As Jim Tenny, with Eva Loud and the child, drove down the road
towards the Brewster house, his horse and buggy became the nucleus
of a gathering procession, shouting and exclaiming, with voices all
tuned to one key of passionate sympathy. There were even many women
of the poorer class who had no sense of indecency in following the
utmost lead of their tender emotions. Some of them bore children of
their own in their arms, and were telling them with passionate
croonings to look at the other little girl in the carriage who had
been lost, and gone away a whole day and two nights from her mother.
They often called out fondly to Ellen and Eva, and ordered Jim to
wait a moment that they might look at the poor darling. But Jim
drove on as fast as he was able, though he had sometimes to rein his
horse sharply to avoid riding down some lean racing boys, who would
now and then shoot ahead of him with loud whoops of triumph. Once as
he drove he laid one hand caressingly over Eva's. "Poor girl!" he
said, hoarsely and shamefacedly, and Eva sobbed loudly. When Jim
reached Mrs. Zelotes Brewster's house there was a swift displacement
of lights and shadows in a window, a door flew open, and the gaunt
old woman was at the wheel.
"Stop!" she cried. "Stop! Bring her in here to me! Let me have her!
Give her to me; I have got everything ready! Come, Ellen--come to
grandmother!"
Then there was a mad rush from the opposite direction, and the
child's mother was there, reaching into the buggy with fierce arms
of love and longing. "Give her to me!" she shrieked out. "Give me my
baby, Eva Loud! Oh, Ellen, where have you been?"
Fanny Brewster dragged her child from her sister's arms so forcibly
that she seemed fairly to fly over the wheel. Then she strained her
to her hungry bosom, covering her with kisses, wetting her soft face
and yellow hair with tears.
"My baby, mother's darling, mother's baby!" she gasped out with
great pants of satisfied love; but another pair of lean, wiry old
arms stole around the child's slender body.
"Give her to me!" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. "She is my son's
child, and I have a right to her! You will kill her, goin' on so
over her. Give her to me! I have everything all ready in my house to
take care of her. Give her to me, Fanny Loud!"
"Keep your hands off her!" cried Fanny. "She's my own baby, and
nobody's goin' to take her away from me, I guess."
"Give her to me this minute!" said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. "You'll
kill her, goin' on so. You're frightenin' her to death. Give her to
me this minute!"
Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by
contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the
feel of her mother's arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of
passion which she had evoked.
"Give her to me!" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster.
The crowd who had followed stood gaping with working faces. The
mothers wept over their own children. Eva stood at her sister's
elbow, with a hand on one of the child's, which was laid over
Fanny's shoulder. Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse's neck.
"Give her to me!" said Mrs. Zelotes again. "Give her to me, I say! I
am her own grandmother!"
"And I am her own mother!" called out Fanny, with a great
master-note of love and triumph and defiance. "I'm her own mother,
and I've got her, and nobody but God shall take her from me again."
The tears streamed down her cheeks; she kissed the child with pale,
parted lips. She was at once pathetic and terrible. She was human
love and selfishness incarnate.
Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly
and softened. She turned and went back into her own house. Her gray
head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight.
She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet
humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a
perfume, when Fanny, with Eva following, still clinging to the
child's little hand over her sister's shoulder, went across the yard
to her own house to tell her husband. The others followed, and stood
about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest
sympathy. One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead
to peer in a window of the sitting-room, and when his mother pulled
him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes,
and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks. He was a young
boy, very small and thin for his age. He whispered to his mother and
she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home.
Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all-night's search, and
he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and
despair. Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled.
He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was
looking for. He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and
finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others, had
said: "Look at here, Andrew, old fellow; you'd better go home and
rest a bit. We'll look all the harder while you're gone, and maybe
she'll be found when you wake up."
"Who will be found?" Andrew asked, with a dazed look. He reeled as
if he were drunk.
"Ain't had anything, has he?" one of the men whispered.
"Not a drop to my knowledge."
Andrew's lips trembled perceptibly; his forehead was knitted with
vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole
body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who
worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched
at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under
his shoulder. "Come along with me, old man," he said, and Andrew
obeyed.
When Fanny and Eva came in with the child, he lay prostrate on the
bed, and scarcely seemed to breathe. A great qualm of fear shot over
Fanny for a second. His father had died of heart-disease.
"Is he--dead?" she gasped to Eva.
"No, of course he ain't," said Eva. "He's asleep; he's wore out.
Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, wake up! She's found, Andrew; Ellen's
found." But Andrew did not stir.
"He is!" gasped Fanny, again.
"No, he ain't. Andrew, Andrew Brewster, wake up, wake up! Ellen's
here! She's found!"
Fanny put Ellen down, and bent over Andrew and listened. "No, I can
hear him breathe," she cried. Then she kissed him, and leaned her
mouth close to his ear. "Andrew!" she said, in a voice which Eva and
Ellen had never heard before. "Andrew, poor old man, wake up; she's
found! Our child is found!"
When Andrew still did not wake, but only stirred, and moaned
faintly, Fanny lifted Ellen onto the bed. "Kiss poor father, and
wake him," she told her.
Ellen, whose blue eyes were big with fright and wonder, whose lips
were quivering, and whose little body was vibrating with the strain
of her nerves, laid her soft cheek against her father's rough, pale
one, and stole a little arm under his neck. "Father, wake up!" she
called out in her little, trembling, sweet voice, and that reached
Andrew Brewster in the depths of his own physical inertness. He
opened his eyes and looked at the child, and the light came into
them, and then the sound of his sobbing filled the house and reached
the people out in the yard, and an echo arose from them. Gradually
the crowd dispersed. Jim Tenny, before he drove away, went to the
door and spoke to Eva.
"Anything I can do?" he asked, with a curious, tender roughness. He
did not look at her as he spoke.
"No; thank you, Jim," replied Eva.
Suddenly the young man reached out a hand and stroked her rough
hair. "Well, take care of yourself, old girl," he said.
Eva went to her sister as Jim went out of the yard. Ellen was in the
sitting-room with her father, and Fanny had gone to the kitchen to
heat some milk for the child, whom she firmly believed to have had
nothing to eat during her absence.
"Fanny," said Eva.
"Well?" said Fanny. "I can't stop; I must get some milk for her; she
must be 'most starved."
Fanny turned and looked at Eva, who cast down her eyes before her in
a very shamefacedness of happiness and contrition.
"Why, what is it?" repeated Fanny, staring at her.
"I've got Jim back, I guess, as well as Ellen," said Eva, "and I'm
going to be a good woman."
After all the crowd of people outside had gone, the little nervous
boy raced into the Brewster yard with a tin cup of chestnuts in his
hand. He knocked at the side door, and when Fanny opened it he
thrust them upon her. "They're for her!" he blurted out, and was
gone, racing like a deer.
"Don't you want the cup back?" Fanny shouted after him.
"No, ma'am," he called back, and that, although his mother had
charged him to bring back the cup or he would get a scolding.