess sufficient
logic to mark the downward trend of this “besides”), what excuse could
she make that would not excite her sister's curiosity? From this second
query it was an easy descent to the third: how soon could she manage to
go?
It was Evelina herself, who furnished the necessary pretext by awaking
with a sore throat on the day when she usually went to market. It was
a Saturday, and as they always had their bit of steak on Sunday the
expedition could not be postponed, and it seemed natural that Ann Eliza,
as she tied an old stocking around Evelina's throat, should announce her
intention of stepping round to the butcher's.
“Oh, Ann Eliza, they'll cheat you so,” her sister wailed.
Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few minutes
later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last glance at the
shop, she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling haste.
The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds that
would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an occasional
snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its meanest and most
neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly troubled by any untidiness
for which she was not responsible, it seemed to wear a singularly
friendly aspect.
A few minutes' walk brought her to the market where Evelina made her
purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical fitness, Mr.
Ramy must also deal.
Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato-barrels and
flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-aproned butcher who
stood in the background cutting chops.
As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales, blood and
saw-dust, he laid aside his cleaver and not unsympathetically asked:
“Sister sick?”
“Oh, not very--jest a cold,” she answered, as guiltily as if Evelina's
illness had been feigned. “We want a steak as usual, please--and my
sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as good a cut as if it
was her,” she added with child-like candour.
“Oh, that's all right.” The butcher picked up his weapon with a grin.
“Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us,” he remarked.
In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut and
wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed steps
toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by such
conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a deaf old
lady in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her opportunity.
“Wait on her first, please,” Ann Eliza whispered. “I ain't in any
hurry.”
The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza, palpitating in
the back of the shop, saw that the old lady's hesitations between liver
and pork chops were likely to be indefinitely prolonged. They were still
unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy
Irish girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary
diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently as
intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on
returning to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing
anew, with an anxious appeal to the butcher's arbitration, the relative
advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the
intrusion on them of two or three other customers, were of no avail,
for Mr. Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and at last Ann
Eliza, ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed her steak, and
walked home through the thickening snow.
Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain, and in
the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions she wondered
how she could have been foolish enough to suppose that, even if Mr. Ramy
<i>did</i> go to that particular market, he would hit on the same day and hour
as herself.
There followed a colourless week unmarked by farther incident. The old
stocking cured Evelina's throat, and Mrs. Hawkins dropped in once or
twice to talk of her baby's teeth; some new orders for pinking were
received, and Evelina sold a bonnet to the lady with puffed sleeves. The
lady with puffed sleeves--a resident of “the Square,” whose name they
had never learned, because she always carried her own parcels home--was
the most distinguished and interesting figure on their horizon. She was
youngish, she was elegant (as the title they had given her implied), and
she had a sweet sad smile about which they had woven many histories; but
even the news of her return to town--it was her first apparition
that year--failed to arouse Ann Eliza's interest. All the small daily
happenings which had once sufficed to fill the hours now appeared to her
in their deadly insignificance; and for the first time in her long years
of drudgery she rebelled at the dullness of her life. With Evelina such
fits of discontent were habitual and openly proclaimed, and Ann Eliza
still excused them as one of the prerogatives of youth. Besides, Evelina
had not been intended by Providence to pine in such a narrow life: in
the original plan of things, she had been meant to marry and have a
baby, to wear silk on Sundays, and take a leading part in a Church
circle. Hitherto opportunity had played her false; and for all her
superior aspirations and carefully crimped hair she had remained as
obscure and unsought as Ann Eliza. But the elder sister, who had long
since accepted her own fate, had never accepted Evelina's. Once a
pleasant young man who taught in Sunday-school had paid the younger
Miss Bunner a few shy visits. That was years since, and he had speedily
vanished from their view. Whether he had carried with him any of
Evelina's illusions, Ann Eliza had never discovered; but his attentions
had clad her sister in a halo of exquisite possibilities.
Ann Eliza, in those days, had never dreamed of allowing herself the
luxury of self-pity: it seemed as much a personal right of Evelina's as
her elaborately crinkled hair. But now she began to transfer to herself
a portion of the sympathy she had so long bestowed on Evelina. She had
at last recognized her right to set up some lost opportunities of her
own; and once that dangerous precedent established, they began to crowd
upon her memory.
It was at this stage of Ann Eliza's transformation that Evelina, looking
up one evening from her work, said suddenly: “My! She's stopped.”
Ann Eliza, raising her eyes from a brown merino seam, followed her
sister's glance across the room. It was a Monday, and they always wound
the clock on Sundays.
“Are you sure you wound her yesterday, Evelina?”
“Jest as sure as I live. She must be broke. I'll go and see.”
Evelina laid down the hat she was trimming, and took the clock from its
shelf.
“There--I knew it! She's wound jest as TIGHT--what you suppose's
happened to her, Ann Eliza?”
“I dunno, I'm sure,” said the elder sister, wiping her spectacles before
proceeding to a close examination of the clock.
With anxiously bent heads the two women shook and turned it, as though
they were trying to revive a living thing; but it remained unresponsive
to their touch, and at length Evelina laid it down with a sigh.
“Seems like somethin' DEAD, don't it, Ann Eliza? How still the room is!”
“Yes, ain't it?”
“Well, I'll put her back where she belongs,” Evelina continued, in the
tone of one about to perform the last offices for the departed. “And I
guess,” she added, “you'll have to step round to Mr. Ramy's to-morrow,
and see if he can fix her.”
Ann Eliza's face burned. “I--yes, I guess I'll have to,” she stammered,
stooping to pick up a spool of cotton which had rolled to the floor. A
sudden heart-throb stretched the seams of her flat alpaca bosom, and a
pulse leapt to life in each of her temples.
That night, long after Evelina slept, Ann Eliza lay awake in the
unfamiliar silence, more acutely conscious of the nearness of the
crippled clock than when it had volubly told out the minutes. The next
morning she woke from a troubled dream of having carried it to Mr.
Ramy's, and found that he and his shop had vanished; and all through the
day's occupations the memory of this dream oppressed her.
It had been agreed that Ann Eliza should take the clock to be repaired
as soon as they had dined; but while they were still at table a
weak-eyed little girl in a black apron stabbed with innumerable pins
burst in on them with the cry: “Oh, Miss Bunner, for mercy's sake! Miss
Mellins has been took again.”
Miss Mellins was the dress-maker upstairs, and the weak-eyed child one
of her youthful apprentices.
Ann Eliza started from her seat. “I'll come at once. Quick, Evelina, the
cordial!”
By this euphemistic name the sisters designated a bottle of cherry
brandy, the last of a dozen inherited from their grandmother, which they
kept locked in their cupboard against such emergencies. A moment later,
cordial in hand, Ann Eliza was hurrying upstairs behind the weak-eyed
child.
Miss Mellins' “turn” was sufficiently serious to detain Ann Eliza for
nearly two hours, and dusk had fallen when she took up the depleted
bottle of cordial and descended again to the shop. It was empty, as
usual, and Evelina sat at her pinking-machine in the back room. Ann
Eliza was still agitated by her efforts to restore the dress-maker, but
in spite of her preoccupation she was struck, as soon as she entered, by
the loud tick of the clock, which still stood on the shelf where she had
left it.
“Why, she's going!” she gasped, before Evelina could question her about
Miss Mellins. “Did she start up again by herself?”
“Oh, no; but I couldn't stand not knowing what time it was, I've got so
accustomed to having her round; and just after you went upstairs Mrs.
Hawkins dropped in, so I asked her to tend the store for a minute, and
I clapped on my things and ran right round to Mr. Ramy's. It turned out
there wasn't anything the matter with her--nothin' on'y a speck of dust
in the works--and he fixed her for me in a minute and I brought her
right back. Ain't it lovely to hear her going again? But tell me about
Miss Mellins, quick!”
For a moment Ann Eliza found no words. Not till she learned that she had
missed her chance did she understand how many hopes had hung upon
it. Even now she did not know why she had wanted so much to see the
clock-maker again.
“I s'pose it's because nothing's ever happened to me,” she thought, with
a twinge of envy for the fate which gave Evelina every opportunity
that came their way. “She had the Sunday-school teacher too,” Ann
Eliza murmured to herself; but she was well-trained in the arts of
renunciation, and after a scarcely perceptible pause she plunged into a
detailed description of the dress-maker's “turn.”
Evelina, when her curiosity was roused, was an insatiable questioner,
and it was supper-time before she had come to the end of her enquiries
about Miss Mellins; but when the two sisters had seated themselves at
their evening meal Ann Eliza at last found a chance to say: “So she on'y
had a speck of dust in her.”
Evelina understood at once that the reference was not to Miss Mellins.
“Yes--at least he thinks so,” she answered, helping herself as a matter
of course to the first cup of tea.
“On'y to think!” murmured Ann Eliza.
“But he isn't SURE,” Evelina continued, absently pushing the teapot
toward her sister. “It may be something wrong with the--I forget what he
called it. Anyhow, he said he'd call round and see, day after to-morrow,
after supper.”
“Who said?” gasped Ann Eliza.
“Why, Mr. Ramy, of course. I think he's real nice, Ann Eliza. And I
don't believe he's forty; but he DOES look sick. I guess he's pretty
lonesome, all by himself in that store. He as much as told me so, and
somehow”--Evelina paused and bridled--“I kinder thought that maybe his
saying he'd call round about the clock was on'y just an excuse. He said
it just as I was going out of the store. What you think, Ann Eliza?”
“Oh, I don't har'ly know.” To save herself, Ann Eliza could produce
nothing warmer.
“Well, I don't pretend to be smarter than other folks,” said Evelina,
putting a conscious hand to her hair, “but I guess Mr. Herman Ramy
wouldn't be sorry to pass an evening here, 'stead of spending it all
alone in that poky little place of his.”
Her self-consciousness irritated Ann Eliza.
“I guess he's got plenty of friends of his own,” she said, almost
harshly.
“No, he ain't, either. He's got hardly any.”
“Did he tell you that too?” Even to her own ears there was a faint sneer
in the interrogation.
“Yes, he did,” said Evelina, dropping her lids with a smile. “He seemed
to be just crazy to talk to somebody--somebody agreeable, I mean. I
think the man's unhappy, Ann Eliza.”
“So do I,” broke from the elder sister.
“He seems such an educated man, too. He was reading the paper when
I went in. Ain't it sad to think of his being reduced to that little
store, after being years at Tiff'ny's, and one of the head men in their
clock-department?”
“He told you all that?”
“Why, yes. I think he'd a' told me everything ever happened to him if
I'd had the time to stay and listen. I tell you he's dead lonely, Ann
Eliza.”
“Yes,” said Ann Eliza.