When Ellen was about sixteen, in her second year at the high-school,
her own family never looked at her without a slight shock of
wonder, as before the unexpected. Her mates, being themselves
in the transition state, received her unquestioningly as a
fellow-traveller, and colored like themselves with the new lights of
the journey. But Ellen's father and mother and grandmother never
ceased regarding her with astonishment and admiration and something
like alarm. While they regarded Ellen with the utmost pride, they
still privately regretted this perfection of bloom which was the
forerunner of independence of the parent stalk--at least, Andrew
did. Andrew had grown older and more careworn; his mine had not yet
paid any dividends, but he had scattering jobs of work, and with his
wife's assistance had managed to rub along, and his secret was still
safe.
One day in February there was a half-holiday. Lloyd's was shut for
the rest of the day, for his brother in St. Louis was dead, and had
been brought to Rowe to be buried, and his funeral was at two
o'clock.
"Goin' to the funeral, old man?" one of Andrew's fellow-workmen had
asked, jostling him as he went out of the shop at noon. Before
Andrew could answer, another voice broke in fiercely. It belonged to
Joseph Atkins, who was ghastly that day.
"I ain't goin' to no funerals," he said; "guess they won't shut up
shop for mine." Then he coughed. His daughter Abby, who had been
working in the factory for some time then, pressed close behind her
father, and the expression in her face was an echo of his.
"When I strike, that's what I'm going to strike for--to have the
shop shut up the day of my funeral," said she; and the remark had a
ghastly flippancy, contradicted by her intense manner. A laugh went
around, and a young fellow with a handsome, unshaven face caught her
by the arm.
"You'd better strike to have the shop shut up the day you're
married," said he; but Abby flung away from him.
"I'll thank you to let me alone, Tom Hardy," she said, with a snap;
and the men laughed harder.
Abby was attractive to men in spite of her smallness and leanness
and incisiveness of manner. She was called mighty smart and dry,
which was the shop synonym for witty, and her favors, possibly
because she never granted them, were accounted valuable. Abby Atkins
had more admirers than many a girl who was prettier and presumably
more winning in every way, and could have married twice to their
once. But Abby had no wish for a lover. "I've got all I can do to
earn my own living and the living of them that belong to me," said
she.
That afternoon Andrew Brewster stayed at home. After dinner Eva
Tenny and her little girl came in, and Ellen went down street on an
errand.
Mrs. Zelotes Brewster was crossing her yard to her son's house when
she saw Ellen passing, and paused to gaze at her with that superb
pride which pertains to self and is yet superior to it. It was the
idealized pride of her own youth. When she proceeded again against
the February gusts, it was with an unconscious aping of her
granddaughter's freedom of gait. Mrs. Zelotes wore an old red
cashmere scarf crossed over her bosom; she held up her black skirts
in front, and they trailed pointedly in the rear; she also stood
well back on her heels, and when she paused in the wind-swept yard
presented a curious likeness to an old robin pausing for
reconnoitre. Fanny and Eva Tenny in the next house saw her coming.
"Look at her holding up her dress in front and letting it drag in
the back," said Eva. "It always seemed to me there was somethin'
wrong about any woman that held up her dress in front and let it
drag behind."
Eva retained all the coarse beauty of her youth, but lines of
unalterable hardness were fixed on her forehead and at her mouth
corners, and the fierce flush in her cheeks was as set as paint. Her
beauty had endured the siege; no guns of mishaps could affect it,
but that charm of evanescence which awakens tenderness was gone. Jim
Tenny's affection seemed to be waning, and Eva looked at herself in
the glass even when bedecked with tawdry finery, and owned that she
did not wonder. She strained up her hair into the latest perkiness
of twist, and crimped it, and curled her feathers, and tied her
ribbons not as much in hope as in a stern determination to do her
part towards the furbishing of her faded star of attraction. "Jim
don't act as if he thought so much of me, an' I dun'no' as I
wonder," she told her sister.
Fanny looked at her critically. "You mean you ain't so good-lookin'
as you used to be?" said she.
Eva nodded.
"Well, if that is all men care for us," said Fanny.
"It ain't," said Eva, "only it's the key to it. It's like losin' the
key and not bein' able to get in the door in consequence."
"It wa'n't my husband's key," said Fanny, with a glance at her own
face, faded as to feature and bloom, but intensified as to love and
daily duty, like that of a dog sharpened to one faithfulness of
existence.
"Andrew ain't Jim," said Eva, shortly.
"I know he ain't," Fanny assented, with emphasis.
"But I wouldn't swap off my husband for a dozen of yours," said Eva.
"Well, I wouldn't swap off mine for a thousand of yours," returned
Fanny, sharply; and there might have been one of the old-time
tussles between the sisters had not Eva's violent, half-bitter sense
of humor averted it. She broke into a hard laugh.
"Good Lord," she said, "I dun'no' as I should want a thousand like
Jim. Seems to me it would be considerable care."
Fanny began to speak, but checked herself. She had heard rumors
regarding Jim Tenny of late and had flown fiercely with denial at
the woman who told her, and had not repeated them to her sister.
She was thinking how she had heard that Jim had been seen driving in
Wenham with Aggie Morse several times lately. Aggie Morse had been
Aggie Bemis, Jim's old sweetheart. She had married a well-to-do
merchant in Wenham, who died six months before and left her with
considerable property. It was her own smart little turn-out in which
she had been seen with Jim.
Eva was working in the shop, and Jim had been out of employment for
nearly a year, and living on his wife. There was a demand for girls
and not for men just then, so Jim loafed. His old mother cared for
the house as well as she was able, and Eva did the rest nights and
mornings. At first Jim had tried to help about the house-work, but
Eva had interfered.
"It ain't a man's work," said she. "Your mother can leave the hard
part of it till I get home." Eva used to put the money she earned
surreptitiously into her husband's pockets that he might not feel
his manly pride injured, but she defeated her own ends by her very
solicitude. Jim Tenny began to reason that his wife saw his shame
and ignominious helplessness, else she would not have been so
anxious to cover it. The stoop of discouragement which Eva used to
fear for his shoulders did not come, but, instead, something
worse--the defiant set-back of recklessness. He took his wife's
earnings and despised himself. Whenever he paid a bill, he was sure
the men in the store said, the minute his back was turned, "It's his
wife's money that paid for that." He took to loafing on sunny
corners, and eying the passers-by with the blank impudence of regard
of those outside the current of life. When his wife passed by on her
way from the shop he nodded to her as if she were a stranger, and
presently followed her home at a distance. He would not be seen on
the street with her if he could avoid it. If by any chance when he
was standing on his corner of idleness his little girl came past, he
melted away imperceptibly. He could not bear it that the child
should see him standing there in that company of futility and openly
avowed inadequacy. The child was a keen-eyed, slender little girl,
resembling neither father nor mother, but looking rather like her
paternal grandmother, who was a fair, attenuated woman, with an
intelligence which had sharpened on herself for want of anything
more legitimate, and worn her out by the unnatural friction. The
little Amabel, for Eva had been romantic in the naming of her child,
was an old-fashioned-looking child in spite of Eva's careful
decoration of the little figure in the best childish finery which
she could muster.
Little Amabel was reading a child's book at another window. When
Mrs. Zelotes entered she eyed her with the sharpness and inscrutable
conclusions therefrom of a kitten, then turned a leaf in her book.
When Mrs. Zelotes had greeted her daughter-in-law and Eva, she
looked with disapproval at Amabel.
"When I was a little girl I should have been punished if I hadn't
got up and curtsied and said good-afternoon when company came in,"
she remarked, severely.
Amabel was not a favorite outside of her own family. People used to
stare aghast at her unexpected questions and demands delivered in a
shrill clarion as from some summit of childish wisdom, and they said
she was a queer child. She yielded always to command from utter
helplessness, but the why of obedience was strongly alert within
her. The child might have been in some subtle and uncanny fashion
the offspring of her age and generation instead of her natural
parents, she was so unlike either of them, and so much a product of
the times, with her meekness and slavishness of weakness and
futility, and her unquenchable and unconquerable vitality of
dissent.
Ellen adored the little Amabel. Presently, when she returned from
her errand down-town, she cried out with delight when she saw her;
and the child ran to meet her, and clung to her, with her flaxen
head snuggled close to her cheek. Ellen caught the child up, seated
herself, and sat cuddling her as she used to cuddle her doll.
"You dear little thing!" she murmured, "you dear little thing! You
did come to see Ellen, didn't you?" And the child gazed up in the
young girl's face with a rapt expression. Nothing can express the
admiration, which is almost as unquestionable as worship, of a very
little girl for a big one. Amabel loved her mother with a rather
unusual intensity for a child, but Ellen was what she herself would
be when she was grown up. Through Ellen her love of self and her
ambition budded into blossom. Ellen could do nothing wrong because
she did what she herself would do when she was grown. She never
questioned Ellen for her reasons.
Mrs. Zelotes kept looking at the two, with pride in Ellen and
disapproval of her caresses of the child. "Seems to me you might
speak to your own folks as well as to have no eyes for anybody but
that child," she said, finally.
"Why, grandma, I spoke to you just a little while ago," returned
Ellen. "You know I saw you just a few minutes before I went
down-town." Ellen straightened the child on her knees, and began to
try to twist her soft, straight flaxen locks into curls. Andrew
lounged in from the kitchen and sat down and regarded Ellen fondly.
The girl's cheeks were a splendid color from her walk in the cold
wind, her hair around her temples caught the light from the window,
and seemed to wreathe her head with a yellow flame. She tossed the
child about with lithe young arms, whose every motion suggested
reserves of tender strength. Ellen was more beautiful than she had
ever been before, and yet something was gone from her face, though
only temporarily, since the lines for the vanished meaning was still
there. All the introspection and dreaminess and poetry of her face
were gone, for the girl was, for the time, overbalanced on the
physical side of her life. The joy of existence for itself alone was
intoxicating her. The innocent frivolities of her sex had seized her
too, and the instincts which had not yet reached her brain nor gone
farther than her bounding pulses of youth. "Ellen is getting real
fond of dress," Fanny often said to Andrew. He only laughed at that.
"Well, pretty birds like pretty feathers, and no wonder," said he.
But he did not laugh when Fanny added that Ellen seemed to think
more about the boys than she used to. There was scarcely a boy in
the high-school who was not Ellen's admirer. It was a curious
happening in those days when Ellen was herself in much less degree
the stuff of which dreams are made than she had been and would be
thereafter, that she was the object of so many. Every morning when
she entered the school-room she was reflected in a glorious multiple
of ideals in no one could tell how many boyish hearts. Floretta
Vining began to imitate her, and kept close to Ellen with supremest
diplomacy, that she might thereby catch some of the crumbs of
attention which fell from Ellen's full table. Often when some happy
boy had secured a short monopoly of Ellen, his rival took up with
Floretta, and she was content, being one of those purely feminine
things who have no pride when the sweets of life are concerned.
Floretta dressed her hair like Ellen's, and tied her neck-ribbons
the same way; she held her head like her, she talked like her,
except when the two girls were absolutely alone; then she sometimes
relapsed suddenly, to Ellen's bewilderment, into her own ways, and
her blue eyes took on an expression as near animosity as her
ingratiating politic nature could admit.
Ellen did not affiliate as much with Floretta as with Maria Atkins.
Abby had gone to work in the shop, and so Ellen did not see so much
of her. Maria was not as much a favorite with the boys as she had
been since they had passed and not yet returned to that stage when
feminine comradeship satisfies; so Ellen used to confide in her with
a surety of sympathy and no contention. Once, when the girls were
sleeping together, Ellen made a stupendous revelation to Maria,
having first bound her to inviolable secrecy. "I love a boy," said
she, holding Maria's little arm tightly.
"I know who," said Maria, with a hushed voice.
"He kissed me once, and then I knew it," said Ellen.
"Well, I guess he loves you," said Maria. Ellen shivered and drew a
fluttering sigh of assent. Then the two girls lay in each other's
arms, looking at the moonlight which streamed in through the window.
God knew in what realms of pure romance, and of passion so
sublimated by innocence that no tinge of earthliness remained, the
two wandered in their dreams.
At last, that afternoon in February, Ellen put down little Amabel
and got out her needle-work. She was making a lace neck-tie for her
own adornment. She showed it to her grandmother at her mother's
command. "It's real pretty," said Mrs. Zelotes. "Ellen takes after
the Brewsters; they were always handy with their needles."
"Can uncle sew?" asked little Amabel, suddenly, from her corner, in
a tone big with wonder.
Eva and the others chuckled, but Mrs. Zelotes eyed the child
severely. "Little girls shouldn't ask silly questions," said she.
Andrew passed his hand with a rough caress over the small flaxen
head. "Uncle Andrew can't sew anything but shoes," said he.
Little Amabel's question had aroused in Mrs. Zelotes a carping
spirit even against Ellen. Presently she turned to her. "I heard
something about you," said she. "I want to know if it is true. I
heard that you were walking home from school with that Joy boy one
day last week." Ellen looked at her grandmother without flinching,
though the pink was over her face and neck.
"Yes'm, I did," said she.
"Well, I think it's about time it was put a stop to," said Mrs.
Zelotes. "That Joy boy!"
Then Fanny lost her temper. "I can manage my own daughter, Grandma
Brewster," said she, "and I'll thank you to attend to your own
affairs."
"You don't seem to know enough to manage her," retorted Mrs.
Zelotes, "if you let her go traipsin' round with that Joy boy."
The warfare waged high for a time. Andrew withdrew to the kitchen.
Ellen took little Amabel up in her own chamber and showed her her
beautiful doll, which looked not a day older, so carefully had she
been cherished, than when she first had her. Ellen felt both
resentment and shame, and also a fierce dawning of partisanship
towards Granville Joy. "Why should my grandmother speak of him so
scornfully?" she asked herself. "He is a real good boy."
That night was very cold, a night full of fierce white glitter of
frost and moonlight, and raging with a turbulence of winds. Ellen
lay awake listening to them. Presently between the whistle of the
wind she heard another, a familiar pipe from a boyish throat. She
sprang out of bed and peeped from her window, and there was a dark,
slight figure out in the yard, and he was looking up at her window,
whistling. Shame, and mirth, and also exultation, which overpowered
them both, stirred within the child's breast. She had read of things
like this. Here was her boy lover coming out this bitter night just
for the sake of looking up at her window. She adored him for it.
Then she heard a window raised with a violent rasp across the yard,
and saw her grandmother's night-capped head thrust forth. She heard
her shrill, imperious voice call out quite distinctly, "Boy, who be
you?"
The lovelorn whistler ceased his pipe, and evidently, had he
consulted his own discretion, would have shown a pair of flying
heels, but he walked bravely up to the window and the night-capped
head and replied. Ellen could not hear what he said, but she
distinguished plainly enough her grandmother's concluding remarks.
"Go home," cried Mrs. Zelotes; "go home just as fast as you can and
go to bed. Go home!" Mrs. Zelotes made a violent shooting motion
with her hands and her white head as if he were a cat, and Granville
Joy obeyed. However, Ellen heard his brave, retreating whistle far
down the road. She went back to bed, and lay awake with a fervor of
young love roused into a flame by opposition swelling high in her
heart. But the next afternoon, after school, Ellen, to Granville
Joy's great bliss and astonishment, insinuated herself, through the
crowd of out-going scholars, close to him, and presently, had he not
been so incredulous, for he was a modest boy, he would have said it
was by no volition of his own that he found himself walking down the
street with her. And when they reached his house, which was only
half-way to her own, she looked at him with such a wistful surprise
as he motioned to leave her that he could not mistake it, and he
walked on at her side quite to her own house. Granville Joy was a
gentle boy, young for his age, which was a year more than Ellen's.
He had a face as gentle as a girl's, and really beautiful. Women all
loved him, and the school-girls raised an admiring treble chorus in
his praise whenever his name was spoken. He was saved from
effeminacy by nervous impulses which passed for sustained manly
daring. "He once licked a boy a third bigger than he was, and you
needn't call him sissy," one girl said once to a decrying friend.
To-day, as the boy and girl neared Mrs. Zelotes's house, Granville
was conscious of an inward shrinking before the remembrance of the
terrible old lady. He expected every minute to hear the grating
upward slide of the window and that old voice, which had in it a
terrible intimidation of feminine will. Granville had a mother as
gentle as himself, and a woman with the strength of her own
conviction upon her filled him with awe as of something anomalous.
He wondered uneasily what he should do if the old lady were to hail
him and call him to an account again, whether it would be a more
manly course to face her, or obey, since she was Ellen's
grandmother. He kept an uneasy eye upon the house, and presently,
when he saw the stern old face at the window, he quailed a little.
But Ellen for the first time in her life took his arm, and the two
marched past under the fire of Mrs. Zelotes's gaze. Ellen had
retaliated, not nobly, but as naturally under the conditions of her
life at that time as the branch of a tree blows east before the west
wind.
[Illustration: He found himself walking home from school with her]