There was one child who did not pass either way that day to school. And
there was one mother who hearing in her heart that age-old cry of pain,
and seeing, graven there, those white, clutching fingers, ironed tears
into the linen on her board,--those that she could not brush away with
the back of her hand. She had no theories about Ambrose. She knew that
he was good. There were those who were bad, but Ambrose was not among
them. She knew, also, that this thought she could never prove to any
one. It was true only in her own heart. Yet who should know better than
she did?
The iron was hot and Sybil ironed, hissing over a tear dropped onto the
white linen.
“Mother,” asked Pearl, “will Father be hungry?”
Sybil gathered her work together.
“I wish,” she said wistfully, “that this storm hadn’t set in. But you’ll
be safe here, Pearl. With the money the Doctor’s wife will pay for this
wash I can bring back enough food to see us through most of the week
safely.” Her face brightened and she looked around the kitchen once
more. “I’ve left a good fire for you.”
“Mother,” Pearl asked, one hand deep in her pocket as she turned a coin,
“can I go with you?”
“Out in this?” said the mother, looking towards the darkening windows.
“No, of course not.”
“Are you going to get Father something?”
“No, I am not,” came decisively.
“Oh-h,” murmured the child. Again she turned the coin in her pocket.
“Mother, won’t Father be hungry?”
“They’ll look out for him, I guess, where he is now.”
Pearl’s hand clutched the bit of silver until its thin edge cut into her
palm. She was seeing the dark, gruesome place where they had shut up her
father.
“Mother,” she gasped, “couldn’t you take Father something to eat?”
“No,” said her mother, tying on her hat, “they wouldn’t allow that!”
“They!” The word clicked in the child’s ear like the mysterious key to
the sorrows that were all about her, but into whose deepest dungeon she
had never been allowed to enter. “They,” then, had put her father there
and might or might not, as it happened, feed her father.
Without further questioning, Pearl let her mother go. Through the snow
as far as the gate she could see the heavily laden form moving, and
then the storm shut off further sight.
Her hand clutched the coin in terror. Hunger! Hunger! In her ears there
rang, muffled, the clip-clop, clip-clop, of her father’s lame step. And
he had said only the day before that he was hungry.
Nothing beyond the gate was to be seen but the falling snow drawn hither
and yon, shroud-like, by the tempest shaking the trees. Pearl ran for
her coat, and leaping after her mother, was off like a rabbit. In the
white rush of snow and wind she sped on until she caught sight of her
mother’s storm-beaten figure. After that, step for step, she followed on
unseen behind her.
Three pheasants, frightened away from the dense undergrowth of a white
cedar, where they were taking shelter, started up with a “cut-cut-cut”
and a swish of long tail feathers as they disappeared into the whirling
snow storm. The wave lines of the wind-beaten trees grew more distorted
as the trees swayed and cracked in the blast. The long, bead-budded
branches of the larches were whipped out like whitened hair. It was
becoming rapidly darker. In the eerie light shadows were not, or seemed
to merge, like thoughts of a disordered mind, into the whirling
phantasmagoria of storm. Below, the lamps of Northerly, lighted this
night by hands not the Sun Chaser’s, twinkled mistily.
Pearl’s fingers grew colder and colder as she followed the burden-bent
figure of her mother, and the light, icy snow filled into the stubbed,
open toes of her boots and chinked up the loose tops and melted down
onto the feet. The lights of the town they were approaching obliged her
to drop behind a little. Was it not something, she was thinking, that
her father had lighted these lamps?
She watched her mother pass the big store and go on toward the Doctor’s
house. She waited an instant, and then, hand clutching coin, she bounded
into the store and came to a standstill trembling in the midst of its
unaccustomed splendor of light and color.
The Doctor, on his way out, paused just inside the door. “Well, well,
well,” he said, “so here we are again!”
“Yes, sir,” agreed Pearl, her eyes blinking, her cold, red nose
quivering.
“Where’s your mother, child?”
“Please, sir, she’s gone to your house.”
“Oh, that’s it!” smiled the Doctor, “and you’re waiting here.”
He leaned over and looked at the scar which the snow had not hidden.
“Come closer,” he commanded.
He tilted Pearl’s snow-wet face back and studied the deep scar across
the left temple.
“Too bad,” he muttered, thinking of the Sun Chaser, and not of the
child, whose frightened eyes scanned his face.
“Yes, sir,” agreed Pearl, “it was the lamp did it.”
He who had seen so much of the tragedy of human life heard the blow of
the mallet already driving a wedge down between this little thing and
the world at large.
He tucked a coin into one of the empty, frost-bitten hands.
“Here, David,” he called, “give the child the best mittens you
have--those like my granddaughter’s.”
And with a genial wink he was gone.
“So it’s mittens,” said David with assurance.
Pearl pressed up to the counter, lifted her thin little chin, looked out
of her frightened, reddened eyes into the face of the lad above her, and
whispered, “Please, sir, not mittens, but something to eat.”
David grasped the edge of the counter and stared. This little thing was
hungry.
“You say you’re hungry?” he demanded angrily.
He had never known before that a little child could go hungry and not be
fed.
Pearl shrank back. He was angry with her because he thought she couldn’t
pay, she believed.
“Please,” she said, “something to eat with this.”
She held out her hand, her money in its tiny palm.
“Didn’t you have any dinner?” demanded the boy.
“Please, sir, no, but this is my money.”
The lad’s face had turned very red--even his neck was red. He was
pulling out and setting down with hurried thumps various articles of
food, bread, butter, cheese, cookies. They came from every direction
storming down on the oaken counter.
“Eat,” commanded the boy savagely, “and take what you can’t eat.”
Growling he turned his back on Pearl.
“Please, sir,” came tremulously, “I haven’t time.”
“Haven’t time to eat?” David whisked about.
Pearl pointed at the bread and butter. “Please, sir, can I buy this with
this money.”
She held up the coins and pointed to the loaves.
The boy’s eyes blazed. “Take it all, child, take it all.”
Quickly she set her money down on the counter; quietly she wrapped her
little arms about the loaves of bread, and silently she was gone, even
while David had turned to find the mittens.
When he came out he dangled the mittens to an empty counter. He looked
over the counter to be sure the child had not fallen behind it, then he
ran and jerked open the door.
“Little girl,” he called out into the storm, “you’ve forgotten your
mittens!”
But there was no answer.