Ellen Brewster was two nights and a day at Cynthia Lennox's, and no
one discovered it. All day the searching-parties passed the house.
Once Ellen was at the window, and one of the men looked up and saw
her, and since his solicitude for the lost child filled his heart
with responsiveness towards all childhood, he waved his hand and
nodded, and bade another man look at that handsome little kid in the
window.
"Guess she's about Ellen's size," said the other.
"Shouldn't wonder if she looked something like her," said the first.
"Answers the description well enough," said the other, "same light
hair."
Both of the men waved their hands to Ellen as they passed on, but
she shrank back afraid. That was about ten o'clock of the morning of
the day after Miss Lennox had taken her into her house. She had
waked at dawn with a full realization of the situation. She
remembered perfectly all that had happened. She was a child for whom
there were very few half-lights of life, and no spiritual twilights
connected her sleeping and waking hours. She opened her eyes and
looked around the room, and remembered how she had run away and how
her mother was not there, and she remembered the strange lady with
that same odd combination of terror and attraction and docility with
which she had regarded her the night before. It was a very cold
morning, and there was a delicate film of frost on the windows
between the sweeps of the muslin curtains, and the morning sun gave
it a rosy glow and a crusting sparkle as of diamonds. The sight of
the frost had broken poor Andrew Brewster's heart when he saw it,
and reflected how it might have meant death to his little tender
child out under the blighting fall of it, like a little
house-flower.
Ellen lay winking at it when Cynthia Lennox came into the room and
leaned over her. The child cast a timid glance up at the tall,
slender figure clad in a dressing-gown of quilted crimson silk which
dazzled her eyes, accustomed as she was to morning wrappers of
dark-blue cotton at ninety-eight cents apiece; and she was filled
with undefined apprehensions of splendor and opulence which might
overwhelm her simple grasp of life and cause her to lose all her old
standards of value.
She had always thought her mother's wrappers very beautiful, but now
look at this! Cynthia's face, too, in the dim, rosy light, looked
very fair to the child, who had no discernment for those ravages of
time of which adults either acquit themselves or by which they
measure their own. She did not see the faded color of the woman's
face at all; she did not see the spreading marks around mouth and
eyes, or the faint parallels of care on the temples; she saw only
that which her unbiased childish vision had ever sought in a human
face, love and kindness, and tender admiration of herself; and her
conviction of its beauty was complete. But at the same time a bitter
and piteous jealousy for her mother and home, and all that she had
ever loved and believed in, came over her. What right had this
strange woman, dressed in a silk dress like that, to be leaning over
her in the morning, and looking at her like that--to be leaning over
her in the morning instead of her own mother, and looking at her in
that way, when she was not her mother? She shrank away towards the
other side of the bed with that nestling motion which is the natural
one of all young and gentle children even towards vacancy, but
suddenly Cynthia was leaning close over her, and she was conscious
again of that soft smother of violets, and Cynthia's arms were
embracing all her delicate little body with tenderest violence,
folding her against the soft red silk over her bosom, and kissing
her little, blushing cheeks with the lightest and carefulest kisses,
as though she were a butterfly which she feared to harm with her
adoring touch.
"Oh, you darling, you precious darling!" whispered Cynthia. "Don't
be afraid, darling; don't be afraid, precious; you are very safe;
don't be afraid. You shall have such a little, white, new-laid egg
for your breakfast, and some slices of toast, such a beautiful
brown, and some honey. Do you love honey, sweet? And some chocolate,
all in a little pink-and-gold cup which you shall have for your very
own."
"I want my mother!" Ellen cried out suddenly, with an exceedingly
bitter and terrified and indignant cry.
"There, there, darling!" Cynthia whispered; "there is a beautiful
red-and-green parrot down-stairs in a great cage that shines like
gold, and you shall have him for your own, and he can talk. You
shall have him for your very own, sweetheart. Oh, you darling! you
darling!"
Ellen felt herself overborne and conquered by this tide of love,
which compelled like her mother's, though this woman was not her
mother, and her revolt of loyalty was subdued for the time. After
all, whether we like it or not, love is somewhat of an impersonal
quality to all children, and perhaps to their elders, and it may be
in such wise that the goddess is evident.
She did not shrink from Cynthia any more then, but suffered her to
lift her out of bed as if she were a baby and set her on a white fur
rug, into which her feet sank, to her astonishment. Her mother had
only drawn-in rugs, which Ellen had watched her make. She was a
little afraid of the fur rug.
Ellen was very small, and seemed much younger than she was by reason
of her baby silence and her little clinging ways. Then, too, she had
always been so petted at home, and through never going to school had
not been in contact with other children. Often the bloom of
childhood is soonest rubbed off by friction with its own kind.
Diamond cut diamond holds good in many cases.
Cynthia did not think she was more than six years old, and never
dreamed of allowing her to dress herself, and indeed the child had
always been largely assisted in so doing. Cynthia washed her and
dressed her, and curled her hair, and led her down-stairs into the
dining-room of the night before, which Ellen still regarded with
wise eyes as the store. Then she sat in the tall chair which must
have been vacated by that mysterious other child, and had her
breakfast, eating her new-laid egg, which the black woman broke for
her, while she leaned delicately away as far as she could with a
timid shrug of her little shoulder, and sipping her chocolate out of
the beautiful pink-and-gold cup. That, however, Ellen decided within
herself was not nearly as pretty as one with "A Gift of Friendship"
on it in gilt letters which her grandmother kept on the whatnot in
her best parlor. This had been given to her aunt Ellen, who died
when she was a young girl, and was to be hers when she grew up. She
did not care as much for the egg and toast either as for the
griddle-cakes and maple syrup at home. All through breakfast Cynthia
talked to her, and in such manner as the child had never heard. That
fine voice, full of sweetest modulations and cadences, which used
the language with the precision of a musician, was as different from
the voices at home with their guttural slurs and maimed terminals as
the song of a spring robin from the scream of the parrot which Ellen
could hear in some distant room. And what Cynthia said was as
different from ordinary conversation to the child as a fairy tale,
being interspersed with terms of endearment which her mother and
grandmother would have considered high-flown, and have been
shamefaced in employing, and full of a whimsical playfulness which
had an undertone of pathos in it. Cynthia was not still for a
minute, and seemed to feel that much of her power lay in her speech
and voice, like some enchantress who cast her spell by means of her
silver tongue. Nobody knew how she dreaded that outcry of Ellen's,
"I want my mother!" It gave her the sensations of a murderess, even
while she persisted in her crime. So she talked, diverting the
child's mind from its natural channel by sheer force of eloquence.
She told a story about the parrot, which caused Ellen's eyes to
widen with thoughtful wonder; she promised her treasures and
pleasures which made her mouth twitch into smiles in spite of
herself; but with all her efforts, when after breakfast they went
into another room, Ellen broke out again, "I want my mother!"
Cynthia turned white and struggled with herself for a moment, then
she spoke. That which she was doing of the nature of a crime was in
reality more foreign to her nature than virtue, and her instinct was
to return to her narrow and straight way in spite of its cramping of
love and natural longings. "Who is your mother, darling?" she asked.
"And what is your name?"
But Ellen was silent, except for that one cry, "I want my mother!"
The persistency of the child, in spite of her youth and her
distress, was almost invulnerable. She came of a stiff-necked family
on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more
pronounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered
by experience and policy. "I want my mother! I want my mother!"
Ellen repeated in her gentle wail as plaintively inconsequent as the
note of a bird, and would say no more.
Then Cynthia displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and
fierce a bird for Ellen. She would have preferred him as a subject
for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and
claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the
gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that
shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires,
against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his
gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and
glared with his yellow eyes.
Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and
deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly
shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired
at her a volley of harsh "How do's" and "Good-mornings," and
"Good-nights," and "Polly want a cracker's," then finished with a
wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious
chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth. "I want my mother!" she
panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted. Then Cynthia took
her away from the parrot and produced the doll. Then truly did the
sentiment of emulative motherhood in her childish breast console her
for the time for her need of her own mother. Such a doll as that she
had never seen, not even in the store-windows at Christmas-time.
Still, she had very fine dolls for a little girl whose relatives
were not wealthy, but this doll was like a princess, and nearly as
large as Ellen.
Ellen held out her arms for this ravishing creature in a French
gown, looked into its countenance of unflinching infantile grace and
amiability and innocence, and her fickle heart betrayed her, and she
laughed with delight, and the tension of anxiety relaxed in her
face.
"Where is her mother?" she asked of Cynthia, having a very firm
belief in the little girl-motherhood of dolls. She could not imagine
a doll without her little mother, and even in the cases of the
store-dolls, she wondered how their mothers could let them be sold,
and mothered by other little girls, however poor they might be. But
she never doubted that her own dolls were her very own children even
if they had been bought in a store. So now she asked Cynthia with an
indescribably pitying innocence, "Where is her mother?"
Cynthia laughed and looked adoringly at the child with the doll in
her arms. "She has no mother but you," said she. "She is yours, but
once she belonged to a dear little boy, who used to live with me."
Ellen stared thoughtfully: she had never seen a little boy with a
doll. The lady seemed to read her thought, for she laughed again.
"This little boy had curls, and he wore dresses like a little girl,
and he was just as pretty as a little girl, and he loved to play
with dolls like a little girl," said she.
"Where is he?" asked Ellen, in a small, gentle voice. "Don't he want
her now?"
"No, darling," said Cynthia; "he is not here; he has been gone away
two years, and he had left off his baby curls and his dresses, and
stopped playing with her for a year before that." Cynthia sighed
and drew down her mouth, and Ellen looked at her lovingly and
wonderingly.
"Be you his mother?" she asked, piteously; then, before Cynthia
could answer, her own lip quivered and she sobbed out again, even
while she hugged her doll-child to her bosom, "I want my mother! I
want my mother!"
All that day the struggle went on. Cynthia Lennox, leading her
little guest, who always bore the doll, traversed the fine old house
in search of distraction, for the heart of the child was sore for
its mother, and success was always intermittent. The music-box
played, the pictures were explained, and even old trunks of
laid-away treasures ransacked. Cynthia took her through the
hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still
that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by
an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment
was very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that
morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old
colored couple had lived in her family since she was born, and would
have been silent had she stolen a whole family of children. Ellen
caught a glimpse of a bent, dark figure at one end of the pink-house
as they entered; he glanced up at her with no appearance of
surprise, only a broad, welcoming expansion of his whole face, which
caused her to shrink; then he shuffled out in response to an order
of his mistress.
Ellen stared at the pinks, swarming as airily as butterflies in
motley tints of palest rose to deepest carmine over the blue-green
jungle of their stems; she sniffed the warm, moist, perfumed
atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom,
then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia led her
into the rose-house, then into one where the grapes hung low
overhead and the air was as sweet and strong as wine, but even there
Ellen wanted her mother.
But it was not until the next morning when she was eating her
breakfast that the climax came. Then the door-bell rang, and
presently Cynthia was summoned into another room. She kissed Ellen,
and bade her go on with her breakfast and she would return shortly;
but before she had quite left the room a man stood unexpectedly in
the door-way, a man who looked younger than Cynthia. He had a fair
mustache, a high forehead scowling over near-sighted blue eyes, and
stood with a careless slouch of shoulders in a gray coat.
"Good-morning," he began. Then he stopped short when he saw Ellen in
her tall chair staring shyly around at him through her soft golden
mist of hair. "What child is that?" he demanded; but Cynthia with a
sharp cry sprang to him, and fairly pulled him out of the room, and
closed the door.
Then Ellen heard voices rising higher and higher, and Cynthia say,
in a voice of shrill passion: "I cannot, Lyman. I cannot give her
up. You don't know what I have suffered since George married and
took little Robert away. I can't let this child go."
Then came the man's voice, hoarse with excitement: "But, Cynthia,
you must; you are mad. Think what this means. Why, if people know
what you have done, kept this child, while all this search has been
going on, and made no effort to find out who she was--"
"I did ask her, and she would not tell me," Cynthia said, miserably.
"Good Lord! what of that? That is nothing but a subterfuge. You must
have seen in the papers--"
"I have not looked at a paper since she came."
"Of course you have not. You were afraid to. Why, good God! Cynthia
Lennox, I don't know but you will stand in danger of lynching if
people ever find this out, that you have taken in this child and
kept her in this way--I don't know what people will do."
Ellen waited for no more; she rose softly, she gathered up her great
doll which sat in a little chair near by, she gathered up her
pink-and-gold cup which had been given her, and the pinks which had
been brought from the hot-house the day before, which Cynthia had
arranged in a vase beside her plate, then she stole very softly out
of the side door, and out of the house, and ran down the street as
fast as her little feet could carry her.