I
Mrs. Kennedy made no preparation for going to work that day. She
suffered from a strange, an inexplicable malady. She didn’t want to go
to bed. She sat upright in a rocking-chair, still in her night-dress,
staring at the kitchen wall before her with a faint little frown.
Angelica washed and dressed herself neatly, and got ready some
breakfast--not very quickly, for she wasn’t accustomed to cooking, but
with the care and deftness that were so natural to her. It was, when
done, a daintier and better meal than her mother had ever served.
"Now, mommer!" she said. "Come on! Sit down!"
"I can’t eat, Angelica."
"You can drink some coffee, anyway."
And she took her mother by the hand and led her to the table--a poor,
frail, barefooted little thing, with her gray hair hanging about her
haggard face.
"Sit down," said Angelica again. "Now, then!"
Her mother drank a cup of coffee greedily, and gave her familiar little
sigh.
"That _was_ nice!" she said.
Her daughter succeeded in making her eat a little as well.
"Now you got to lie down," she said.
"I can’t. I’ve got to clean the halls."
"I’ll do it, mommer."
"Nonsense, Angelica! You don’t know a thing about it."
"I guess I can learn. Go on, mommer, lie down!"
She straightened the bed and patted the thin little pillow.
"Now, mommer, tell me! How do you do it? Where do you start?"
"Angie, I can’t let you. You’re tired to death, child. I’m more used to
it."
But Angelica would not listen to her. She went out, resolutely, with the
pail and the cloth and the scrubbing-brush, to do for her mother for one
day what her mother had done for her for nineteen years.
It was not Angelica’s disposition to enjoy martyrdom. She never felt
sorry for herself; she didn’t now. It was work which must be done, and
she was anxious to do it properly. She was in that state of intense
fatigue when one craves more and more physical activity. She scrubbed
all the stone stairs, mopped the corridor, went on working and working
and thinking and thinking.
She came down-stairs at one o’clock and went out to buy something for
lunch.
"What is there to do this afternoon?" she asked.
"Nothing," said Mrs. Kennedy. "I haven’t got half the work to do in this
place that I had in the old one--only three washings."
"I know. Well, mommer, I suppose we’ll have to get some more money from
somewhere. I’ll go out and look for a job, I guess."
She found one without much trouble. Her sort of job--unskilled,
transitory, ill-paid--was plentiful.
"I’m starting in to-morrow morning," she told her mother, when she came
home. "Now, if there’s any ink, I guess I’ll write to Eddie."
"Why?" asked her mother.
"Well, it seems he don’t know anything about--what happened, and I guess
we’ll be married after all."
"You mean to say you’re still set on that, Angie?" cried her mother.
"It’s wicked--downright _wicked_--to deceive a good man so."
"I don’t think so," Angelica replied. "What I did was bad enough, but I
don’t think it’s wicked not to tell about it. If you’d been in prison
you wouldn’t go around telling every one about it, would you?"
"That isn’t the same at all, Angie. I don’t want you to tell ‘every
one’; only the man you’re going to marry."
"He wouldn’t be the man I’m going to marry very long, if I tell him.
He’d never speak to me again. I know Eddie! And he’s too good to lose,"
she added. "Of course, something may go wrong, but I don’t think so. I
think I’ve got him!"
So she wrote: