NEW FRIENDS.
AND then the poor woman who thought she had no more tears to shed,
buried her face in her hands and shed some of the bitterest ones she
ever did in her life.
Poor Nettie! she tried to turn comforter; tried to think of one
cheering word to say; but what was there to cheer the wife of a
drunkard? Or the daughter of a drunkard? Could it be possible that she,
Nettie Decker, was that! Oh, dear! how often she had stood in the door,
and with a kind of terrified fascination watched Jane Daker stealing
home in the darkness, afraid to go in at the front door, lest her
drunken father should see her and vent his wrath on her. Could she ever
creep around in the dark and hide away from her own _father_? Wouldn't
it be possible for her to go back home? She had not money enough to
get there, but couldn't she work somehow, and earn money? She could
write a letter to the folks at home and tell them the dreadful story,
and they would surely find a way of sending for her. But then, money
was not plenty in that home, and she began to understand that they had
done a great deal for her, and that it had cost a good deal to pay her
fare to this place. She had wondered, at the time, that her father did
not send the money for her to come home, but she said to herself: "I
suppose he did not know how much it would cost, and he will give it to
me to send in my first letter. Perhaps he will give me a little bit
more than it costs, too, for a little present for Jamie."
Oh, poor little girl! building hopes on a father like hers. She had not
been at home half a day, but she knew now that no money would ever go
back to the Marshalls in return for all they had done for her. Worse
than that, she might not be able to get back to them herself. Would her
father be likely to let her go? He had sent for her, and had told her
during this first hour of their meeting, that she had worked for other
people long enough. This made her heart swell with indignation.
Done enough for others, indeed! What had they not done for her? She
never realized it half so plainly as she did to-night. "I will go
back!" she muttered, setting the little bowl she was drying on the
table with a determined thump. "I can't stay in such a place as this.
I will write to Auntie Marshall this very night if I can get a chance,
and she will contrive some way."
Certainly, Nettie in that mood could have no comfort for a weeping
mother, and attempted none, after the first murmured word of pity. But
meantime she knew very well that she could not go back home that night,
and the present terror was, where was she to sleep?
Her mother went back into the bedroom after a few minutes of bitter
weeping, and Nettie finished the work, then stood drearily in the
doorway, wondering what she could do next, when a good, homely,
motherly face looked out of the side window of the small house next
their own, and a cheery voice spoke:
"Are you Joe Decker's little Nannie?"
"Yes'm," said Nettie, sadly, wondering drearily, even then, if it could
be possible that this was so.
"Well," said the voice, "I calculated that you must be; though I never
should have known you in the world, if I hadn't heard you was coming,
you was such a mite of a thing when you went away. What a tall nice
girl you've got to be. Your ma is sick, the children said. I've been
away ironing all day, or I would have been in to see if I could help
the poor thing any. I don't know her very much, but she is sickly, and
has hard times now and then, and I'm sorry for her. Now what I was
wondering is, where are they going to put you to sleep? The upper part
of that house ain't finished off, is it? It is one big attic, ain't it,
where Norm sleeps? I thought so. I suppose there could be quite a nice
room made up there with a little work and a few dollars laid out, but
your pa ain't done it, I'll be bound. And I knew there wasn't but one
bedroom down-stairs, and I couldn't think how they would manage it."
"It isn't managed at all, ma'am," said Nettie, seeing that she seemed
to wait for an answer, and there was nothing to say but the simple
truth. "There is no place for me to sleep."
"You don't say! Now that's a shame. Well, now, what I was thinking was,
that maybe you would like to sleep in the woodhouse chamber; it is a
nice little room as ever was, and it opens right out of my Sarah Ann's
room; so you wouldn't be lonesome. I haven't any manner of use for it,
now my boy's gone away, and I just as soon you would sleep there as
not until your folks get things fixed. You're a dreadful clean-looking
little girl, and I like that. I'm a master hand to have clean things
around me; Job says he believes I catch the flies and dust their wings
before I let them go into my front room. Job is my husband, and that is
his little joke at me, you know." And she laughed such a jolly little
roly-poly sort of laugh that poor Nettie could not keep a smile from
her troubled face. A refuge in the woodhouse chamber of this neat,
good-natured-looking woman seemed like a bit of heaven to the homesick
child.
"I am very much obliged to you, ma'am," she said respectfully; "I will
tell my mother how kind you are, and I think she will be glad to accept
the kindness for a few days. I--" and then Nettie suddenly stopped. It
might not be well to say to this new friend that she would not need to
trouble the woodhouse chamber long, for she meant to start for home
as soon as a letter could travel there, and another travel back.
Something might come in the way of this resolve, though it made her
feel hot all over to think of such a possibility.
"Bless my heart!" said Mrs. Job Smith as Nettie vanished to consult her
mother. "If that ain't as polite and pretty-spoken a child as ever I
see in my life. She makes me think of our Jerry. To think of that child
being Joe Decker's girl and coming back to such a home as he keeps! It
is too bad! I am sure I hope they will let her sleep in the woodhouse
chamber. It is the only spot where she will get any peace."
Mrs. Decker was only too glad to avail herself of her neighbor's kind
offer. "It is good of her," she said gratefully to Nettie. "I wish to
the land you could have such a comfortable room all the time; they are
real clean-looking folks. You wouldn't suppose from the looks of this
house that I cared for clean things, but I do, and I used to have them
about me, too. I was as neat once as the best of them; but it takes
clothes and soap and strength to be clean, and I have had none of 'em
in so long that I have most forgot how to do anything decent."
"Soap?" said Nettie, wonderingly. She was beating up the poor rags
which composed the bed in her mother's room, trying to get a little
freshness into them.
"Yes, soap; I don't suppose you can imagine how it would seem not to
have all the soap you wanted; I couldn't, either, once, but I tell
you I save the pennies nowadays for bread, so that I need not see my
children starve before my eyes. I would rather do without soap than
bread; especially when our clothes are so worn out that there is
nothing much to change with. Oh, I tell you when you get into a house
where the men folks spend all they can get on beer or whiskey, there
are not many pennies left. Mrs. Smith has been real kind; she sent the
children in a bowl of soup one day when their father had gone off and
not left a thing in the house, nor a cent to get anything with.
"And she has done two or three things like that lately; I'm grateful to
her, but I'm ashamed to say so. I never expected to sink so low that I
should be glad of the scraps which a poor neighbor like her could send
in. Oh, no; they are not very poor. Why, they are rich as kings, come
to compare them with us; but they are not grand folks at all; he is a
teamster, and works hard every day; so does she; but he doesn't drink
a drop, and they have a good many comfortable things. Their boy is away
at school, and their girl, Sarah Ann, is learning a dressmaker's trade.
You will have a comfortable bed in there, and I'm glad of it."
And now it was eight o'clock. Susie and Sate were asleep in their
trundle bed, the tired Nettie having coaxed them to let her give them
a splendid bath first, making the idea pleasant to them by producing
from her trunk a cunning little cake of perfumed soap. They looked "as
pretty as pictures," the sad-eyed mother said, as she bent over them
when they were asleep, with their moist hair in loose waves, and their
clean faces flushed with health. "They are real pretty little girls,"
she added earnestly, as she turned away. "He might be proud of them.
And he used to be, too. When Sate was a baby, he said she had eyes like
you, and he used to kiss her and tell her she was pretty, until I was
afraid he would spoil her; but there isn't the least danger of that
now. He never notices either of them except to slap them or growl at
them."
"How came father to begin to drink?" Nettie asked the question
timidly, hesitating over the last word; it seemed such a dreadful word
to add to a father's name.
"Don't ask me, child; I don't know. They say he always drank a little;
a glass of beer now and then. I knew he did when I married him, but I
thought it was no more than all hard-working men did. I never thought
much about it. I know it never entered my head that he could be a
drunkard. I'd have been too afraid for Norm if I had dreamed of such a
thing as that.
"He kept increasing the drinks, little by little--it grows on them, it
seems, the habit does; they say that is the way with all the drinks; I
didn't know it. I never was taught about these things. If I had been,
I think sometimes my life would have been very different. I know I
wouldn't have walked right into the fire with my one boy, anyhow. I'm
talking to you, child, as though you were a woman grown, and you seem
most like a woman to me, you are so handy, and quiet, and nice-looking.
I was sorry you were coming, because I thought you would just be an
added plague; and now I am sorry for your own sake."
Nettie hesitated greatly over the next question. It was a very hard one
to ask this sick and discouraged mother, but she must know the whole of
the misery by which she was surrounded. "Does Norman drink too?"
"Norm," said Mrs. Decker, dropping into the one chair, and putting
her hand to her heart as though there was something stabbing her
there, "Norm has been led away by your father. He was a bright little
fellow, and your father took to him amazingly. I used to tell him his
own little girls would have reason to be jealous of his step-son. He
took Norm with him everywhere, from the first. And taught him to do
odd things, for a little fellow, and was proud of his singing, and
his speaking, and all that. And when Susie there, was a baby, and I
was kept close at home with her, and Norm would tear around in the
evening and wake her up, I slipped into the way of letting him go out
with your father to spend the evenings; I didn't know they spent them
in bar-rooms, or groceries where they sold beer. I never _dreamed_ of
such a thing. Your father talked about meeting the men, and I thought
they met at some of the houses where there wasn't a baby to cry, and
talked their work over, or the news, you know. And there he was
teaching Norm to drink. He was a pretty little fellow, and he would
sing comic songs, and then they would treat him to the sugar in their
glasses! When I found it out, he had got to liking the stuff, and I
don't suppose a day goes by without his taking more or less of it now.
He never gets as bad as your father; but he will. He is never cross
and ugly to me, nor to the children, but he will be. It grows on him.
It grows on them all. And to think that I led him into the trap! If I
had stayed in the country where I was brought up, or if I had left him
with his grandfather, as he wanted me to, he might have been saved. The
grandfather is gone now, and so is the farm. Your father got hold of my
share of that, and lost it somehow. He didn't mean to, and that soured
him, and he drank the harder and we are going down to the very bottom
of everything as fast as we can."
It seemed to poor Nettie that they must have reached the bottom now.
She could not imagine any lower depths than these.
She made up the poor bed as well as she could, and then went back to
the kitchen to see what could be done about breakfast. Her new mother
was evidently too weak and sick to be troubled with the thought of
it, and while she stayed, Nettie resolved that she would help the
poor woman all she could. She went out into the yard to examine, and
discovered to her satisfaction that there must be a cooper's shop just
around the corner, for the chips lay thick. She gathered some for the
morning fire, determined in her mind that she would buy a few potatoes
at the grocery in the morning! In the cupboard she had found a cup of
sour milk; this she had carefully treasured with an eye to breakfast,
and she now looked into her purse to see if she could spare pennies for
a quart of flour. If she could, then some excellent cakes would be the
result. And now everything that she knew how to do towards the next
day's needs was attended to, and she went out in the moonlight, and sat
down on the lowest step of the back stoop, and did what she had been
longing to do all the afternoon--cried as though her poor young heart
was breaking.
Astride a saw-horse in the yard which belonged to Job Smith, and which
was separated from the stoop where she sat only by a low fence, was a
curly-headed boy, who had come there apparently to whittle and whistle
and watch her. He was not there when she sat down and buried her head
in her apron. She did not notice his whistling, though he made it loud
and shrill on purpose to attract her attention, He knew quite a little
about her by this time. He had come upon the boys of the Grammar School
in the midst of their afternoon recess and heard Harry Stuart interrupt
little Ted Barrows who was the youngest one in the class and wrote
the best compositions. They were gathered under a tree listening to
Ted, while he read them "The Story of An Hour," which was especially
interesting because it had some of their own experiences skilfully
woven in.
"Hold on," Harry was saying, just as the whistling boy appeared within
hearing. "You didn't make that thing up; you got it from the Deckers;
that is what is just going to happen there. Old Joe's Nan is coming
home this very day, and she is about as old as the girl you've got in
your story, and is freckled, I dare say; most girls are."
"I didn't even know old Joe Decker had a girl to come home!" said
little Ted, looking injured. "I made every word of it out of my own
mind."
But the boys did not hear him; their interest had been called in
another direction. "Is that so? Is Nan Decker coming home? My! What a
house to come to. Mother said only yesterday that she hoped the folks
who had her would keep her forever. What is she coming for? Who told
you?"
"Why, she is coming because Joe thinks that will be another way to
plague the old lady. At least that is what my mother thinks. Mrs.
Decker told her once that when Joe had been drinking more than usual
he always threatened to send for Nan; but she didn't think he would.
And now it seems he has. I heard it from the old fellow himself. He
was telling Norm about it, while I stood waiting for father's saw. He
said she was coming in the stage this afternoon; that she had worked
for other folks long enough and it was time he had some good of her
himself. I pity her, I tell you."
Then the whistler had come out from behind the trees, and said
good-afternoon, and asked a few questions. The boys had answered him
civilly enough, but in a way which showed that they did not count
him as one of them. The fact was, he was a good deal of a stranger.
He had been in town only a few weeks, and he did not go to school,
and he boarded with or lived with, the Smiths, who lived next door to
the Deckers, and were nice enough people, but did not have much to do
with the fathers and mothers of these boys, and--well, the fact was,
the boys did not know whether to take this new comer in, and make him
welcome, or not. They sort of liked him; he was good-natured, and
accommodating so far as they knew, but they knew very little about him.
He asked a good many questions about the expected Nan Decker. He had
never heard of her before. Since he was to live next door to her, it
might be pleasant to know what sort of a person she was. But the boys
could tell him very little. Seven years, at their time of life, blots
out a good many memories. They only knew that she was Nan Decker who
went away when her mother died, and who had lived with the Marshalls
ever since; and all agreed in being sorry for her that she was obliged
at last to come home.
The whistling boy walked away, after having cross-questioned first one,
and then another, and learned that they knew nothing. He was on his
way to the woods for one of his long summer rambles. He felt a trifle
lonely, and wished that the boys had asked him to sit down under the
trees and have a good time with them.
[Illustration: JERRY ON ONE OF HIS SUMMER RAMBLES.]
He would have liked to hear Ted's composition, he said to himself; the
boy had a sweet face, and a head that looked as though he might be
going to make a smart man, one of these days. What was the matter with
those fellows, he wondered, that they were not more cordial?
He thought about it quite awhile, then plunged into the mosses and
ferns and gathered some lovely specimens, which he arranged in the box
he carried slung over his shoulder, and forgot all about the boys, and
poor little Nan Decker. On the way home, in the glow of the setting
sun, he thought of her again, and wondered if she had come, and if
she would be a sorrowful and homesick little girl. It seemed queer to
think of being homesick when one came home! But then, it was only a
home in name; he had not lived next door to it for five weeks without
discovering that, and the little girl's mother was dead! Poor Nan
Decker! A shadow came over his bright face for a moment as he thought
of this. His mother was dead. He resolved to speak a kind word to
the little girl the very first time that he had a chance. And here in
the moonlight was his chance.
He stopped whistling at last and spoke: "If it is anything about which
I can help, I shall be very glad to do it." A kind, cheerful voice.
Nettie looked up quickly and choked back her tears. She was not one to
cry, if there were to be any lookers-on.
"I guess you are homesick," said the boy from, his horse's back;
"and that isn't any wonder. I'm homesick myself, nearly every night,
especially if it is moonlight. I don't know what there is about the
moon that chokes a fellow up so, but I've noticed it often; but then I
feel all right in the morning."
"Are you away from your home?"
"I should say I was! Or rather home has gone away from me. I haven't
any home in particular, only my father, and he is away out in
California. I couldn't go there with him, and since my school closed I
am waiting here for him to come back. It is home, you know, wherever
he is. He doesn't expect to be back yet for months. So you and I ought
to be pretty good friends, we are such near neighbors. I live right
next door to you. We ought to be introduced. You are Nannie Decker, I
suppose, and I am Jerry Mack at your service. I don't wonder you are
homesick; folks always are, the first night."
"My name is Nanette," said Nettie, gently, "but people who like me most
always say Nettie: and it isn't being homesick that makes me feel so
badly--though I am homesick; but it is being scared, and astonished,
and, oh! everything. Nothing is as I thought it would be; and there are
things about it that I did not understand at all, or maybe I wouldn't
have come; and now I am here, I don't know what to do." She was very
near crying again, in spite of a watcher.
"I know," he said, nodding his head, and speaking in a grave,
sympathetic voice. "Job Smith--that is the man I am staying with--has
told me how it used to be with your father. He says he was a very nice
father indeed. I am as sorry for you as I can be. But after all, I
wouldn't give up if I were you; and I should be real glad that I had
come home to help him. He needs a great deal of help. Folks reform, you
know. Why, people who are a great deal worse than your father has ever
been yet, have turned right around and become splendid men. If I were
you I would go right to work to have him reform. Then there's Norm--he
needs help, too; and he ought to have it before he gets any older,
because it would be so much easier for him to get started right now."
"I don't know the least thing to do," said Nettie; but she dried her
eyes on her neat little handkerchief as she spoke, and sat up straight,
and looked with earnest eyes at the boy on the other side the fence.
This sort of talk interested and helped her.
"No; of course you don't. You haven't studied these things up, I
suppose. But there is a great deal to do. My father is a temperance
man, and I have heard him talk. I know a hundred things I would like to
do, and a few that I can do. I'll tell you what it is, Nettie, say we
start a society, you and I, and fight this whole thing?
"We can begin with little bits of plans which we can carry out now, and
let them grow as fast as we can follow them and see what we can do. Is
it a bargain?"
"There is nothing I would like so well, if you will only show me how,"
said Nettie, and her eyes were shining.
It was wonderful what a weight these few words seemed to lift from her
troubled heart. The boy's face had grown more thoughtful. He seemed in
doubt just how to express what he wanted to say next.
"I don't know how you feel about it," he said as last, "but I know
somebody who would be sure to help in anything of this kind that we
tried to do--show us how, you know, and make ways for us to get money,
and all that."
"Who is it?"
Nettie spoke quickly now, for her heart was beating loud and fast. Was
there somebody in this town who could be asked to come to the rescue,
and who was willing to give such hearty help as that? If such were the
case, she could see that a great deal might be accomplished. She waited
for her new friend's answer, but he looked down on the stick he was
whittling and gravely sharpened the end to a very fine point, before he
spoke again.
"I don't know what you think about such things, but I mean--God. I
_know_ he is on our side in this business, don't you?"
"Yes," said Nettie, thoughtfully, and her manner changed.
Her voice which had been only eager before, became soft and gentle, and
she looked over at the boy in the moonlight and smiled. "I know Him,"
she said, "and I am His servant. It is strange I forgot for a little
while that He knew all about this home, and father, and everything!
Maybe He wants me to help father. I mean to begin right away. I will
do every single thing I can think of, to keep father, and Norm, and
everybody else from drinking liquor any more forever."
There was a sudden spring from the saw-horse, a long step taken over
the low fence, and the boy stood beside her.
"There are two of us," he said gravely. "There is my hand on it. I am a
Christian, too. And father gave me a verse once, which always helps me
when I think of the rumsellers: 'If God be for us, who _can_ be against
us!' I know he is for us, and so, though the rumsellers are against us,
and think they are going to beat, one of these days he will show them!
What you and I want to do is to keep working at it all we can, so as to
show that we believe in him."
"Now we are partners--Nettie Decker and Jerry Mack, who knows what we
can do? Anyhow, we are friends, and will stand by each other through
thick and thin, won't we?"
"Yes," said Nettie, "we will." And she rose up from the doorstep, and
they shook hands.