CHAPTER I. ACROSS THE GULF.
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THE rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives,
are by no means the saddest.
This occurred to Miss Kelso one January
night, not many winters ago. Though, to be
exact, it was rather the weather than the simile
which occurred to her. The weather may happen
to anybody, and so serves a purpose like
photography and weddings. Reflections upon
life you run your chance of at twenty-three.
If, in addition to the circumstance of being
twenty-three, you are the daughter of a gentleman
manufacturer, and a resident of Boston,
it would hardly appear that you require the
ceremony of an introduction. A pansy-bed in
the sun would be a difficult subject of classification.
Undoubtedly, pages might with ease
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be occupied in treating of Miss Kelso's genealogy.
Her descent from the Pilgrims could be
indisputably proved. It would be possible to
ascertain whether or not she cried at her mother's
funeral. Thrilling details of her life in the
nursery are upon record. Her first composition
is still legible. Indeed, three chapters, at the
least, might be so profitably employed in conveying
to the intelligence of the most far-sighted
reader the remotest intimation of Miss Kelso's
existence, that one feels compelled into an apology
to high art for presenting her in three lines
and a northeaster.
Perhaps it should be added that this young
lady was engaged to be married to her father's
junior partner, and that she was sitting in her
father's library, with her hands folded, at the
time when the weather occurred to her; sitting,
as she had been sitting all the opaque, gray
afternoon, in a crimson chair by a crimson fire,
a creamy profile and a creamy hand lifted and
cut between the two foci of color. The profile
had a level, generous chin. The hand had —
rings.
There are people who never do anything that
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is not worth watching; they cannot eat an apple
or button a shoe in an unnoticeable, unsuggestive
manner. If they undertake to be awkward, they
do it so symbolically that you feel in debt to
them for it. Miss Kelso may have been one
of these indexical persons; at any rate, there
was something in her simple act of sitting before
a fire, in her manner of shielding her eyes
from the warmth to which her figure was languidly
abandoned, which to a posture-fancier
would have been very expressive.
She had noticed in an idle way, swathed to
the brain in her folds of heat and color, that the
chromatic run of drops upon a window, duly
deadened by drawn damask, and adapted nicely
to certain conditions of a cannel blaze, had a
pleasant sound. Accurately, she had not found
herself to be the possessor of another thought
since dinner; she had dined at three.
It had been a long storm, but Miss Kelso had
found no occasion to dampen the sole of her
delicate sandals in the little puddles that dotted
the freestone steps and drained pavement. It
had been a cold storm, but the library held, as
a library should, the tints and scents of June.
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It had been a dismal storm; but what of that?
Miss Kelso was young, well, in love, and — Miss
Kelso. Given the problem, Be miserable, she
would have folded her hands there by her fire,
like a puzzled snow-flake in a gorgeous poppy,
and sighed, “But I do not understand!”
To be sure, her father was out of town, and she
had mislaid the score of La Grande Duchesse, —
undesirable circumstances, both, but not without
their compensations. For the placid pleasantness
of five o'clock paternal society, she had the rich,
irregular delights of solitude in a handsome house,—
a dream, a doubt, a daring fancy that human
society would snap, an odd hope pellmell upon
the heels of an extraordinary fear, snatches of
things, the mental chaos of a liberated prisoner.
Isolation in elegance is not apt to be productive
of thought, however, as I intimated.
Opposed to the loss of La Duchesse would be
the pleasure of making Maverick look for it.
Miss Kelso took a keen, appreciative enjoyment
in having a lazy lover; he gave her something
to do; he was an occupation in himself. She
had indeed a weakness for an occupation; suffered
passions of superfluous life; at the Cape
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she rebelled because Providence had not created
her a bluefisher; in Paris she would make
muslin flowers, and learn the métier to-morrow.
This was piquant in her; her plighted husband
found himself entertained by it always;
he folded her two hands like sheets of ricepaper
over his own, with an easy smile.
The weather occurred to the young lady
about six o'clock in the form of a query: Was
it worth while to go out to-night? She cultivated
an objection to Don Giovanni in the rain,—
and it always rained on Giovanni; Maverick
could talk Brignoli to Mrs. Silver, and hold a
fan for Fly, as well without her; she happened
to find herself more interested in an arm-chair
than in anything else in the world, and slippers
were the solution of the problem of life. Was
it worth while?
This was one of those vital questions which
require immediate motives for a settlement, and
of immediate motives Miss Kelso possessed very
few. Indeed, it was as yet unanswered in her
own mind, when the silver handle of her carriage-door
had shut with a little shine like a smile
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upon her, and Fly's voice, like boiling candy,
bubbled at her from the front seat.
Maverick had called; there had been a whiff
of pleasant wet air in her face; and, after all, life
and patent springs are much alike in doors or out.
Miss Kelso sank languidly back into the perfumed
cushions; the close doors and windows
shut in their thick sweetness; the broken lights
of the street dropped in, and Maverick sat beside
her.
“You have had your carriage re-scented,
Perley, I 'm sure,” said Fly, who was just
enough at home with Perley to say it.
“From Harris's, — yes.”
“Santalina, unless I am quite mistaken?”
This, softly, from Mrs. Silver; Mrs. Silver
was apt to speak very softly.
“I was tired to death of heliotrope,” said
Perley, with a weary motion of her well-shaped
head; “it clings so. There was some trouble,
I believe, to take it out; new stuffing and
covering. But I think it pays.”
“Indeed, yes, richly.”
“It always pays to take trouble for sachet, I
think,” said Fly, sententiously.
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“Perley never makes a mistake in a perfume,”—
that came, of course, from Maverick.
“Perley never did make a mistake in a perfume,”
observed Mrs. Silver, in the mild motherly
manner which she had acquired from frequently
matronizing Perley. “Never from the
day Burt made the blunder of tuberoses for
her poor mother. The child flung them out
of the casket herself. She was six years old
the day before. It was a gratification to me
when Burt went out of fashion.”
Perley, it may be presumed, feeling always
some awkwardness at the mention of a dead
parent for whom propriety required her to
mourn, and in connection with whose faint memory
she could not, do the best she might, acquire
an unhappiness, made no reply, and sachet and
Mrs. Silver dropped into silence together. Fly
broke it, in her ready way: “So kind in you
to send for us, Perley!”
“It was quite proper,” said Perley.
She did not think of anything else to say,
and fell, as her santalina and her chaperone
had fallen, a little noticeably out of the conversation.
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Fly and Maverick Hayle did the talking. Mrs.
Silver dropped in now and then properly.
Perley listened lazily to the three voices; one
sometimes hears very noticeable voices from very
unnoticeable people; these were distinct of note
as a triplet; idle, soft, and sweet — sweetly, softly
idle. She played accompaniments with them to
her amused fancy.
The triplet rounded into a chord presently, and
made her a little sleepy. Sensitive only to an
occasional flat or sharp of Brignoli or Kellogg,
she fell with half-closed eyes into the luxury of
her own thoughts.
What were they? What does any young lady
think about on her way to the opera? One
would like to know. A young lady, for instance,
who is used to her gloves, and indifferent to her
stone cameos; who has the score by heart, and
is tired of the prima donna; who has had a
season ticket every winter since she can remember,
and will have one every winter till
she dies?
The ride to the theatre was not a short one,
and slow that night on account of the storm,
which was thickening a little, half snow.
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Perley, through the white curtains of her falling
eyelids, looked out at it; she was fond of
watching the streets when no one was watching
her, especially on stormy nights, for no reason
in particular that she knew of, except that
she felt so dry and comfortable. So clean too!
There were a great many muddy people out that
night; the sleet did not wash them as fast as the
mud spattered them; and the wind at the corners
sprang on them sharply. From her carriage
window she could look on and see it lying in
wait for them, and see it crouch and bound and
set teeth on them. She really followed with
some interest, having nothing better to do, the
manful struggles of a girl in a plaid dress, who
battled with the gusts about a carriage-length
ahead of her, for perhaps half a dozen blocks.
This girl struck out with her hands as a boxer
would; sometimes she pommelled with her elbows
and knees like a desperate prize-fighter;
she was rather small, but she kept her balance;
when her straw hat blew off, she chased headlong
after it, and Perley languidly smiled. She
was apt to be amused by the world outside of
her carriage. It conceived such original ways
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of holding its hands, and wearing its hats, and
carrying its bundles. It had such a taste in
colors, such disregard of clean linen, and was
always in such a hurry. This last especially
interested her; Miss Kelso had never been in
a hurry in her life.
“There!” said Fly.
“Where?” said Perley, starting.
“I 've broken my fan; made a perfect wreck
of it! What shall I do? No, thank you.
Mr. Hayle, I am in blue to-night. You know
you could n't fail to get me a green one if you
tried. You must bring me out — but it 's too
wet to bring fans out. Mother, we must go in
ourselves.”
So it came about that in the land of fans, or in
the region roundabout, Maverick and the Silvers
disappeared in the flash of a fancy-store, and
Perley, in the carriage, was left alone.
“Dear me!” said Mrs. Silver, placidly, as the
umbrella extinguished her, “we are making our
friends a great deal of trouble, Fly, for a little
thing.”
Now Perley did not find it a trouble. She
was rather glad to be alone for a few minutes.
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In fact, she took it very kindly in Fly to break
that fan, and, as she afterwards thought, with
reason.
The carriage door was left open, by her orders.
She found something pleasant in the wet wildness
of the storm; it came near enough almost to
dampen her cheek as she leaned forward towards
it; and the street came into the frame that was
left, in a sharp picture.
The sidewalk was very wet; in spots the
struggling snow drifted grayish white, and went
out into black mud under a sudden foot; the
eaves and awnings dripped steadily, and there
was a little puddle on the carriage step; the
colored lights of a druggist's window shimmered
and broke against the pavement and the carriage
and the sleet, leaving upon the fancy the surprise
of a rainbow in a snow-storm; people's
faces dipped through it curiously; here, a fellow
with a waxed mustache struck into murderous
red, and dripped so horridly that a policeman,
in the confusion of the storm, eyed him for half a
block; there, a hale old man fell suddenly into
the last stages of jaundice; beyond, a girl straggling
jealously behind a couple of very wet, but
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very happy lovers, turned deadly green; a little
this way, another stepped into a bar of lily
white, and stood and shone in it for an instant,
“without spot or stain, or any such thing,” but
stepped out of it, quite out, shaking herself a
little as she went, as if the lighted touch had
scorched her.
Still another girl (Miss Kelso expressed to
herself some languid wonder that the night
should find so many young girls out, and alone,
and noted how little difference the weather appeared
to make with that class of people) — the
girl in plaid, whom the storm had buffeted
back for the last few moments — came up with
the carriage, and stopped, full against the druggist's
window, for breath. She looked taller,
standing in the light, than she had done when
boxing the wind at the corners, but still a little
undersized; she had no gloves, and her straw hat
hung around her neck by the strings; she must
have been very cold, for her lips were blue, but
she did not shiver.
Who has not noticed that fantastic fate of
galleries, which will hang a saint and a Magdalene,
a Lazarus and Dives, face to face? And
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who has not felt, with those transfixed glances,
doomed by sunlight, starlight, moonlight, twilight,
in crowds and in hush, from year unto
year, to struggle towards each other, — vain builders
of a vain bridge across the fixed gulf of an
irreparable lot, — a weariness of sympathy, which
wellnight extinguished the artistic fineness of the
chance? Something of this feeling would have
struck a keen observer of Miss Kelso and the
little girl in plaid.
Their eyes had met, when the girl lifted her
arms to tie on her hat. Against the burning
globes of the druggist's window, which quivered
and swam through the sheen of the fall of sleet,
and just where the perfect prism broke about
her, she made a miserably meagre figure. Miss
Kelso, from the soft dry gloom of her carriage
door, leaned out resplendent.
The girl's lips moved angrily, and she said
something in a sharp voice which the wind must
have carried the other way, for the druggist
heard it, and sent a clerk out to order her off.
Miss Kelso, obeying one of her whimsical impulses, —
who had a better right, indeed, to be
whimsical? — beckoned to the girl, who, after
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swearing a little at the druggist's clerk, strode
up rather roughly to the carriage.
“What do you want of me? and what were
you staring at? Did n't you ever see anybody
lose his hat in a sleet-storm before?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Kelso; “I did
not mean to be rude.”
She spoke on the instinct of a lady. She was
nothing of a philanthropist, not much of a Christian.
Let us be honest, even if inbred sin
and courtesy, not justification by faith, and conscience,
induced this rather remarkable reply. I
call it remarkable, from the standpoint of girls in
plaid. That particular girl, without doubt, found
it so. She raised her eyes quickly and keenly to
the young lady's face.
“I think I must have been sorry for you,”
observed Miss Kelso; “that was why I looked at
you. You seemed cold and wet.”
“You 're not cold and wet, at any rate.”
This was raggedly said, and bitter. It made
Miss Kelso feel singularly uncomfortable; as if
she were to blame for not being cold and wet.
She felt a curious impulse towards self-defence,
and curiously enough she followed it by saying,
“I cannot help that!”
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“No,” said the girl, after a moment's thought.
“N-no; but I hate to be pitied by carriage-folks.
I won't be pitied by carriage-folks!”
“Sit down on the steps,” said Miss Kelso, “and
let me look at you. I do not often see people
just like you. What is your name?”
“What 's yours?”
“I am called Miss Kelso.”
“And I am called Sip Garth.”
That ragged bitterness was in the girl's voice
again, much refined, but distinct. Miss Kelso, to
whom it seemed quite natural that the small
minority of the world should feel at liberty to
use, at first sight, the Christian name of the large
remainder, took little or no notice of it.
But what could bring her out in such a
storm, asked Miss Kelso of Sip Garth.
“The Blue Plum brings out better than me.
Who cares for a little sleet? See how wet I
am! I don't care.” She wrung out her thin
and dripping shawl, as she spoke, between her
bare, wet hands.
“The Blue Plum?” Miss Kelso hesitated,
taking the thing daintily upon her lips. What
did she, or should she, know of the Blue Plum?
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“But the theatre is no place for you, my poor
girl.” She felt sure of as much as that. She
had dimly understood as much from her father
and the newspapers. No theatre patronized by
the lower classes could be a place for a poor
girl.
“It 's no place for you,” she said again. “You
had so much better go home.”
Sip Garth laughed. She swung herself upon
the highest step of Miss Kelso's carriage, and
laughed almost in Miss Kelso's fine, shocked
face.
“How do you know whether I had so much
better go home? Wait till you've been working
on your feet all day, and wait till you live where
I live, before you know whether I had so much
better go home! Besides” — she broke off with
a quick change of tone and countenance — “I
don't go for the Plum. The Plum does n't make
much odds to me. I go to see how much better
I could do it.”
“Could you?”
“Could n't I!”
“I don't quite understand.”
“I don't suppose you do. Give me the music,
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give me the lights, and the people, and the
poetry, and I'd do it. I 'd make 'em laugh,
would n't I? I 'd make 'em cry, you may make
up your mind on that. That 's what I go to the
Plum for. I do it over. That 's what you think
of in the mills, don't you see? That 's so much
better than going home, — to do it over.”
“You seem,” said Miss Kelso, with some perplexed
weariness in her expression, — perhaps
she had carried her whim quite far enough, —
“you seem to be a very singular girl.”
Evidently Miss Kelso's coachman, whose hatbrim
appeared and peered uneasily over the box
at disgusted intervals, thought so too. Evidently
the passers, such of them as had preserved their
eyesight from the ravages of the sleet, thought
so too. Evidently it was quite time for the girl
in plaid to go.
“I wonder what you seem like,” said Sip
Garth, thoughtfully. She leaned, as she spoke,
into the sweet dimness of the carriage, and
gravely studied the sweet dimness of the young
lady's face. Having done this, she nodded to
herself once or twice with a shrewd smile, but
said nothing. Her wet shawl now almost brushed
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Miss Kelso's dress; the girl was not filthy, but
the cleanliest poverty in a Boston tenementhouse
fails to acquire the perfumes of Arabia,
and Perley sickened and shrank. Yet it struck
her as odd, for the moment, if you will believe it,
that she should have santalina in her carriage
cushions; not as ill-judged, not as undesirable,
not as in any way the concern of girls from tenement-houses,
not at all as something which she
would not do again to-morrow, but only as odd.
She had thought no more than this, when the
disgusted coachman, with an air of infinite personal
relief, officially announced Mr. Hayle, and
Fly came laughing sweetly back. It was quite
time for Sip to go.
In the confusion she dripped away among the
water-spouts like one of them, before Miss Kelso
could speak to her again.
The street came into the frame that was left in
a sharp picture. The sidewalk was once more
very wet; in spots the struggling snow drifted,
grayish white, and went out into black mud
under sudden feet; the eaves and awnings
dripped steadily, and there was a little puddle
on the carriage steps.
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Miss Kelso had a young, fresh imagination,
a little highly colored, perhaps, by opera music,
and it made these things a vivid background
for the girl in plaid, into which and out of which
she stepped with a fanciful significance.
With the exception of her servants, her seamstresses,
and the very little members of a very little
Sabbath-school class, which demanded of her
very little thought and excited in her very little
interest, Miss Kelso had never in her life before—
I think I speak without exaggeration — had
never in her life before exchanged a dozen words
with an example of what Maverick Hayle was
pleased to term the &rbogr;ι πολλο&iacgr;, thereby evincing
at once his keen appreciation of the finer distinctions
both of life and letters, as well as the
fact, that, though a successful manufacturer, he
had received a collegiate education and had not
yet forgotten it. And, indeed, as he was accustomed
to observe, “Nothing gives a man such a
prestige in society.”
The girl in plaid then, to repeat, was a novelty
to Perley Kelso. She fell back into her cushions
again to think about her.
“Poor Perley! I hope she found herself amused
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while we were gone,” sympathized Fly, fluttering
in with her new fan. Perley thanked her, and
had found herself amused, much amused.
Yet, in truth, she had found herself saddened,
singularly saddened. She could scarcely have
understood why. Nothing more definite than an
uncomfortable consciousness that all the world
had not an abundance of sachet and an appreciation
of Brignoli struck her distinctly. But how
it rained on that girl looking in at her from the
carriage steps! It must rain on many girls
while she sat in her sweet, warm, sheltered darkness.
It must be a disagreeable thing, this being
out in the rain. She did not fancy the thud of
drops on her carriage-roof as much as usual; the
wind waiting at corners to crouch and spring
on people ceased to amuse her; it looked cruel
and cold. She shivered and looked so chilly
that Maverick folded her ermines like a wonderful
warm snow-cloud tenderly about her, and
drowned the storm from her hearing with his
tender, lazy voice.
In the decorous rustle of the crowd winding
down through the corridors, like a glittering
snake, after Giovanni that night, Fly started
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with a little faint scream, and touched Perley
on the arm.
“My dear Perley! — Mr. Hayle, there is a girl
annoying Perley.”
At Perley's elbow, trying quietly but persistently
to attract her attention, Perley was startled
and not well pleased to see the girl in plaid. In
the heat and light and scent and soft babble of
the place, she cut a jagged outline. The crowd
broke in beautiful billows about her and away
from her. It seemed not unlike a radiant sea
out of which she had risen, black and warning as
a hidden reef. She might have been thought to be
not so much a foreign horror as a sunken danger
in the shining place. She seemed, indeed, rather
to have bounded native from its glitter, than to
have forced herself upon it. Her eyes were very
large and bright, and she drew Perley's beautiful,
disturbed face down to her own with one bare
hand.
“Look here, young lady, I want to speak to
you. I want to know why you tell me the Plum
is no place for me? What kind of a place is
this for you? — now say, what kind of a place?
You don't know; but I do. I followed you here
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to see. I tell you it 's the plating over that 's
the difference; the plating over. At the Plum
we say what we mean; and we mean bad enough,
very like. We 're rough, and we 're out with it.
Up at this place they 're in with it. They plate
over. The music plates over. The people plate
over. It 's different from us, and it ain't different
from us. Don't you see? No, you don't. I do.
But you 'd ought to, — you 'd ought to. You 're
old enough and wise enough. I don't mean to
be saucy; but I put it to you honest, if I have
n't seen and heard that in this grand place to-night—
all plated over — that 's no more fit for a
lady like you seem to be to sit and see and hear,
than it 's fit for me and the like of me to sit and
see and hear the Plum. I put it to you honest,
and that 's all, and I 'm sorry to plague you with
all your fine friends about, for I liked the looks
of you right well when I sat on your carriage
steps. But it ain't often you 'll have the chance
to hear truer words from a rough girl like me;
and it ain't likely you hear no more words true
nor false from me; so good by, young lady. I
put it to you honest!”
“Hush!” said Miss Kelso, somewhat pale, as
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Maverick stepped up to drive the girl away.
“Let her alone. It 's only a girl I — amused
myself with when you went with Fly for the fan.
Let her be. It was only a whim of mine, and, as
it has proved, a foolish one. I am not used to
such people. She was coarse and hurt me. But
let her go.”
“I should advise you to choose your amusements
more wisely another time,” said Maverick
Hayle, looking angrily after Sip, who was edging
her way, with a sharp motion, through the radiant
sea. She disappeared from view on the
stairway suddenly, and the waves of scent and
light and heat and babble met and closed over
her as merrily as waves are wont to meet and
close over sunken reefs.
The ripple of Miss Kelso's disturbed thoughts
closed over her no less thoroughly, after the
momentary annoyance was past. She had done
a foolish thing, and been severely punished for
it. That was all. As Maverick said, the lower
classes could not bear any unusual attention from
their betters, without injury. Maverick in his
business connection had occasion to know. He
must be right.
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Maverick in his business connection had occasion
to know another thing that night. Maverick
in his business connection was met by a telegram,
on returning with Miss Kelso to her
father's house. The senior partner held the
despatch in his hand. He was sitting in Miss
Kelso's parlor. His face was grave and disturbed.
“Losses, perhaps,” thought Perley, and left
father and son alone. They did not seem inclined
to remain alone, however. She had not
yet taken off her wraps in the hall, when she
heard Maverick say in an agitated voice, “I
can't! I cannot do it!” and Mr. Hayle the
senior came out. The despatch was still in
his hand.
“My dear Miss Perley,” he said, with some
hesitation.
“Yes, sir?” said Perley, unfastening her
corded fur.
“Your father —”
“Wait a minute!” said Perley, speaking fast.
She unfastened the fur, and folded the cape up
into a white heap with much pains and precision.
She was struck with a childish dread of
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hearing a horrible thing. She felt singularly confused.
Snatches of Giovanni danced through
her brain. She thought that she saw the girl
in plaid sitting on her front stairs, with a worldful
of rain upon her head. Her own thought
came curiously back to her, in words: “How
disagreeable it must be to sit out in the rain!”
Her youth and happiness shrank with a sudden
faint sickness at being disturbed. It was with as
much fright as grief that she took the paper from
her father's old friend and read: —
“Crushed at six o'clock this afternoon, in the
freight depot at Five Falls. Instant death.”
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CHAPTER II. THE SLIPPERY PATH.
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NOTHING is more conducive to one's sense
of personal comfort than to live in a factory
town and not be obliged to answer factory
bells. This is especially to be said of those misty
morning bells, which lay a cloudy finger upon
one's last lingering dream, and dip it and dimple
it into shreds; of those six-o'clock winter bells,
whose very tongues seem to have stiffened with
the cold, and to move thickly and numbly against
their frosted cheeks. One listens and dozes, and
would dream again but for listening again, and
draws one's silk and eider shoulder-robe closer to
one's warm throat with a shiver of rare enjoyment.
Iron voices follow, and pierce the shoulder-robe.
They are distinct in spite of the eider,
though a little hoarse. One turns and wraps
one's self again. They are dulled, but inexorable.
One listens and dozes, and would dream again
-- 035 --
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but for listening. The inexorable is the delightful.
One has to take only the pleasure of listening.
A dim consciousness of many steps of cold
people cutting the biting, sunless air, gives a
crispness to the blankets. The bells shiver in
sympathy with the steps, and the steps shiver in
response to the bells. The bells hurry, hurry,
hurry to the steps. The steps hurry, hurry,
hurry to the bells. The bells grow cross and
snappish, — it is so cold. The steps grow pert
and saucy, — it is so cold. Bells and steps, in a
convulsion of ill-temper, go out from hearing together,
and only a sense of pillows and two hours
before breakfast fills the world.
Miss Kelso, waking to the six-o'clock bells of a
winter morning, appreciates this with uncommon
keenness; with the more uncommon keenness
that she has never waked to the six-o'clock bells
of a winter morning before. She has experienced
the new sensation of spending, for the first time,
a February night in her July house, and is so
thoroughly convinced that she ought to be cold,
and so perfectly assured that she is n't, that the
dangerous consideration of the possible two hours
before mentioned, and the undeniable fact that
-- 036 --
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she has invited Maverick to breakfast at seven,
incite between her delicate young flesh and her
delicate young conscience one of those painful
and prolonged struggles which it is impossible for
any one who is obliged to get up in the morning
to appreciate. Conscience conquering, after
a protracted contest, the vanquished party slips
reluctantly and slowly out of silk and eider
into crépins and Persiana, just as Mr. Maverick
Hayle's self-possessed ring plays leisurely
through the house.
The ghastly death of the managing partner
has had its effect upon his business and his
daughter, without doubt. Upon his business —
as might be assumed from the fact that Maverick
Hayle should breakfast at seven o'clock — a confusing
effect, requiring care and time to adjust
with wisdom. Upon his daughter, — what, for
instance? If he slipped from her life, as he slips
from her story, so heart slips away from heart,
and love from love, with the slide of every hour.
To cross the gap from life with a father to life
without, very much as the February night
descended upon the July house, were not unnatural.
One must be warm, at all events.
-- 037 --
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Her grief was wrapped in swaddling-clothes.
It was such a young grief, and she so young a
griever; and the sun shone, and the winter air
was crisp.
Perley had been fond of her father, — of course;
and mourned him, — of course: but fondness is
not friendship, and mourning is not desolation.
Add to this a certain obstinate vein in this
young woman, which suggested it to her fancy
as a point of loyalty to her father's memory
not to strain her sorrow beyond its honest
altitude, and what follows? To be at first very
sadly shocked, to be next very truly lonely; to
wish that she had never been cross to him
(which she had), and to be sure that he had never
been cross to her (which he had); to see, and
love to see, the best of the departed life and
the sweetest of the departed days; and then to
wander musing away, by sheer force of contrast,
upon her own unfinished life, and into
the sweetness of her own coming days, and repent
of it next moment; to forget one afternoon
to notice the five-o'clock solitude because
Maverick comes in; to take very much to her
Prayer-Book the first fortnight, and entirely to
-- 038 --
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Five Falls the second; and to be pouring out
her lover's coffee this morning, very lovely, a
little quiet, and less unhappy.
“But pale?” suggested Maverick, leaning
back in his chair, with the raised eyebrow of a
connoisseur, to pronounce upon the effect of her.
The effect was good, very good. Her black
dress, and the little silver tête-à-tête service over
which she leaned, set one another off quaintly;
and a trifle more color in her face would have
left the impression of a sketch finished by two
artists who had failed of each other's idea.
Perley did not know that she was pale; did
not feel pale; felt perhaps — and paused.
How did she feel?
Apparently she did not feel like explaining
to Maverick Hayle. Something in the delicate
motion with which he raised the delicate napkin
in his well-shaped hand to his delicately
trimmed mustache acted perhaps as a counterirritant
to some delicate shading of her thought.
It would not have been the first time that such
a thing had happened. He was as necessary to
Perley Kelso as her Axminster carpets; he
suited her in the same way; in the same way
-- 039 --
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he — sometimes — wearied her. But how did
she feel?
“As nearly as I can make out,” said Perley,
“I feel like a large damask curtain taken down
for the first time off its cornice,” with a glance
at the heavy walnut mouldings of her windows.
“All in a heap, you know, and surprised. Or
like a — what do you call it? that part of a
plane that runs in a groove, when you stop the
groove up. And I 'm not used, you know, Maverick,
to feeling at all; it 's never been asked of
me before.”
She smiled and playfully shook her head; but
her young eyes were perplexed and gently sad.
“It was coming to this cold house, under the
circumstances,” suggested Maverick.
No; Perley shook her head again; the house
was not cold; never mind. Was his cup out?
The milk was cold, at any rate; he must wait
a minute; and so sat thoughtfully silent while
she touched the bell, with the little silver service
shining against her shoulder and the curve
of her arm.
“What did you come down here for?” asked
Maverick, over his second cup.
-- 040 --
[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]
Perley did n't know.
“When shall you go back?”
Perley did n't know that.
“What are you going to do?”
Perley did n't know that, either. “Perhaps I
shall not go back. I am tired of town. Perhaps
I shall stay here and look after — things.”
“Things? For instance?”
“The mills, for instance. My property, for
instance.”
Maverick lazily laughed; pushing back his
chair, and raising the connoisseur's eyebrow
again at the little shining service, and the black
curve of the womanly, warm arm.
Perhaps she would take his place this morning;
he was late, now; she could rake over a
shoddy-heap, he was sure, or scold an overseer.
He would agree to sit by the fire and order dinner,
if she would just run over to father's for him
and bring him his slippers.
“I 'll run over to the counting-room with you,
and bring you to repentance,” said Perley; “the
air must be like wine this morning, and the sun
like heaven.”
The air was so much like wine and the sun like
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
heaven, that Perley, upon leaving the junior partner
at the mill-gates, strolled on by a path on the
river's brink through and beyond the town, finding
herself loath to go back and sit by the fire
and order dinner; the more so, possibly, because
she was a bit annoyed that Maverick should have
hit with such exactness her typical morning; it
had, somehow, a useless, silly sound.
A useless, silly sound in this town of Five
Falls was artistically out of place. She almost
felt herself to be a superfluity in the cold, crisp
air filled to the full with business noises; and
took a pleasure in following the river almost out
of hearing of the mill machinery, and quite into
the frozen silence of the upper stream.
Though the stream was large, the town was
not; neither had the mills, from that distance, an
imposing air. Perley, with a sudden remembrance
of the size of her income, wondered at
this for the first time. “The business” had been
a standing mystery in the young lady's careless
fancy, the existence of which she had dimly understood
from her father, as she had dimly understood
the existence of “The Blue Plum”; perhaps
both had been about equally withheld from
-- 042 --
[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]
her comprehension. That there was some cotton
in it she felt sure; that it was a responsible business
and a profitable business she understood;
that there were girls in little shawls, ragged men,
and bad tobacco, an occasional strike, and a mission
Sunday school connected with it, she remembered.
Upon the cool of her summer rest the hot
whir of the thing had never breathed. Factory
feet had trodden as lightly as dewdrops upon her
early dreams.
She put on Five Falls for a few months every
year as she put on a white dress, — a cool thing,
which kept wash-people busy.
Five Falls in July agreed with her, and she
fancied it. Five Falls in February entertained
her, and she found it suggestive; and indeed
Five Falls in February was not a barren sight.
She had wandered, it might be, half a mile up
stream, and had turned to look behind her, just
at the spot from which the five cascades, which
named the town, broke into view; more accurately,
there were four cascades — pretty, swift,
slender things — and the dam. The stream was
a deep one, with a powerful current, and Perley
-- 043 --
[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]
noticed the unusual strength of the bridge below
the dam. It was a county bridge and well built;
its stone piers, freckled and fringed with heavy
frost, had the sombre, opulent air of time-worn
frescos, behind which arches of light and sky
drew breath like living things, and palpitated in
time to the irregular pulse of the water.
The pulse of the water was sluggish, half
choked by swathings of beautiful ice; the falls,
caught in their tiny leap, hung, frozen to the heart,
in mid-air; the open dam, swift, relentless, and
free, mocked at them with peals of hollow laughter;
and great puffs and palls of smoke, which
overhung the distant hum of the little town, made
mouths, one fancied, at the shining whiteness of
the fields and river bank.
Miss Kelso, turning to retrace her steps with
her face set thoughtfully towards this sight, was
disturbed by a quick, loud tread behind her; it
came abreast of her and passed her, and, in so
doing, thrust the flutter of a dingy plaid dress
against her in the narrow path.
Either some faded association with the faded
dress or with the energetic tread, or both, puzzled
Miss Kelso, and she stopped to consider it.
-- 044 --
[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]
Apparently the girl stopped to consider something,
but without turning her head. Miss Kelso,
after a moment's hesitation, stepped up and
touched her on the shoulder.
“I knew you,” said the girl abruptly, still without
turning her head. “I did n't suppose you 'd
know me. You need n't unless you want to.”
“I had forgotten you,” said Perley, frankly.
“But I remember now. I remember very well.
I am surprised to see you in Five Falls.”
“You need n't never be surprised to see factory
folks anywhere,” said Sip Garth. “We 're a
restless set. Wanderers on the face of the earth.”
“Are you in my father's — in the mills?”
“Yes,” more gently, and with a glance at Perley's
mourning, “in your mills, I suppose; the
brick ones, — yes. I supposed they were yours
when I heard the names. But folks told me you
only come down here in summer-time. I did n't
expect to see you. I 've been here three
weeks.”
“You like it here?” asked Miss Kelso, somewhat
at a loss how to pursue the art of conversation
under what she found to be such original circumstances, —
she and Sip were walking towards
-- 045 --
[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]
the town now, in the widening path, side by
side.
“I hope you like it here?” she repeated.
“Catty likes. It does n't make much odds to
me.”
“Who is Catty?”
“That 's my sister; we 're the last of us, she
and I. Father got smashed up three weeks ago
last Friday; caught in the gearing by the arm.
They would n't let Catty and me look at him, he
was smashed so. But I looked when there
was n't anybody round. I wanted to see the last
of him. I never thought much of father, but I
wanted to see the last of him.”
In her controlled, well-bred way, Perley sickened
and shrunk again, as she had sickened and
shrunk from this girl before, but said quickly, “O,
I am sorry!”
“You need n't be,” said Sip Garth. “Have n't
I told you that I did n't think much of father? I
never did neither.”
“But that is dreadful!” exclaimed Miss
Kelso. “Your own father! and now he is
dead!”
Something in their kindred deprivation moved
-- 046 --
[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]
Perley; an emotion more like sympathy than
recoil, and more like attraction than disgust,
took possession of her as they walked slowly
and more slowly, in the ever-widening path, side
by side into the town.
“He beat Catty,” said Sip, after a pause, in a
low voice. “He beat me, but I did n't make so
much of that. He used to take my wages. I
had to hide 'em, but he used to find 'em. He
spent it on drink. You never saw a man get
drunker than my father could, Miss Kelso.”
Miss Kelso presumed that she never had;
thinking swiftly how amused Maverick would
be at that, but said nothing.
“Drunk as a beast,” continued Sip, in an interested
tone, as if she were explaining a problem
in science, — “drunk as a fool. Why, so
drunk, he 'd lie on a rummy's floor for twenty-four
hours, dead as a door-nail. I 've seen them
kick him out, down the steps, into the ditch, you
know, when they could n't get rid of him no
other way. Then” — lowering her voice again—
“then he came home and beat Catty.”
“You seem to be fond of your sister,” observed
Miss Kelso.
-- 047 --
[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]
“Yes,” said Sip, after some silence, — “yes,
I love Catty.”
“You have not been to work this morning?”
asked Perley, for want of something better to
say.
“No, I asked out to-day. Catty 's sick. I 've
just been up river to Bijah's after some dock-weed
for her; he had some dock-weed, and he
told me to come; he 's a well-meaning old chap,
Bijah Mudge.”
Not having the pleasure of the acquaintance
of Mr. Mudge, Perley was perplexed how to
follow the topic, and did not try.
“I suppose you think I was saucy to you,”
said Sip, suddenly, “in the Opera House, I mean.
I did n't expect you 'd ever notice me again.”
“You `put it to me honest,' certainly,” said
Miss Kelso, smiling. “But though, of course, you
were quite mistaken, I did not think, as far as
I thought at all about it, that you meant to be
impertinent. The Opera question, Sip, is one
which it takes a cultivated lover of music to
understand.”
“Oh!” said Sip with a puzzled face.
“Poetry, fiction, art, all are open to the same
-- 048 --
[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]
objections which you found to Giovanni. People
are affected by these things very differently.
Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air;
and only —”
Miss Kelso remembered suddenly that she was
talking to an ignorant factory-girl; a girl who
went to the Blue Plum, and had never heard of
Mozart; wondered how she could have made
such a blunder; collected her scattered pearls
into a hasty change of subject, — something about
the cold weather and mill-hours and Catty.
“Catty 's deaf,” said Sip again in her sudden
way, after they had walked in silence for a few
moments down the shining, slippery, broadening
way. She lifted her little brown face sidewise to
Perley's abstracted one, to watch the effect of
this; hesitating, it seemed, whether it were worth
while to bestow some lingering confidence upon
her.
“Ah!” said Perley; “poor thing!”
The little brown face fell, and with it fell another
pause. It had been a thoughtful pause for
Miss Kelso, and she broke it in a thoughtful voice.
“Can you stop with your dock-weed long
enough to sit down here a minute? It is
-- 049 --
[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]
warm in the sun just here on these rocks, and
we are so close to town; and I want you to talk
to me.”
“I have n't got anything to say to you,” said
Sip a little sullenly, sitting down, however, upon
a broad, dry rock, and spreading her hands,
which were bare and purple, out upon her lap
in the sun.
“Don't you earn enough to buy you gloves?”
asked Miss Kelso.
“Catty had my gloves,” said Sip, evasively.
“What do you want of me? I can't stay long.”
“Why, I hardly know,” said Perley, slowly.
“I want you to talk without being questioned.
I don't like to question you all the time. But I
want to hear more about you, and — you did n't
speak of your mother; and where you live, and
how; and many other things. I am not used to
people who live as you do. I presume I do not
understand how to treat you. I do not think it
is curiosity. I think it is — I do not know
what it is. I suppose I am sorry.”
“You need n't trouble yourself to be sorry, as
I 've said before,” replied Sip, chafing her purple
fingers. “Besides, I have n't much to tell.
-- 050 --
[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]
There 's folks in your mills has enough to tell,
that would make stories in newspapers, I bet
you! Foreigners mostly. If you want stories
to amuse you, you 've come to the wrong place.
I 'm a Yankee, and my mother was a Yankee.
Father was n't; but I don't know what he was,
and I don't believe he knew himself. There 's
been six of us, put together; the rest died,
babies mostly, of drink and abuse. I wish
Catty and me 'd been two of 'em! Well, mother
she died with one of 'em four years ago (it was
born of a Tuesday, and Thursday morning she
was to work, and Saturday noon she was dead),
and father he died of the gearing, and Catty and
me moved here where there was easy work for
Catty. We was in a hoop-skirt factory before, at
Waltham; I used to come in nights to the Blue
Plum, as you see me in your carriage. I guess
that 's all. I 've worked to cotton-mills before
the hoops; so they put me right to weaving. I
told you we 're a restless lot. But we 're always
at factory jobs someways, from father to son and
mother to daughter. It 's in the blood. But I
guess that 's all.
“You have good prompt pay,” said Miss Kelso,
-- 051 --
[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
properly. “I suppose that you could not have
a better or healthier occupation. You get so
much exercise and air.”
She had heard her father say this, in times
long past.
Sip shrugged her shoulders with a suppressed
laugh; the unmistakable, incorrigible, suppressed
laugh of “discontented labor,” but said nothing.
“I should like to see your sister Catty,” said
Perley, obliged to reintroduce conversation.
“We 're on the Company board. You can
come when she gets well.”
“How long has she been deaf?”
“It may not please you to hear,” said Sip,
reluctantly.
Miss Kelso was sure that it would not displease
her to hear.
“Well, they were running extra time,” said
Sip, “in the town where we was at work before
Catty was born. They were running fourteen
hours a day. Mother she was at work,
you know. There was no two ways to that.
Father was on a spree, and we children were
little shavers, earning next to nothing. She
begged off from the extra; but it was all, or
-- 052 --
[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]
quit; it 's always all or quit. Quit she could n't.
I 'll say this for Jack Bench, — he was our boss,—
Jack, he had n't got it through his head what
condition she was in. But she worked till a
Saturday night, and Catty was born on a Monday
morning. Father came off his drunk Sunday,
and Jack Bench he always laid it on to
that; but Catty was born deaf. Father did
fly round pretty well that Sunday night, and
maybe it helped. But he did n't strike mother.
I was round all day to see to it that he should
n't strike. But Catty was born deaf — and,”
half under her breath, “and — queer, and dumb,
you know; but I 've taught her a little talk.
She talks on her fingers. Sometimes she makes
sounds in her throat. But I can always understand
Catty. Poor Catty! It 's never her fault,
but she 's a world of care and wear.”
“But such things,” said Miss Kelso, rising
with a shocked face from the sunny stone, “do
not often happen in our New England factories!”
“I only know what I know,” said Sip, shortly;
“I did n't blame anybody. I never knew any
other woman as it turned out so bad to. They
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
're mostly particular about women in that state;
fact is, they 're mostly more particular than the
women themselves. I 've seen a boss threaten
a woman with her notice to get her home, and
she would n't stir. But it 's all or quit, in
general.”
“But these people cannot be in such need of
money as that!” said Perley.
“Folks don't do such things for fun,” said
Sip, shortly.
“But in our mills —”
“Your own mills are your own affairs,” interrupted
Sip. “You 'd better find out for yourself.
It ain't to complain to you that I talk to you.”
They had come now quite into the town, and
stopped, at the parting of their several ways.
Miss Kelso held out her hand to the girl, with
a troubled face. The mills were making a
great noise and confused her, and she felt that
it was of little use to say anything further than
that she should try to come and see Catty, and
that she thanked her for — but she was sure that
she did not know for what, and so left the sentence
unfinished, and bade her good morning
instead.
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
Sip Garth stood still in a snow-drift, and
rubbed her hands, which had grown pink and
warm. Her brown little face was puzzled.
“It was n't all the sun, nor yet the touch.
It was the newness, I think,” she said.
She said it again to Catty, when she got home
with the dock-weed.
“Eh!” said Catty. She made a little harsh
sound like a croak.
“O, no matter,” said Sip, talking upon her
fingers, “you could n't understand! But I think
it must have been the newness.”
-- 055 -- p476-060
CHAPTER III. A GAME OF CHESS.
[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]
“I BEG your pardon?” said Maverick Hayle.
He said it in simple bewilderment.
Perley repeated her remark.
“You wish — excuse me — do I understand
you to wish —”
“`Partner' was undoubtedly the word that she
used, Maverick,” said Mr. Hayle the senior, with
an amused smile.
“I want to be a partner in the firm,” reiterated
Perley, with great distinctness; “you 're very stupid
this morning, Maverick, if you 'll excuse me.
I thought I had expressed myself clearly. I want
to be a partner in Hayle and Kelso.”
They were sitting — the two gentlemen and the
young lady — around a table in Miss Kelso's parlor:
a little table which Perley had cleared to
its pretty inlaid surface, with some indefinite idea,
which vastly entertained Maverick, of having
-- 056 --
[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]
room in which to “conduct business.” Some
loose papers, a new glazed blank-book, and a little
gold pencil lay upon the table. The pattern of
the table was a chess-board of unusual beauty:
Miss Kelso's hand, slightly restless, traced the
little marble squares, sometimes with the pencil,
sometimes without, while she talked. The squares
were of veined gray and green.
“I sent for you this morning,” said Perley,
turning to the elder gentleman, “because it
seemed to me quite time that I should understand
the state of my affairs as my father's death has
left them. I am very ignorant, of course. He
never talked to me about the business; but I
suppose that I could learn. I should prefer to
learn to understand my own affairs. This is not
inconsistent, I am sure you will appreciate, with
that confidence which it is my delight to feel in
you and Maverick.”
Maverick, at the sound of his own name, looked
up with a faint effort to recall what had preceded
it, having plunged suddenly and irretrievably into
the depths of a decision that Story, the next time
he was in the country, should make a study of a
hand upon squares of gray and green. In self-defence
he said so.
-- 057 --
[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]
“Whatever responsibilities,” said Perley, with
a slight twitch of annoyance between her eyes,
and speaking still to the elder gentleman, — “whatever
responsibilities rest upon me, as sole heir to
my father's property, I am anxious to fulfil in
person. Whatever connection I have with the
Hayle and Kelso Mills, I am anxious, I am exceedingly
anxious, to meet in person. And I thought,”
added the young lady, innocently, “that the simplest
way would be for me to become a partner.”
“Now I don't know another woman,” said
Maverick, rousing, with an indulgent smile, “who
could have originated that, father, if she had tried.
Let us take her in. By all means take her in.
As she says, what could be simpler?”
“Miss Perley will of course understand what
would be in due time legally and suitably explained
to her,” observed Mr. Hayle, “that she
has, and need have, no responsibilities as heir to
her father's property; that she has, and can have,
no such connection with the Hayle and Kelso
Mills as requires the least exertion or anxiety
upon her part.”
“But I don't understand at all,” said Perley.
-- 058 --
[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]
“I thought I fell heir to all that, with the money.
At least I thought I could if I wished to.”
“But we 're private, not corporate, don't you
see?” explained Maverick, carelessly. “You
don't fall heir to a partnership in a company as
you would to stock in a corporation, Perley.
You must see that.”
Probably Perley did not see that in the least.
The little gold pencil traced a row of greens and
skipped a row of grays in a sadly puzzled, unbusiness-like
way.
“You could not fall heir to the partnership
even if you were a man,” continued Maverick, in
his patronizing fashion. “The choice of a new
partner, or whether, indeed, there shall be a new
partner, is a matter resting wholly with the Senior
and myself to settle. Do I make it clear?”
“Quite clear,” said Perley, brightening; “so
clear, that I do not see anything in the world to
prevent your choosing me.”
Both gentlemen laughed; about as much as
they seemed to think was expected of them.
Maverick took up the pencil which Perley had
laid down, and jotted green squares at his end of
the table. Perley, at hers, slipped her empty
-- 059 --
[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]
fingers musingly along a soft gray vein. She
was half vexed, and a little mortified. For the
first time in her life, she was inclined to feel
ashamed of being a woman. She was seriously
interested, — perhaps, again, for the first time in
her life, seriously interested — in this matter. A
faint sense of degradation at being so ignorant
that she could not command the respect of two
men sufficiently to the bare discussion of it possessed
her.
“One need not be a child because one is a
woman!” she said, hotly.
“The case is just this, my dear,” said the
Senior, kindly observant of her face and tone.
“Your father dies” — this with a slight, decorous
sadness in his voice, but mathematically withal, as
he would propound a sum for Perley's solution:
A man buys a bushel; or, A boy sold a yard —
“your father dies. Maverick and I reorganize
the firm in our own way: that is our affair. You
fall heir to a certain share of interest in the business:
that is your affair. It is for you to say
what shall be done with your own property. You
are even quite at liberty to withdraw it entire
from the concern, or you can leave it in our
-- 060 --
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hands, which, I am free to say, we should, in the
existing state of affairs, prefer —”
“And expect,” interrupted Maverick, pleasantly,
making little faces on Perley's pink, shell-like
nails with the pencil.
“Which we prefer, and very naturally, under
the circumstances, expect,” continued the Senior.
“You then receive certain dividends, which will
be duly agreed upon, and have thus the advantage
of at once investing your property in a safe,
profitable, and familiar quarter, and of feeling no
possible obligation or responsibility — business
obligation and responsibility are always so trying
to a lady — about it. You thus become, in fact
and in form, if you prefer, a silent partner. Indeed,
my dear,” finished the Senior, cheerfully,
“I do not see but this would meet your fancy
perfectly.”
“Especially as you are going to marry into
the firm,” observed Maverick.
“Has a silent partner a voice and vote in —
questions that come up?” asked Perley, hesitating,
and rubbing off the little faces from her nails
with a corner of her soft handkerchief.
“No,” said Maverick; “none at all. An
-- 061 --
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ordinary, unprivileged dummy, I mean. If you have
your husband's, that 's another matter. A woman's
influence, you know; you 've heard of it.
What could be more suitable?”
“Then, if I understand,” said Perley, “I invest
my property in your mills. You call me a silent
partner, to please me and to stop my asking
questions. I have nothing to do with the mills
or the people. I have nothing to do but to spend
the money and let you manage it. That 's all it
amounts to.”
“That 's all,” said Maverick.
Perley's light finger and the Junior's pencil
skirmished across the chess-table for a few moments
in silence; the finger from gray to gray;
the pencil on green and green; the finger, by
chance, it seemed, pursuing; the pencil, unconsciously,
it seemed, retreating, as if pencil-mark
and finger-touch had been in the first idle stages
of a long game.
“Who will go into the firm if I can't?” asked
Perley, suddenly.
“Father talks of our confidential clerk,” said
Maverick, languidly, “a fellow we 've promoted
from East Street, but smart. Smart as a trap.
-- 062 --
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Garrick by name. You 've seen him, perhaps, —
Stephen Garrick. But nothing is settled; and
this is submitted,” bowing, “to the close confidence
of our silent partner.”
Perley did not seem to be in a mood for gallantry;
did not smile, but only knitted her soft brows.
“Still, I do not see that there is anything to
prevent my becoming an active partner. There
is nothing the matter with the law, I suppose,
which forbids a woman becoming an active partner
in anything?”
Maverick assured her that there was nothing
the matter with the law; that the matter was
entirely with the existing firm. Excepting, indeed,
some technicality, about which he could
not, at the moment, be precise, which, he believed,
would make formal partnerships impossible
in the case of husband and wife.
“But that case we are not considering,” said
Perley, quickly. “That case it will be time
enough to consider when it occurs. As long as
I am unmarried and independent, Maverick, I
am very much in earnest in my wish to manage
my mills myself. I do not like to think that a
great many people may be affected by the use
-- 063 --
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of my property in ways over which I can have no
possible control. Of course, I don't know what
else to do with my money, and if it must be, it
must be,” — Perley noticed with some wonder
here an amused glance between father and son.
“But I shall be very much disappointed; and
I am much, I am very much, in earnest.”
“I verily believe she is,” said Maverick, with
sudden conviction. “Now, I admire that! It
is ingenuous and refreshing.”
“Then why don't you take my part, Maverick,
instead of laughing at me?” asked Perley, and
was vexed at herself for asking immediately.
“O, that,” said Maverick, “is another matter.
I may find myself entertained to the last degree
by the piquancy, originality, esprit, of a lady,
when I may be the last man upon earth to consent
to going into business with my wife. Seriously,
Perley,” for Perley did not bear this well,
“I don't see what has given you this kink, nor
why you have become so suddenly reluctant to
intrust the management of your property to me.”
“It is not my property,” said Perley, in a low
voice, “which I am reluctant to intrust to you.”
“What, then, may it be?”
-- 064 --
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“My people, — the people. Perhaps I have
thought of them suddenly. But it may be better
to remember a thing suddenly than never to
remember it at all.”
“People! O, the hands, the mill-people.
A little Quixotic fancy there. Yes, I understand
now; and very pretty and feminine it is
too. My dear Perley, you may set your kind
heart at rest about the mill-people, — a well-paid,
well-cared-for, happy set of laboring people
as you could ask to see. You can go down into
our mission school and take a class, if that is
what you are troubled about.”
“Suppose I were to withdraw my share of the
business,” suggested Perley, abruptly. “Suppose,
upon being refused this partnership for which I
have asked this morning, I should prefer to withdraw
my interest in the mills?”
“We should regret it,” said Mr. Hayle, courteously;
“but we should have nothing to do but
to make the best of circumstances.”
“I see, I see now!” Perley flushed as the eyes
of the two gentlemen met again and again with
suppressed amusement in them. “I ought to have
said that before I told you that I did n't know
-- 065 --
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what else to do with the money. Of course!
I see, I 've made a bad business blunder. I see
that you think I should always make bad business
blunders. Now, Maverick Hayle, I don't
believe I should!”
“My dear Perley,” said Maverick, wearily,
“just listen to reason for reason's sake. A
lady's patience and a gentleman's time are too
valuable to throw away at this rate. Even if
you possessed any other qualification, which you
do not, or all other qualifications, which you cannot,
for this ridiculous partnership, you lack an
absolutely essential one, — the acquaintance of
years with the business. Just reflect upon your
acquaintance with the business!”
“I will acquire an acquaintance of years with
the business,” said Perley, firmly.
“Begin at the spools, for example?”
“I will begin at the spools.”
“Or inspect the cotton?”
“Or inspect the cotton.”
“Wear a calico dress, and keep the books
in a dingy office?”
“Wear a dozen calico dresses, and keep books
in the dingiest office you have. I repeat, I am in
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
earnest. I ask for the vacant partnership, or
a chance to fit myself for a partnership, in Hayle
and Kelso. Whatever my disqualifications, I am
ready to remove them, any and all. If you refuse
it to me, while I suppose we shall all go on and
be very good-natured about it, I shall feel that
you refuse it to me because I am a young lady,
not because I do not stand ready to remove a
young lady's disqualifications.”
“Really, Perley, this is becoming absurd, and
the morning is half gone. If you won't take a
gallant dismissal of a foolish subject, then I do
refuse it to you because you are a young lady.”
“We must refuse it to you certainly, on whatever
grounds,” remarked the Senior, with politeness,
“however unpleasant it may be to refuse
you even the gratification of an eccentric fancy.”
Perley's pursuing finger on the little gray
squares thoughtfully traced the course of Maverick's
retreating pencil on the green. Pencilmark
and finger-touch played faster now, as if in
the nervous stages of a shortening game.
“What do you do,” asked the young lady, irrelevantly,
and still with her light fingers thoughtfully
tracking the chess-board, and still watching
-- 067 --
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the little gold pencil, which still retreated before
it, “in your mills, when you have occasion to run
extra time?”
“Run it,” said Maverick, laconically.
“But what do you do with the people, — the
operatives, I mean?”
“Pay them extra.”
“But they are not obliged, unless they desire,
to work more than eleven hours a day?”
“No,” said the Junior, nonchalantly; “they
can leave if they prefer.”
Perley's face, bent over the squares of gray and
green, changed color slightly. She would have
spoken, it seemed, but thought better of it, and
only played with her thoughtful finger silently
along the board.
“Your remark will leave an unfortunate impression
upon the young lady, my son,” observed
the elder Mr. Hayle, “unless you explain to her
that in times of pressure it would be no more
possible for a mill to thin out its hands in extra
hours than it would be for her to dismiss her
cook when she has a houseful of company. The
state of the market is an inexorable fact, an inex-orable
fact, Miss Perley, before which
-- 068 --
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employer and employé, whose interests, of course,
are one, have little liberty of choice. The
wants of the market must be met. In fast times,
we are all compelled to work pretty hard. In
dull times, we rest and make up for it. I can
assure you that we have almost universally found
our hands willing and anxious to run an extra
hour or so for the sake of extra pay.”
“How long a day's work has the state of the
market ever required of your mills?” asked
Perley, still with her head bent and her finger
moving.
“Perhaps thirteen hours and a half. We ran
thirteen hours and a half for a week last July,
was n't it, Maverick?”
“What is the use of talking business to a woman?”
said Maverick, with such unusual animation
that he said it almost impatiently.
“I understand then,” said Perley, with the same
abruptness which had characterized her words so
often that morning, “that my application to look
after my mills in an official capacity is refused?”
“Is refused.”
“In any official capacity?”
“In any official capacity.”
-- 069 --
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
“But that,” with a faint smile, “of silent partner.”
“But that,” with a bow, “of silent partner.”
“It is quite impossible to gratify me in this
respect?” pursued Perley, with her bent head
inclined a little to the Senior.
“Quite impossible,” replied the Junior.
“So, out of the question.”
“And so, out of the question.”
The finger-touch brought the pencil-mark abruptly
to a stop upon a helpless square of green.
“Checkmate?” asked the young man, smiling.
“Checkmate,” said the young lady, smiling
too.
She closed the pencil-case with a snap, tossed
the little glazed blank-book into the fire, and rang
for luncheon, which the three ate upon the chess-table, —
smiling.
-- 070 -- p476-075
CHAPTER IV. THE STONE HOUSE.
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
IF you are one of “the hands” in the Hayle and
Kelso Mills, you go to your work, as is well
known, from the hour of half past six to seven,
according to the turn of the season. Time has
been when you went at half past four. The
Senior forgot this the other day in a little talk
which he had with his silent partner, — very naturally,
the time having been so long past; but the
time has been, is now, indeed, yet in places. Mr.
Hayle can tell you of mills he saw in New
Hampshire last vacation, where they ring them
up, if you 'll believe it, winter and summer, in
and out, at half past four in the morning. O no,
never let out before six, of course. Mr. Hayle
disapproves of this. Mr. Hayle thinks it not
humane. Mr. Hayle is confident that you would
find no mission Sunday school connected with
that concern.
-- 071 --
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If you are one of “the hands” in the Hayle
and Kelso Mills — and again, in Hayle and Kelso,—
you are so dully used to this classification, “the
hands,” that you were never known to cultivate
an objection to it, are scarcely found to notice its
use or disuse. Being surely neither head nor
heart, what else remains? Conscious scarcely,
from bell to bell, from sleep to sleep, from day to
dark, of either head or heart, there seems even a
singular appropriateness in the chance of the
word with which you are dimly struck. Hayle
and Kelso label you. There you are. The world
thinks, aspires, creates, enjoys. There you are.
You are the fingers of the world. You take your
patient place. The world may have need of you,
but only that it may think, aspire, create, enjoy.
It needs your patience as well as your place.
You take both, and you are used to both, and the
world is used to both, and so, having put the label
on for safety's sake, lest you be mistaken for a
thinking, aspiring, creating, enjoying compound,
and so some one be poisoned, shoves you into
your place upon its shelf, and shuts its cupboard
door upon you.
If you are one of “the hands,” then, in Hayle
-- 072 --
[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]
and Kelso, you have a breakfast of bread and
molasses probably; you are apt to eat it while
you dress; somebody is heating the kettle, but you
cannot wait for it; somebody tells you that you
have forgotten your shawl, you throw it over one
shoulder, and step out, before it is fastened, into
the sudden raw air; you left lamp-light in-doors;
you find moonlight without; the night seems to
have overslept itself; you have a fancy for trying
to wake it, would like to shout at it or cry
through it, but feel very cold, and leave that for
the bells to do by and by. You and the bells are
the only waking things in life. The great brain
of the world is in serene repose. The great heart
of the world lies warm to the core with dreams.
The great hands of the world, the patient, perplexed,
one almost fancies at times, just for the
fancy, seeing you here by the morning moon, the
dangerous hands, alone are stirring in the dark.
You hang up your shawl and your crinoline,
and understand, as you go shivering by gaslight
to your looms, that you are chilled to the heart,
and that you were careless about your shawl, but
do not consider carefulness worth your while by
nature or by habit; a little less shawl means a
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
few less winters in which to require shawling.
You are a godless little creature, but you cherish
a stolid leaning, in these morning moons, towards
making an experiment of death and a wadded
coffin.
By the time that gas is out, you cease, perhaps,
though you cannot depend upon that, to shiver,
and incline less and less to the wadded coffin, and
more to a chat with your neighbor in the alley.
Your neighbor is of either sex and any description,
as the case may be. In any event, warming
a little with the warming day, you incline
more and more to chat. If you chance to be a
cotton-weaver, you are presently warm enough.
It is quite warm enough in the weaving-room.
The engines respire into the weaving-room; with
every throb of their huge lungs you swallow
their breath. The weaving-room stifles with
steam. The window-sills of this room are guttered
to prevent the condensed steam from running
in streams along the floor; sometimes they
overflow, and water stands under the looms; the
walls perspire profusely; on a damp day, drops
will fall from the roof.
The windows of the weaving-room are closed;
-- 074 --
[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]
the windows must be closed; a stir in the air
will break your threads. There is no air to stir.
You inhale for a substitute motionless, hot moisture.
If you chance to be a cotton-weaver, it is
not in March that you think most about your
coffin.
Being “a hand” in Hayle and Kelso, you are
used to eating cold luncheon in the cold at noon,
or you walk, for the sake of a cup of soup or
coffee, half a mile, three quarters, a mile and a
half, and back. You are allowed three quarters
of an hour in which to do this. You come and
go upon the jog-trot.
You grow moody, being “a hand” at Hayle
and Kelso's, with the growing day; are inclined
to quarrel or to confidence with your neighbor in
the alley; find the overseer out of temper, and
the cotton full of flaws; find pains in your feet,
your back, your eyes, your arms; feel damp and
sticky lint in your hair, your neck, your ears,
your throat, your lungs; discover a monotony
in the process of breathing hot moisture, lower
your window at your risk; are bidden by somebody
whose threads you have broken at the other
end of the room to put it up, and put it up;
-- 075 --
[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]
are conscious that your head swims, your eye-balls
burn, your breath quickens; yield your
preference for a wadded coffin, and consider
whether the river would not be the comfortable
thing; cough a little, cough a great deal, lose
your balance in a coughing fit, snap a thread,
and take to swearing roundly.
From swearing you take to singing; both
perhaps are equal relief, active and diverting.
There is something curious about that singing
of yours. The time, the place, the singers,
characterize it sharply, — the waning light, the
rival din, the girls with tired faces. You start
some little thing with a refrain and a ring to it;
a hymn, it is not unlikely; something of a River
and of Waiting, and of Toil and Rest, or Sleep,
or Crowns, or Harps, or Home, or Green Fields, or
Flowers, or Sorrow, or Repose, or a dozen things,
but always, it will be noticed, of simple, spotless
things, such as will surprise the listener who
caught you at your oath of five minutes past.
You have other songs, neither simple nor spotless,
it may be; but you never sing them at your
work, when the waning day is crawling out from
spots between your looms, and the girls lift up
-- 076 --
[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
their tired faces to catch and keep the chorus in
the rival din.
You like to watch the contest between the
chorus and the din; to see — you seem almost to
see — the struggle of the melody from alley to
alley, from loom to loom, from darkening wall
to darkening wall, from lifted face to lifted face;
to see — for you are very sure you see — the
machinery fall into a fit of rage. That is a sight!
You would never guess, unless you had watched
it just as many times as you have, how that machinery
will rage. How it throws its arms about,
what fists it can clench, how it shakes at the
elbows and knees, what teeth it knows how to
gnash, how it writhes and roars, how it clutches
at the leaky, strangling gas-lights, and how it
bends its impotent black head, always, at last,
without fail, and your song sweeps triumphant,
like an angel, over it! With this you are very
much pleased, though only “a hand,” to be sure,
in Hayle and Kelso.
You are singing when the bell strikes, and
singing still when you clatter down the stairs.
Something of the simple spotlessness of the
little song is on your face, when you dip into
-- 077 --
[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]
the wind and dusk. Perhaps you have only
pinned your shawl, or pulled your hat over your
face, or knocked against a stranger on the walk;
but it passes; it passes and is gone. It is cold
and you tremble, direct from the morbid heat in
which you have stood all day; or you have been
cold all day, and it is colder, and you shrink; or
you are from the weaving-room, and the wind
strikes you faint, or you stop to cough and the
girls go on without you. The town is lighted,
and people are out in their best clothes. You
pull your dingy veil about your eyes. You are
weak and heart-sick all at once. You don't
care to go home to supper. The pretty song
creeps, wounded, back for the engines in the
deserted dark to crunch You are a miserable
little factory-girl with a dirty face.
A broken chatter falls in pieces about you;
all the melody of the voices that you hear has
vanished with the vanquished song; they are
hoarse and rough.
“Goin' to the dance to-night, Bet?”
“Nynee Mell! yer alway speerin' awa' after
some young mon. Can't yer keep yer een at
home like a decint lassie?”
-- 078 --
[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]
“An' who gave you lave to hoult a body's
hand onasked an' onrequested, Pathrick Donnavon?”
“Sip Garth, give us `Champagne Charley';
can't you?”
“Do you think the mules will strike?”
“More mules they, if they do. Did ye never
see a mouse strike a cat?”
“There 's Bub beggin' tobacco yet! How old
is that little devil?”
“The Lord knows!”
“Pity the Lord don't know a few more
things as one would suppose might fall in his
line.”
“A tract?”
“A tract. Bless you, four pages long. Says
I, What in — 's this? for I was just going in
to the meetin' to see the fun. So he stuffs it
into my hand, and I clears out.”
“Sip, I say! Priscilla! Sip Garth —”
But Sip Garth breaks out of sight as the
chatter breaks out of hearing; turns a corner;
turns another; walks wearily fast, and wearily
faster; pushes her stout way through a dirty
street and a dirtier street; stops at shadowy
-- 079 --
[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]
corners to look for something which she does
not find; stops at lighted doors to call for
something that does not answer; hesitates a
moment at the dismal gate of a dismal little
stone house by the water, and, hesitating still
and with a heavy sigh, goes in.
It is a damp house, and she rents the dampest
room in it; a tenement boasting of the
width of the house, and a closet bedroom with
a little cupboard window in it; a low room
with cellar smells and river smells about it, and
with gutter smells and drain smells and with
unclassified smells of years settled and settling
in its walls and ceiling. Never a cheerful
room; never by any means a cheerful room,
when she and Catty — or she without Catty —
come home from work at night.
Something has happened to the forlorn little
room to-night. Sip stops with the door-latch
in her hand. A fire has happened, and the
kerosene lamp has happened, and drawn curtains
have happened; and Miss Kelso has happened, —
down on her knees on the bare floor,
with her kid gloves off, and a poker in her
hands.
-- 080 --
[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]
So original in Perley! Maverick would say;
Maverick not being there to say it, Perley
spoke for herself, with the poker in her hand,
and still upon her knees.
“I beg your pardon, Sip, but they told me,
the other side of the house, that you would be
in in five minutes, and the room was dark and
so I took the liberty. If you would n't mind
me, and would go right on as if I had n't come,
I should take it very kindly.”
“All right,” said Sip.
“The fact is,” said Miss Kelso, meditatively
twirling her poker, “that that is the first fire I
ever made in my life. Would you believe it,
to look at it?”
“I certainly should n't,” said Sip.
“And you 're quite sure that you would n't
mind me?”
“No, not quite sure. But if you 'll stay
awhile, I 'll find out and tell you.”
“Very well,” said Miss Kelso.
“See how dirty I am,” said Sip, stopping in
the full light on her way to the closet bedroom.
“I had n't seen,” said Miss Kelso to the
poker.
-- 081 --
[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]
“O, well. No matter. I did n't know but
you 'd mind.”
There was dust about Sip, and oil about her,
and a consciousness of both about her, that
gave her a more miserable aspect than either.
In the full light she looked like some half-cleared
Pompeian statue just dug against the
face of day.
“We can't help it, you see,” said poor Sip;
“mill-folks can't. Dust we are and to dust do
we return. I 've got a dreadful sore-throat to-night.”
“Have you taken cold?”
“O no. I have it generally. It comes from
sucking filling through the shuttle. But I don't
think much of it. There 's girls I know, weavers,
can't even talk beyond a whisper; lost their voices
some time ago.”
Sip washed and dressed herself after this in
silence. She washed herself in the sink; there
was no pump to the sink; she went out bareheaded,
and brought water in from a well in
the yard; the pail was heavy, and she walked
wearily, with her head and body bent to balance
it, over the slippery path. She coughed while
-- 082 --
[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]
she walked and when she came in, — a peculiar,
dry, rasping cough, which Perley learned afterwards
to recognize as the “cotton-cough.” She
washed herself in a tin basin, which she rinsed
carefully and hung up against the wall. While she
was dressing in the closet bedroom, Perley still
knelt, thoughtfully playing with the poker beside
the fire.
“I don't suppose,” said Sip, coming out presently
in her plaid dress, with her hair in a net,
and speaking as if she had not been interrupted,—
“I don't suppose you 'd ever guess how much
difference the dirt makes. I don't suppose you
ever could. Cotton ain't so bad, though. Once
I worked to a flax-mill. That was dirt.”
“What difference?”
“Hush!” said Sip, abruptly, “I thought I
heard —” She went to the window and looked
out, raising her hands against her eyes, but
came back with a disappointed face.
“Catty has n't come in,” she said, nervously.
“There 's times she slips away from me; she
works in the Old Stone, and I can't catch her.
There 's times she does n't come till late. Will
you stay to tea?” with a quick change of voice.
-- 083 --
[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]
“Thank you. I don't understand about Catty,”
with another.
Sip set her table before she spoke again; bustled
about, growing restless; put the kettle on
and off the hob; broke one of her stone-china
plates; stopped to sweep the floor a little and to
fill her coal-hod; the brown tints of her rugged
little face turning white and pinched in spots
about the mouth.
She came, presently, and stood by the fire by
Miss Kelso's side, in the full sweep of the light.
“Miss Kelso,” her hands folding and unfolding
restlessly, “there 's many things you don't understand.
There 's things you could n't understand.”
“Why?”
“I don't know why. I never did quite know
why.”
“You may be right; you may be wrong.
How can you tell till you try me?”
“How can I tell whether I can skate on running
water till I try it? — I wish Catty would
come!”
Sip walked to the window again, and walked
back again, and took a look at the teapot, and
cut a slice or two of bread.
-- 084 --
[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]
“So you 've left the Company board,” observed
Miss Kelso, quite as if they had been
talking about the Company board. “You did n't
like it?”
“I liked well enough.”
“You left suddenly?”
“I left sudden.” Sip threw her bread-knife
down, with an aimless, passionate gesture. “I
suppose it 's no good to shy off. I might as well
tell o't first as last. They turned us off!”
“Turned you off?”
“On account of Catty.”
Miss Kelso raised a confused face from the
poker and the fire.
“You see,” said Sip, “I told you there 's things
you could n't understand. Now there ain't one
of my own kind of folks, your age, would n't have
understood half an hour ago, and saved me the
trouble of telling. Catty 's queer, don't you see?
She runs away, don't you see? Sometimes she
drinks, don't you understand? Drinks herself
the dead kind. That ain't so often. Most times
she just runs away about streets. There 's sometimes
she does — worse.”
“Worse?” The young lady's pure, puzzled
-- 085 --
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face dropped suddenly. “O, I was very dull! I
am sorry. I am not used —” And so broke off,
with a sick look about the lips, — a look which
did not escape the notice of the little brown,
pinched face in the firelight, for it was curving
into a bitter smile when the door opened, banging
back against the wall as if the opener had
either little consciousness or little care of the
noise it made.
“There 's Catty,” said Sip, doggedly. “Come
and get warm, Catty.” This is their silent language
on her rapid, work-worn fingers.
“If you mind me now, I 'll go,” said Miss
Kelso, in a low voice.
“That 's for you to say, whether I shall mind
you now.”
“Poor Catty!” said Perley, still in a very low
voice. “Poor, poor Catty!”
Sip flushed, — flushed very sweetly and suddenly
all over her dogged face. “Now I don't
mind you. Stay to supper. We 'll have supper
right away. Come here a minute, Catty dear.”
Catty dear would not come. Catty dear stood
scowling in the middle of the room, a sullen, ill-tempered,
ill-controlled, uncontrollable Catty dear
as one could ask to see.
-- 086 --
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“For love's sake,” said Sip, on her patient
fingers; “here a minute, for love's sake, Catty.”
“For love's sake?” repeated Catty, in her
pathetic language.
“Only for love's sake, dear,” said Sip.
Catty came with this, and laid her head down
with a singularly gentle motion on Sip's faded
plaid lap. Miss Kelso could see her now, in the
light in which they three were sitting. A girl
possibly of fifteen years, — a girl with a low forehead,
with wandering eyes, with a dull stoop to
the head, with long, lithe, magnetic fingers,
with a thick, dropping under lip, — a girl walled
up and walled in from that labyrinth of sympathies,
that difficult evolution of brain from beast,
the gorgeous peril of that play at good and evil
which we call life, except at the wandering eyes,
and at the long, lithe, magnetic fingers. An ugly
girl.
She lay, for an ugly girl, very still in her sister's
lap. Sip softly stroked her face, talking
now to the child and now to her visitor, wound
about in a pretty net of soft sounds and softer
emotions. A pleasant change had fallen upon
her since the deaf-mute came in.
-- 087 --
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“See how pleasant it is to come home early,
Catty.” (She won't talk to-night, because you 're
here.) “For love's sake, dear, you know.” (That'
s the way I get along with her. She likes that.)
“For love's sake and my sake, and with the lamp
and fire bright. So much better — ” (It 's never
her fault, poor dear! God knows, I never, never
laid it up against her as it was her fault.) “Better
than the dark street-corners, Catty — ”
“There 's light in the shops,” said Catty, on
her long fingers, with a shrewd, unpleasant smile.
“And supper at home,” said Sip, quickly, rising.
“For love's sake, you know. And company
to supper!”
“For love's sake?” asked Catty, rising too.
“I don't know for whose sake!” said Sip, all
the pleasantness gone in a minute from her.
The young lady and Catty were standing now,
between the lamp-glow and the fire-glow, side by
side. They were a startling pair to be standing
side by side. They stood quite still, except that
Catty passed her fingers curiously over Miss
Kelso's dress, — it seemed that she saw quite as
much with her fingers as with her eyes, — and
that she nodded once or twice, as if she were
-- 088 --
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talking to herself, in a stupid way. Perley's fine,
fair, finished smile seemed to blot out this miserable
figure, and to fill the room with a kind of
dazzle.
“Good God!” cried Sip, sharply. “You asked
me for the difference. Look at that! You
asked what difference the dirt makes. That 's
the difference! To be born in it, breathe it,
swallow it, grow on it, live it, die and go back to
it — bah! If you want to go the devil, work in
the dirt. Look at her!”
“I look at her,” said Perley, with a solemn,
frightened look upon her young face, — “I look
at her, Sip. For love's sake. Believe me if you
can. Make her understand. I look for love's
sake.”
Is it possible? Is Miss Kelso sure? Not for a
whim's sake? Not for fancy's sake? Not for
the sake of an idle moment's curiosity? Not to
gratify an eccentric taste, — playing my Lady
Bountiful for a pretty change in a pretty life?
Look at her; it is a very loathsome under lip.
Look well at her; they are not pleasant eyes.
An ugly girl, — a very ugly girl. For love's sake,
Miss Kelso?
-- 089 --
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Catty sat down to supper without washing her
face. This troubled Sip more than it did her
visitor. Her visitor, indeed, scarcely noticed it.
Her face wore yet something of the solemn fright
which had descended on it with Catty's coming
in.
She noticed, however, that she had bread and
butter for her supper, and that she was eating
from a stone-china plate, and with a steel fork
and with a pewter spoon. She noticed that the
bread was toasted, it seemed in deference to the
presence of a guest, and that the toasting had
feverishly flushed Sip's haggard face. She noticed
that Sip and Catty ate no butter, but dipped
their bread into a little blue bowl of thick black
molasses. She noticed that there was a kind of
coarse black tea upon the table, and noticed that
she found a single pewter spoonful of it quite
sufficient for her wants. She noticed that Sip
made rather a form than a fact of playing with
her toasted bread in the thick black molasses,
and that she drained her dreadful teacup thirstily,
and that she then leaned, with a sudden sick look,
back into her chair.
Everything tasted of oil, she said. She could
-- 090 --
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not eat. There were times that she could not eat
day nor night for a long time. How long? She
was not sure. It had been often two days that
nothing passed her lips. Sometimes, with the
tea, it was longer. There were times that she
came home and got right into bed, dirt and
all. She could n't undress, no, not if it was to
save her soul, nor eat. But, generally, she managed
to cook for Catty. Besides, there was the
work.
“What work?” asked Miss Kelso, innocently.
“Washing. Ironing. Baking. Sweeping.
Dusting. Sewing. Marketing. Pumping. Scrubbing.
Scouring,” said Sip, drumming out her
periods on a teaspoon with her hard, worn fingers.
“Oh!” said Miss Kelso.
“For two, you see,” said Sip.
“But all this, — you cannot have all this to do
after you have stood eleven hours and a half at
your loom?”
“When should I have it to do! There 's Sunday,
to be sure; but I don't do so much now Sundays,
except the washing and the brushing up.
I like,” with a gentle, quick look at the deaf and
dumb girl, who still sat dipping bread crusts into
-- 091 --
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
black molasses, absorbed and still, “to make it a
kind of a comfortable day for Catty, Sunday.
I don't bother Catty so much to help me, you
know,” added Sip, cheerfully. “I like,” with another
very pleasant look, “to make it comfortable
for Catty.”
“I went into the mills to-day,” said Miss Kelso,
in reply. It was not very much to the point as a
reply, and was said with an interrogatory accent,
which lessened its aptness.
“Yes?” said Sip, in the same tone.
“I never was in a mill before.”
“No?”
“No.”
There was a pause, in which the young lady
seemed to be waiting for a leading question, like a
puzzled scholar. If she were, she had none. Sip
sat with her dogged smile, and snapped little paper
balls into the fire.
“I thought it rather close in the mills.”
“Yes?”
“And — dirty. And — there was one very
warm room; the overseer advised me not to go in.”
“It was very good advice.”
“I went into the Company boarding-house too.”
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
“For the first time?”
“For the first time. I went to inquire after
you. The landlady took me about. Now I think
of it, she invited me to tea.”
“Why did n't you stay?”
“Why, to tell the truth, the — tablecloth was—
rather dirty.”
“Oh!”
“And I saw her wipe her face on — the dishtowel.
Do the girls often sleep six in a room?
They had no wash-stands. I saw some basins
set on trunks. They carried all the water up and
down stairs themselves; there were two or three
flights. There was n't a ventilator in the house.
I saw a girl there sick.”
“Sick? O, Bert Bush. Yes. Pleurisy. She 's
going to work her notice when she gets about
again. Given out.”
“She coughed while I was there. I thought
her room was rather cold. I thought all the
rooms were rather cold. I did n't seem to see
any fire for anybody, except in the common sitting-room.
But the bread was sweet.”
“Yes, the bread was sweet.”
“And the gingerbread.”
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
“Very sweet.”
“And, I suppose, the board —
“The board is quarter of a dollar cheaper than
in other places.”
Sip stopped snapping paper balls into the fire,
and snapped instead one of her shrewd, sidewise
glances at her visitor's face.
The fine, fair, finished face! How puzzled it
looked! Sip smiled.
Catty had crept around while they were talking,
and sat upon the floor by Miss Kelso's chair.
She was still amusing herself with the young
lady's dress, passing her wise fingers to and fro
across its elegant surface, and nodding to herself
in her dull way. Miss Kelso's hand, the one with
the rings, lay upon her lap, and Catty, attracted
suddenly by the blaze of the jewels, took it up.
She took it up as she would a novel toy, examined
it for a few moments with much pleasure, then
removed the rings and dropped them carelessly,
and laid her cheek down upon the soft flesh. It
was such a dusty cheek, and such a beautiful,
bare, clean hand, that Sip started anxiously to
speak to Catty, but saw that Perley sat quite still,
and that her earnest eyes were full of sudden tears.
-- 094 --
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“You will not let me say, you know, that I am
sorry for you. I have been trying all the evening.
I can't come any nearer than this.” This
she said smiling.
“Look here!” said Sip; her brown face worked
and altered. She said, “Look here!” again, and
stopped. “That 's nigh enough. I 'll take that.
I like that. I like you. Look here! I never
said that to one of your kind of folks before; I
like you. Generally I hate your kind of folks.”
“Now that,” said Miss Kelso, musing, “perplexes
me. We feel no such instinct of aversion
to you. As far as I understand `my kind of
folks,' they have kindly hearts, and they have it
in their hearts to feel very sorry for the poor.”
“Who wants their pity? And who cares
what 's in their hearts?”
Sip had hardened again like a little growing
prickly nut. The subject and her softer mood
dropped away together.
“Sip,” said Perley, fallen into another revery,
“you see how little I know —”
Sip nodded.
“About — people who work and — have a
hard time.”
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
“They don't none of 'em know. That 's why
I hate your kind of folks. It ain't because they
don't care, it 's because they don't know; nor
they don't care enough to know.”
“Now I have always been brought up to believe,”
urged Miss Kelso, “that our factory-people,
for instance, had good wages.”
“I never complained of the wages. Hayle
and Kelso could n't get a cotton-weaver for
three dollars a week, like a paper-factory I
know about in Cincinnati. I knew a girl as
worked to Cincinnati. Three dollars a week,
and board to come out of it! Cotton-weaving'
s no play, and cotton-weavers are no
fools.”
“And I always thought,” continued Miss Kelso,
“that such people were — why, happy and comfortable,
you know. Of course, I knew they must
economize, and that, but —”
She looked vaguely over at the supper-table;
such uncertain conceptions as she might hitherto
be said to have had of “economizing” acquiring
suddenly the form of thick, black molasses,
a little sticky, to be sure, but tangible.
Sip made no reply, and Perley, suddenly aware
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
of the lateness of the hour, started in dismay to
take her leave. It occurred to her that the sticky
stone-china dishes were yet to be washed, and
that she had done a thoughtless thing in imposing,
for a novel evening's entertainment, upon
the scanty leisure of a worn-out factory-girl.
She turned, however, neither an entertained
nor a thoughtless face upon Sip when she tried
to rise from her chair. Catty had fallen asleep,
with her dirty cheek upon the shining hand, from
which the rings were gone. Her ugly lower lip
protruded, and all the repulsive lines about her
eyes came out. Her long fingers moved a little,
as is often the way with the deaf and dumb in
sleep, framing broken words. Even in her
dreams, this miserable creature bore about her a
dull sense of denial and distress. Even in her
dreams she listened for what she never heard,
and spoke that which no man understood.
“Mother used to say,” said Sip, under her
breath, “that it was the noise.”
“The noise?”
“The noise of the wheels. She said they
beat about in her head. She come home o'
nights, and says to herself, `The baby 'll never
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
hear in this world unless she hears the wheels';
and sure enough” (Sip lifted her face to Perley's,
with a look of awe), “it is true enough that
Catty hears the wheels; but never anything
besides.”
-- 098 -- p476-103
CHAPTER V. BUB MELL.
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
IT was a March night, and a gray night, and a
wild night; Perley Kelso stepped out into
it, from the damp little stone house, with something
of the confusion of the time upon her. Her
head and heart both ached. She felt like a
stranger setting foot in a strange land. Old,
home-like boundary lines of things to which her
smooth young life had rounded, wavered before
her. It even occurred to her that she should
never be very happy again, for knowing that factory-girls
ate black molasses and had the cotton-cough.
She meant to tell Maverick about it. She
might have meant many other things, but for
being so suddenly and violently jerked by the
elbow that she preserved herself with difficulty
from a smart fall into the slushy street. Striking
out with one hand to preserve her balance, she
-- 099 --
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
found herself in the novel position of collaring
either a very old young child or a very young
old man, it was impossible at first sight to tell
which. Whatever he was, it was easy at first
sight to tell that he was filthy and ragged.
“Le' go!” yelled the old young creature,
writhing. “Le' go, I say, dern yer! Le' me be!”
Perley concluded, as her eyes wonted to the
dark street, that the old young creature was by
right a child.
“If yer had n't le' go I 'd 'a' made yer, yer
bet,” said the boy, gallantly. “Pretty way to
treat a cove as doin' yer a favor. You bet.
Hi-igh!”
This, with a cross between a growl of defiance
and a whine of injury.
“Guess what I 've got o' yourn? You could n't.
You bet.”
“But I don't bet,” said Perley, with an amused
face.
“Yer don't? I do. Hi-igh! Don't I though?
You bet! Now what do you call that? Say!”
“I call that my glove. I did not miss it till
this minute. Did you pick it up? Thank you.”
“You need n't thank me till you 've got it, you
-- 100 --
[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]
need n't,” said the child. “I 'm a cove as knows
a thing or two. I want ten cents. You bet I do.”
“Where do you live?” asked Perley.
He lived down to East Street. Fust Tenement.
No. 6. What business was it of hern,
he 'd like to know.
“Have you a father and mother?”
Lor yes! Two of 'em. Why should n't he?
“I believe I will go home with you,” said Perley,
“it is so near by; and — I suppose you are
poor?”
Lor, yes. She might bet.
“And I can make it right about the recovery
of the glove when I get there?”
“N-n-oo you don't!” promptly, from the cove
as knew a thing or two. “You 'll sling over
to the old folks, I 'll bet. You don't come
that!”
“But,” suggested Perley, “I can, perhaps,
give your father and mother a much larger
sum of money than I should think it best to
give you. If they are poor, I should think you
would be glad that they should have it. And
I can't walk in, you know, and give your father
and mother money for nothing.”
-- 101 --
[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]
“You give me ten cents,” said this young old
man, stoutly, “or what do you s'pose I 'll do with
this 'ere glove? Guess now!”
Perley failed to guess now.
“I 'll cut 'n' run with it. I 'll cut 'n' run like
mad. You bet. I 'll snip it up with a pair of
shears I know about. I 'll jab holes in it with
a jackknife I 've got. No, I won't. I 'll swop
it off with my sister, for a yaller yaggate I 've got
my eye on in the 'pothecarry's winder. My sister'
s a mill-gal. She 'll wear it on one hand to
meetin', an' stick the t'other in her muff. That 's
what I 'll do. How 'll you like that? Hi-igh!
You bet!”
“At least, I can go home with you,” said
Perley, absently effecting an exchange between
her glove and a fresh piece of ten-cent scrip,
which the boy held up in the light from a shopwindow,
and tested with the air of a middle-aged
counterfeiter; “you ought to have been at home
an hour ago.”
“Lor now,” said this promising youth, “I was
just thinkin' so ought you.”
“What is your name?” asked Perley, as they
turned their two faces (one would have been
-- 102 --
[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]
struck, seeing them together, with thinking how
much younger the woman looked than the child),
toward East Street, the First Tenement, and
No. 6.
“My name 's Bub. Bub Mell. They used to
call me Bubby, for short, till I got so large they
give it up.”
“How old are you?”
“Eight last Febiverry.”
“What do you do?”
“Work to the Old Stone.”
“But I thought no children under ten years
of age were allowed to work in the mills.”
“You must be green!” said Bub.
“But you go to school?”
“I went to school till I got so large they
give it up.”
“But you go a part of the time, of course?”
“No, I don't neither. Don't you s'pose I
knows?”
“What is that you have in your mouth?”
asked Perley, suddenly.
Bub relieved himself of a quid of fabulous size,
making quite superfluous the concise reply, “Terbaccer.”
-- 103 --
[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]
“I never saw such a little boy as you chew
tobacco before,” said Perley, gasping.
“You must be green! I took my fust swag a
year and a half ago. We all does. I 'm just
out, it happens,” said Bub, with a candid smile.
“That 's what I wanted your ten cents for.
I smokes too,” added Bub, with an air of
having tried not to mention it, for modesty's
sake, but of being tempted overmuch. “You
bet I do! Sometimes it 's pipes, and sometimes
it 's ends. As a gener'l thing, give me a pipe.”
“What else do you do?” demanded Perley,
faintly.
“What else?” Bub reflected, with his old,
old head on one side. He bet on marbles.
He knew a tip-top gin-sling, when he see it, well
as most folks. He could pitch pennies. He
could ketch a rat ag'in any cove on East Street.
Lor! could n't he?
“But what else?” persisted Perley.
Bub was puzzled. He thought there warn't
nothin' else. After that he had his supper.
“And after that?”
Lor. After that he went to bed.
“And after that?”
-- 104 --
[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]
After that he got up and went in.
“Went in where?”
She must be green. Into the Old Stone.
Spoolin', you know.
Did he go to church?
She might bet he did n't! Why, when
should he ketch the rats?
Nor Sunday school?
He went to the Mission once. Had a card
with a green boy onto it. Got so old he give
it up.
What did he expect, asked Perley, in a
sudden, severe burst of religious enthusiasm,
would become of him when he died?
Eh?
When he died, what would become of him?
Lor.
Could he read?
Fust Primer. Never tried nothin' else.
Could he write?
No.
Was he going to school again?
Could n't say.
Why did n't his parents send him?
Could n't say that. Thought they was too old;
-- 105 --
[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]
no, thought he was too old; well, he did n't know;
thought somebody was too old, and give it up.
Was this where he lived?
She must be green! Of course he did.
Comin' in?
Perley was coming in. With hesitation she
came in.
She came into what struck her as a very
unpleasant place; a narrow, crumbling place;
a place with a peculiar odor; a very dark place.
Bub cheerfully suggested that she 'd better look
out.
For what?
Holes.
Where?
Holes in the stairs. He used to step into 'em
and sprain his ankles, you bet, till he got so old
he give it up She 'd better look out for the
plaster too. She 'd bump her head. She never
saw nothin' break like that plaster did; great
cakes of it. Here, this way. Keerful now!
By this way and that way, by being careful
now and patient then and quite persistent at
all times, Perley contrived to follow Bub in safety
up two flights of villanous stairs and into the
-- 106 --
[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]
sudden shine of a low, little room, into which he
shot rather than introduced her, with the unembarrassing
remark that he did n't know what
she 'd come for, but there she was.
There were six children, a cooking-stove, a
bed, a table, and a man with stooped shoulders
in the room. There was an odor in the room
like that upon the stairs. The man, the children,
the cooking-stove, the bed, the table, and the odor
quite filled the room.
The room opened into another room, in which
there seemed to be a bureau, a bed, and a sick
woman.
Miss Kelso met with but a cool reception in
these rooms. The man, the children, the cooking-stove,
the bed, the odor, and the woman thrust
her at once, she could not have said how, into
the position of an intruder. The sick woman,
upon hearing her errand, flung herself over to
the wall with an impatient motion. The man sullenly
invited her to sit down; gave her to understand—
again she could hardly have told how —
that he wanted no money of her; no doubt the
boy had had more than he deserved; but that, if
she felt inclined, she might sit down.
-- 107 --
[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]
“To tell the truth,” said Perley, in much confusion,
“I did not come so much on account of
the glove as on account of the boy.”
What had the boy been up to now? The
sullen man darted so fierce a look at the boy,
who sat with his old, old smile, lighting an old
pipe behind the cooking-stove, that Perley hastened
to explain that she did not blame the boy.
Who could blame the boy?
“But he was out so late about the streets, Mr.
Mell. He uses tobacco as most children use
candy. And a child of that age ought not to be
in the mills, sir,” said Perley, warming, “he ought
to be at school!”
O, that was all, was it? Mr. Mell pushed back
his stooped shoulders into his chair with an air
of relief, and Bub lighted his pipe in peace. But
he had a frowning face, this Mr. Mell, and he
turned its frown upon his visitor. He would like
to know what business it was of hers what he did
with his boy, and made no scruple of saying so.
“It ought to be some of my business,” said the
young lady, growing bolder, “when a child of
eight years works all the year round in these
mills. I have no doubt that I seem very rude,
-- 108 --
[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]
sir; but I have in fact come out, and come out
alone as you see me, to see with my own eyes
and to hear with my own ears how people live
who work in these mills.”
Had she? Mr. Mell smiled grimly. Not a pleasant
job for a lady he should think; and uncommon.
“It 's a job I mean to finish,” said Miss Kelso,
firmly. “The stairs in this house are in a shocking
condition. What is — excuse me — the very
peculiar odor which I notice on these premises?
It must be poisonous to the sick woman, — your
wife?”
It was his wife. Yes; consumption; took it
weaving; had been abed this four month; could
n't say how long she 'd hold out. Doctor said,
five month ago, as nothin' would save her but a
change. So he sits and talks about Florida and
the South sun, and the folks as had been saved
down there. It was a sort of a fretful thing to
hear him. Florida! Good God! How was the
likes of him to get a dyin' wife to Florida?
She did n't like strangers overmuch; better not
go nigh her; she was kind of fretful; the childern
was kind of fretful too; sometimes they cried
like as his head would split; he kept the gell
-- 109 --
[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]
home to look after 'em; not the first gell; he
could n't keep her to home at all; she made
seven; he did n't know 's he blamed her; it was
a kind of a fretful place, let alon' the stairs and
the smell. It come from the flood, the smell did.
“The flood?”
Yes, the cellar flooded up every spring from the
river; it might be drained, he should think; but
it never was as he heard of. There was the
offal from the mills floated in; it left a smell
pretty much the year round; and a kind of chill.
Then they had n't any drain, you see. There was
that hole in the wall where they threw out dishwater
and such. So it fell into the yard under
the old woman's window, and made her kind of
fretful. It made her fretful to see the children
ragged too. She greeted over it odd times. She
had a clean way about her, when she was up and
about, the old woman had.
“Who owns this house?” asked Miss Kelso,
with burning eyes.
The man seemed unaccountably reluctant to
reply; he fixed the fire, scolded Bub, scolded a
few other children, and shook the baby, but was
evidently unwilling to reply.
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Upon Perley's repeating her question, the sick
woman, with another impatient fling against the
wall, cried out sharply, What was the odds? Do
tell the girl. It could n't harm her, could it?
Her husband, very ill at ease, believed that young
Mr. Hayle owned the house; though they dealt
with his lessee; Mr. Hayle had never been down
himself.
For a sullen man, with a stoop in the shoulders,
a frown in the face, seven children, a sick
wife, and no drain-spout, Mr. Mell did very well
about this. He grew even communicative, when
the blaze in Miss Kelso's eyes went out, paled
by the sudden fire in her cheek.
He supposed he was the more riled up by this
and that, he said, for being English; Scotch by
breed, you know; they 'd named the first gell
after her grandma, — Nynee; quite Scotch, ye
see; she was a Hielander, grandma, — but married
to England, and used to their ways. Now there
was ways and ways, and one way was a ten-hour
bill. There was no mistaking that, one way was
a ten-hour bill, and it was a way they did well by
in England, and it was a way they 'd have to walk
in this side the water yet — w-a-l-k in y-e-t!
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He 'd been turned out o' mills in this country
twice for goin' into a ten-hour strike; once to
Lawrence and once up to New Hampshire. He 'd
given it up. It did n't pay. Since the old woman
was laid up, he must get steady work or
starve.
He 'd been a factory operative* thirty-three
years; twenty-three years to home, and ten years
to the United States, only one year as he was
into the army; he was forty-three years old.
Why did n't he send that boy to school? Why
did n't he drive a span of grays! He could n't
send the boy to school, nor none of the other boys
to school, except as mayhap they took their turn
occasional. He made it a point to send them
till they was eight if he could; he did n't like
to put a young un to spoolin' before he was eight,
if he could help it. The law? O yes, there was
a law, and there was ways of getting round a law,
bless you! Ways enough. There was parties
as had it in their hands to make it none so easy,
and again to make it none so hard.
“What parties?”
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Parties as had an interest in spoolin in common
with the parent.
“The child's employers?”
Mr. Mell suddenly upon his guard. Mr. Mell
trusted to the good feelin' of a young lady as
would have a heart for the necessities of poverty,
and changed the subject.
“But you cannot mean,” persisted Perley, “that
a healthy man like you, with his grown children
earning, finds it impossible to support his family
without the help of a poor baby like Bub over
there?”
Mr. Mell quite meant it. Did n't know what
other folks could do; he could n't; not since the
rise in prices, and the old woman givin' out.
Why, look at here. There was the gell, twenty
year old; she worked to weaving; there was the
boy as was seventeen, him reading the picture
paper over to the table there, he draws and
twists; there was another gell of fifteen, you
might say, hander at the harnesses into the
dressing-room; then there was Bub, and the
babies.
Counting in the old woman and the losses,
he must have Bub. The old woman ate a power
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ful sight of meat. He went without himself whensoever
he could; but his work was hard; it made
him kind of deathly to the stomach if he went
without his meat.
What losses did he speak of? Losses enough.
High water. Low water. Strikes. Machinery
under repair. Besides the deathly feelin' to the
stomach. He'd been out for sickness off and on,
first and last, a deal; though he looked a healthy
man, as she said, and you would n't think it.
Fact was, he 'd never worked but one whole
month in six year; nor he 'd never taken a
week's vacation at a time, of his own will an'
pleasure, for six year. Sometimes he lost two
days and a half a week, right along, for lack of
work.* Sometimes he give out just for the heat.
He 'd often seen it from 110° to 116° Fahrenheit
in the dressing-room. He wished he was back
to England. He would n't deny but there was
advantages here, but he wished he was back.
(This man had worked in England from 6 A. M.
to 8 o'clock P. M., with no time allowed for dinner;
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he paid threepence a week to an old woman who
brought hot water into the mills at noon, with
which she filled the tin pot in which he had
brought tea and sugar from home. He had, besides,
a piece of bread. He ate with one hand
and worked with the other.)
He warn't complainin' of nobody in particular,
to nobody in particular, but he thought he had a
kind of a fretful life. He had n't been able to lay
by a penny, not by this way nor that, considerin'
his family of nine and the old woman, and the
feelin' to the stomach. Now that made him fretful
sometimes. He was a temperate man, he 'd
like to have it borne in mind. He was a member
of a ten-hour society, of the Odd Fellows, Good
Templars, and Orthodox Church.
Anything for him? No; he did n't know of
anything she could do for him. He 'd never
taken charity from nobody's hands yet. He
might, mayhap, come to it some day. He supposed
it was fretful of him, but he 'd rather lay in
his grave. The old woman she would n't never
know nothing of that; it was a kind of a comfort,
that was. He was obliged to her for wishing
him kindly. Sorry the old woman was so
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fretful to-night; she was oncommon noisy; and the
children. He 'd ask her to call again, if the old
woman was n't so fretful about strangers. Hold
the door open for the lady, Bub. Put down your
pipe, sir! Have n't ye no more manners than to
smoke in a lady's face? There. Now, hold the
door open wide.
Wide, very wide, the door flung that Bub
opened to Perley Kelso. As wide it seemed to
her as the gray, wild, March night itself. At the
bottom of the stairs, she stood still to take its
touch upon her burning face.
Bub crept down after her, and knocked the
ashes out of his pipe against the door.
“Ain't used to the dark, be ye?”
No; not much used to the dark.
“Afraid?”
Not at all afraid.
Lor. He was goin' to offer to see her home, —
for ten cents. He used to be afraid. Got so old
he give it up.
Half-way home, Miss Kelso was touched upon
the arm again; this time gently, and with some
timidity. Sip Garth, with a basket on her arm,
spoke as she turned; she had been out
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marketing, she said; getting a little beef for to-morrow's
dinner; had recognized and watched her half up
the street; it was very late; Miss Kelso was not
so used to being out late as mill-girls were; and
if she cared for company —
“I do not know that there is any reason why I
should not be out as late as mill-girls are,” mused
Miss Kelso, struck by the novelty of the idea. But
she was glad of the company, certainly; fell into
step with the mill-girl upon the now crowded walk.
“This is very new to me,” she said in a low
voice, as they turned a corner where a gust of
oaths met her like an east-wind and took away
her breath.
“You 'll see strange sights,” said Sip, with her
dogged smile.
She saw strange sights, indeed; strange sights
for delicate, guarded, fine young eyes; but so
pitifully familiar to the little mill-girl with the
dogged smile! As familiar, for instance, as
Maverick and Axminster carpets to Miss Kelso,
Miss Kelso wondered.
The lights of the little town were all ablaze;
shops and lounging-places full. Five Falls was
as restless as the restless night.
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“Always is,” said Sip, “in a wind. Take a
good storm, or even take the moon, and it 's
different. When mill-folks have a man to hate,
or a wife to beat, or a child to drown, or a sin to
think of, or any ugly thing to do, you may notice,
ten to one, they 'll take a windy night; a dark
night like this, when you can't see what the
gale is up to, when you 're blown along,
when you run against things, when you can't
help yourself, when nothing seems to be anybody's
fault, when there 's noises in the world
like the engines of ten thousand factories let
loose. You can't keep still. You run about.
You 're in and out. You 've got so used to a
noise. You feel as if you were part and parcel
of it. I do. Next morning, if you 've lost your
soul, — why, the wind 's down, and you don't
understand it.”
Sip's dark face lighted fitfully, as if the gusty
weather blew its meaning to and fro; she gesticulated
with her hands like a little French woman.
It struck Perley that the girl was not far wrong
in fancying that she could “do it over” at the
Blue Plum.
But Perley saw strange sights. Five Falls in
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the gusty weather was full of them. Full of
knots of girls in bright ribbons singing unpleasantly;
of knots of men at corners drinking
heavily; of tangles where the two knots met
with discordant laughter; of happy lovers that
one sighed over; of haggard sinners that one
despaired of praying over; of old young children
with their pipes, like Bub; of fragments of murderous
Irish threats; of shattered bits of sweet
Scotch songs; of half-broken English brogue;
of German gutturals thick with lager; only now
and then the shrewd, dry Yankee twang.
It was to be noticed of these people that the
girls swore, that the babies smoked, that the men,
more especially the elder men, had frowns like
Mr. Mell.
“One would think,” said Miss Kelso, as she
watched the growing crowd, “that they had no
homes.”
“They have houses,” said Sip.
They passed a dark step where something lay
curled up like a skulking dog.
“What 's that?” said Miss Kelso, stopping and
stooping. It was a little girl, — a very little girl.
She had a heavy bundle or a pail upon her arm;
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had been sent upon an errand, it seemed, and
had dropped upon the step asleep; had been
trodden on once or twice, for her clothes bore
the mark of muddy feet.
“That 's Dib Docket,” said Sip. “Go home,
Dib!” Sip shook her, not ungently.
The little thing moved away uncertainly like a
sleep-walker, jostled to and fro by people in the
street. She seemed either too weak or too weary
to sit or stand.
“That 's Dib Docket,” repeated Sip. “That
child walks, at her work in the mills, between
twenty and thirty miles a day. I counted it up
once. She lives three quarters of a mile from
the factory besides. She 's not so bright as she
might be. It 's a wicked little devil; knows
more wickedness than you 've ever thought of,
Miss Kelso. No, you 'd better not go after her;
you would n't understand.”
Women with peculiar bleached yellow faces
passed by. They had bright eyes. They looked
like beautiful moving corpses; as if they might
be the skeletons among the statues that were dug
against the face of day. Miss Kelso had noticed
them since she first came out.
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“What are they?”
“Cotton-weavers. You can tell a weaver by
the skin.”
Threading her way through a blockade of loudspeaking
young people by the railroad station
(there was always plenty going on at the station,
Sip said), Miss Kelso caught a bit of talk about
“the Lord's day.” Surprised at this evidence
of religious feeling where she was not prepared
to expect it, she expressed her surprise to Sip.
“O,” said Sip, “we mean pay-day; that 's
all the Lord's day we know much about.”
There was an old man in this crowd with very
white hair. He had a group of young fellows
about him, and gesticulated at them while he
talked. The wind was blowing his hair about.
He had a quavering voice, with a kind of mumble
to it, like the voice of a man with a chronic
toothache.
“Hear him!” said Sip.
Perley could hear nothing but a jargon of
“Eight hour,” “Ten hour,” “Labor reform,”
“Union,” “Slaves and masters,” “Next session,”
and “Put it through.” Some of the young fellows
seemed to listen, more laughed.
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“Poor old Bijah!” said Sip, walking on; “always
in a row, — Bijah Mudge; can't outgrow it.
He 's been turned out of half the mills in New
England, folks say. He 'll be in hot water in
Five Falls before long, if he don't look out. But
he 's a lonesome old fellow, — Bijah.”
Just beyond the station Sip suddenly stopped.
They were in the face of a gay little shop, with
candy and dry goods in the windows.
“And rum enough in the back room there to
damn an angel!” said Sip, passionately, “and he
will have her in there in five minutes! Hold on,
will you?” She broke away from Miss Kelso,
who “held on” in bewilderment.
A pretty girl was strolling up and down the
platform of this place, with her hand upon the
arm of a young fellow with a black mustache.
The girl had a tint like that of pale gold about
her hair and face, and large, vain, unhappy eyes.
She wore blue ribbons, and looked like a Scotch
picture.
Sip stopped at the foot of the platform, and
called her. The girl came crossly, and yet with
a certain air of relief too.
“What do you want, Sip Garth?”
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“I want you to go home, Nynee Mell.”
“Home!” said Nynee, with weak bitterness.
“Yes, home; it 's better than this.”
“It frets me so, to go home!” said Nynee, impatiently.
“I hate to go home.”
“It is better than this,” repeated Sip, earnestly.
“Come. I don't set up to be a preacher,
Nynee, but I do set up that Jim 's no company
fit for a decent girl.”
“I 'm a decent girl,” said poor Nynee, trying
to toss her silly head, but looking about her with
an expression of alarm. “Who said I was n't?”
Sip's reply Miss Kelso lost. The two girls
talked together for a few moments in low tones.
Presently Nynee walked slowly away.
“Jim 'll be cross to-morrow, if I give him the
slip,” she said, pettishly, but still she walked
away.
“There!” exclaimed Sip, stopping where she
stood, “that will do. Dirk! Dirk, I say!”
Dirk I say stopped too. He had been walking
rapidly down the street when Sip spoke. He was
a young man of perhaps twenty-five, with a strong
hand and a kindly eye. He looked very kindly
at Sip.
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“I want you to go home with Nynee Mell,”
said Sip.
“I 'd a sight rather go home with some others
than Nynee Mell,” said the kindly young man.
“I know what I 'm about,” said Sip. “I know
who 'll keep Nynee Mell out of mischief. Go
quick, can't you?”
The kindly young man kindly went; not so
quickly as he might, but he went.
“Who was that young man?” asked Miss
Kelso, as they climbed the hill.
“Jim? A miserable Irishman, Jim is; has n't
been in Five Falls a month, but long enough to
show his colors, and a devilish black mustache,
as you see. You see, they put him to work next
to Nynee; he must go somewhere; they put him
where the work was; they did n't bother their
heads about the girl; they 're never bothered with
such things. And there ain't much room in the
alley. So she spends the day with him, pushing
in and out. So she gets used to him and all that.
She 's a good girl, Nynee Mell; wildish, and
spends her money on her ribbons, but a good girl.
She 'll go to the devil, sure as death, at this rate.
Who would n't? Leastways, being Nynee Mell.”
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“But I meant the other young man,” observed
Miss Kelso.
“Him? O, that 's Dirk Burdock; watchman
up at the Old Stone.”
“A friend of yours?”
“I never thought of it,” said Sip, gravely.
“Perhaps that 's what you 'd call him. I like
Dirk first-rate.”
Sip pointed out one other young man to Miss
Kelso before they were quite at home. They
were passing a dingy hall where the mission, Sip
said, held a weekly prayer meeting. The young
man came out with the worshippers. It was Mr.
Garrick (said Sip), the new partner. He 'd been
in the way of going since he was in the dressing-room
himself; folks thought he 'd give it up now;
she guessed it was the first time you 'd ever
caught the firm into the mission meeting; meaning
no offence, however.
He was a grave man, this Mr. Garrick; a man
with premature wrinkles on the forehead; with a
hard-worked, hard-working mouth; with a hard
hand, with a hard step; a man, you would say,
in a hard place, acquired by a hard process; a
man, perhaps, who would find it hard to hope, and
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harder to despair. But a man with a very bright,
sweet, sudden smile. A man of whom Perley
Kelso had seen or heard half her life; who had
been in and out of the house on business; who
had run on her errands, or her father's, — it made
little difference — in either case she had never
troubled herself about the messenger; but a man
whose face she could no more have defined than
she could, for instance, that of her coachman.
Her eyes followed him, therefore, with some
curiosity, as he lifted his hat in grave surprise at
passing her, and went his way.
Perley counted the people that came out from
the mission meeting. There were six in all.
“There must be sixty folks within sight,” observed
Sip, running her quick eye up and down
the gaudy little street, “as many as sixty loafin',
I mean.”
Miss Kelso made no answer, and they reached
and entered her own still, clean, elegantly trimmed
lawn in silence.
“Now I 've seen you safe home,” said the mill-girl,
“I shall feel better. The fact was, I did n't
know but the boys would bother you; they 're a
rough set; and you ain't used to 'em.”
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“I never thought of such a thing!” exclaimed
the young lady. “They all know me, you know.”
“Yes; they all know you.”
“I supposed they would feel a kind of interest,
or respect —”
“What reason have you ever given them,”
said Sip in a low tone, “to feel any special interest
or respect for you?”
“You are right,” said Miss Kelso, after a moment's
thought. “They have no reason. I have
given them none. I wish you would come in a
minute.”
“Have I been saucy?”
“No; you have been honest. Come in a
minute; come, I want you.”
The lofty, luxurious house was lighted and
still. Sip held her breath when the heavy front
door shut her into it. Her feet fell on a carpet
like thick, wild moss, as she crossed the warm
wide hall. Miss Kelso took her, scarcely aware,
it seemed, that she did so, into the parlors, and
shut their oaken doors upon their novel guest.
She motioned the girl to a chair, and flung herself
upon another.
Now, for a young lady who had had a
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season ticket to the Opera every winter of her
life, it will be readily conjectured that she had
passed an exciting evening. In her way, even
the mill-girl felt this. But in her way, the mill-girl
was embarrassed and alarmed by the condition
in which she found Miss Kelso.
The young lady sat, white to the lips, and
trembled violently; her hands covered and recovered
each other, with a feeble motion, as they
lay upon her lap; the eyes had burned to a
still white heat; her breath came as if she were
in pain.
Suddenly she rose with a little crouch like a
beautiful leopardess and struck the gray and
green chess-table with her soft hand; the blow
snapped one of her rings.
“You do not understand,” she cried, “you people
who work and suffer, how it is with us! We
are born in a dream, I tell you! Look at these
rooms! Who would think — in such a room as
this — except he dreamed it, that the mothers
of very little children died for want of a few
hundreds and a change of climate? Why, the
curtains in this room cost six! See how it is!
You touch us — in such a room — but we dream;
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we shake you off. If you cry out to us, we only
dream that you cry. We are not cruel, we are
only asleep. Sip Garth, when we have clear eyes
and a kind heart, and perhaps a clear head, and
are waked up, for instance, without much warning,
it is nature to spring upon our wealth, to hate
our wealth, to feel that we have no right to our
wealth; no more moral right to it than the
opium-eater has to his drug!
“Why, Sip,” rising to pick up the chess-table,
“I never knew until to-night what it was like to
be poor. It was n't that I did n't care, as you
said. I did n't know. I thought it was a respectable
thing, a comfortable thing; a thing that
could n't be helped; a clean thing, or a dirty
thing, a lazy thing, or a drunken thing; a thing
that must be, just as mud must be in April; a
thing to put on overshoes for.”
And now what did she think?
“Who knows what to think,” said Perley
Kelso, “that is just waked up?”
“Miss Kelso?” said Sip.
“Yes,” said Miss Kelso.
“I never knew in all my life how grand a
room could be till I come into this grand room
to-night. Now, you see, if it was mine —”
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“What would you do, if this grand room were
yours?” asked Miss Kelso, curiously.
“Just supposing it, you know, — am I very
saucy?”
“Not very, Sip.”
“Why,” said Sip, “the fact is, I 'd bring Nynee
Mell in to spend an evening!”
An engraving that lay against a rich easel in a
corner of the room attracted the girl's attention
presently. She went down on her knees to examine
it. It chanced to be Lemude's dreaming
Beethoven. Sip was very still about it.
“What is that fellow doing?” she asked, after a
while, — “him with the stick in his hand.”
She pointed to the leader of the shadowy orchestra,
touching the baton through the glass,
with her brown finger.
“I have always supposed,” said Perley, “that
he was only floating with the rest; you see the
orchestra behind him.”
“Floating after those women with their arms
up? No, he is n't!”
“What is he doing?”
“It 's riding over him, — the orchestra. He
can't master it. Don't you see? It sweeps him
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along. He can't help himself. They come and
come. How fast they come! How he fights
and falls! O, I know how they come. That 's
the way things come to me; things I could do,
things I could say, things I could get rid of if I
had the chance; they come in the mills mostly;
they tumble over me just so; I never have the
chance. How he fights! I did n't know there
was any such picture as that in the world. I 'd
like to look at that picture day and night. See!
O, I know how they come.”
“Miss Kelso —” after another silence and
still upon her knees before the driving Dream
and the restless dreamer. “You see, that 's it.
That 's like your pretty things. I 'd keep your
pretty things if I was you. It ain't that there
should n't be music anywhere. It 's only that
the music should n't ride over the master. Seems
to me it is like that.”
eaf476n1* Mr. Mell's “testimony” may be found in the reports of the
Massachusetts Bureau of Labor.
eaf476n2*
“We may here add that our inquiries will authorize us to
say that three out of every five laboring men were out of
employ.”
— Statistics of Labor.
-- 131 -- p476-136
CHAPTER VI. MOULDINGS AND BRICKS.
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“MAVERICK!”
“At your service.”
“But Maverick — ”
“What then?”
“Last year, at Saratoga, I paid fifteen dollars
apiece for having my dresses done up!”
“Thus supporting some pious and respectable
widow for the winter, I have no doubt.”
“Maverick! how much did I think about the
widow?”
“I should say, from a cursory examination of
the subject, that your thoughts would be of less
consequence — excuse me — to a pious and respectable
widow, than — how many times fifteen?
Without doubt, a serious lack of taste on the part
of a widow; but, I fear, a fatal fact.”
“But, Maverick! I know a man on East Street
whom I never could make up my mind to look in
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the face again, if he should see the bill for santalina
in those carriage cushions!”
The bill was on file, undoubtedly, suggested
Maverick. Allow her friend an opportunity to
see it, by all means.
“Maverick! do you see that shawl on the arm
of the tête-à-tête? It cost me three thousand
dollars.”
Why not? Since she did the thing the honor
to become it, she must in candor admit, amazingly.
“And there 's lace up stairs in my bureau
drawer for which I paid fifty dollars a yard. And,
Maverick! I believe the contents of any single
jewel-case in that same drawer would found a
free bed in a hospital. And my bill for Farina
cologne and kid gloves last year would supply a
sick woman with beefsteak for this. And Maverick!”
“And what?” very languidly from Maverick.
“Nothing, only — why, Maverick! I am a
member of a Christian church. It has just occurred
to me.”
“Maverick!” again, after a pause, in which
Maverick had languished quite out of the
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conversation, and had entertained himself by draping
Perley in the shawl from the tête-à-tête, as if she
had been a lay-figure for some crude and gorgeous
design which he failed to grasp. Now he made a
Sibyl of her, now a Deborah, now a Maid of Orleans,
a priestess, a princess, a Juno; after some
reflection, a Grace Darling; after more, a prophetess
at prayer.
“Maverick! we must have a library in our
mills.”
“Must we?” mused Maverick, extinguishing
his prophetess in a gorgeous turban.
“There; how will that do? What a Nourmahal
you are!”
“And relief societies, and half-time schools,
and lectures, and reading-rooms, and, I hope, a
dozen better things. Those will only do to start
with.”
“A modest request — for Cophetua, for instance,”
said Maverick, dropping the shawl in a
blazing heap at her feet.
“Maverick! I 've been a lay-figure in life long
enough, if you please. Maverick, Maverick! I
cannot play any longer. I think you will be sorry
if you play with me any longer.”
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Cophetua said this with knitted brows. Maverick
tossed the shawl away, and sat down beside
her. The young man's face also had a wrinkle
between the placid eyes.
“Those will only do to start with,” repeated
Perley, “but start with those we must. And,
Maverick,” with rising color, “some tenementhouses,
if you please, that are fit for human beings
to inhabit; more particularly human beings who
pay their rentals to Christian people.”
“It seems to me, Perley,” said her lover, pleasantly,
“a great blunder in the political economy of
Hayle and Kelso that you and I should quarrel
over the business. Why should we quarrel over the
business? It is the last subject in the world that
collectively, and as comfortable and amiable engaged
people, can concern us. If you must amuse
yourself with these people, and must run athwart
the business, go to father. Have you been to
father?”
“I had a long talk with your father,” said Perley,
“yesterday.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said something about Political Economy;
he said something else about Supply and Demand.
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He said something, too, about the State of the
Market.”
“He said, in short, that we cannot afford any
more experiments in philanthropy on this town of
Five Falls?”
“He said, in short, just that.”
“He said, undoubtedly, the truth. It would
be out of the question. Why, we ran the works
at a dead loss half of last year; kept the hands
employed, and paid their wages regularly, when
the stock was a drug in the market and lay like
lead on our hands. Small thanks we get for that
from the hands, or — you.”
“Your machinery, I suppose, would not have
been improved by lying unused?” observed Perley,
quietly.
“It would have been injured, I presume.”
“And it has been found worth while, from a
business point of view, to retain employés even
at a loss, rather than to scatter them?”
“It has been, perhaps,” admitted Maverick, uneasily.
“One would think, however, Perley, that
you thought me destitute of common humanity,
just because you cannot understand the
ins and outs of the thousand and one questions
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which perplex a business man. I own that I do
not find these people as much of a diversion as
you do, but I protest that I do not abuse them.
They go about their business; and I go about
mine. Master and man meet on business grounds,
and business grounds alone. Bub Mell and a
young lady with nothing else to do may meet,
without doubt, upon religious grounds; upon the
highest religious grounds.”
“These improvements which I suggest,” pursued
Perley, waving Maverick's last words away
with her left hand (it was without ornament and
had a little bruise upon one finger), “have been
successful experiments, all of them, in other mills;
most of them in the great Pacific. Look at the
great Pacific!”
“The great Pacific can afford them,” said
Maverick, shortly. “That 's the way with our
little country mills always. If we don't bankrupt
ourselves by reflecting every risk that the great
concerns choose to run, some soft-hearted and
soft-headed philanthropist pokes his finger into
our private affairs, and behold, there 's a hue and
cry over us directly.”
“For a little country mill,” observed Perley,
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making certain figures in the air with her
bruised white finger, “I think, if I may judge
from my own income, that a library and a reading-room
would not bankrupt us, at least this
year. However, if Hayle and Kelso cannot
afford some few of these little alterations, I think
their silent partner can.”
“Very well,” laughed Maverick; “we 'll make
the money and you may spend it.”
“Maverick Hayle,” said Perley, after a silence,
“do you know that every law of this State which
regulates the admission of children into factories
is broken in your mills?”
“Ah?” said Maverick.
“I ask,” insisted Perley, “if you know it?”
“Why, no,” said Maverick, with a smile; “I
cannot say that I know it exactly. I know that
nobody not behind the scenes can conceive of the
dodges these people invent to scrape and screw
a few dollars, more or less, out of their children.
As a rule, I believe the more they earn themselves
the more they scrape and screw. I know
how they can lie about a child's age. Turn a
child out of one mill for his three months' schooling,
and he 's in another before night, half the
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time. Get him fairly to school, and I 've known
three months' certificates begged or bribed out
of a school-mistress at the end of three weeks.
Now, what can I do? You can't expect a mill-master
to have the time, or devote it to running
round the streets compelling a few Irish babies
to avail themselves of the educational privileges
of this great and glorious country!”
“That is a thing,” observed Perley, “that I
can look after in some measure, having, as you
noticed, nothing else to do.”
“That is a thing,” said Maverick, sharply,
“which I desire, Perley, that you will let alone.
I must leave it to the overseers, or we shall
be plunged into confusion worse confounded.
That is a thing which I must insist upon it
that you do not meddle with.”
Perley flushed vividly. The little scar upon
her finger flushed too. She raised it to her lips
as if it pained her.
“There is reason,” urged Maverick, — “there
is reason in all things, even in a young lady's
fancies. Just look at it! You run all over Five
Falls alone on a dark night, very improperly,
to hear mill-people complain of their drains,
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and — unrebuked by you — of their master. You
come home and break your engagement ring and
cut your finger. Forthwith you must needs turn
my mill-hands into lap-dogs, and feed them
on — what was it? roast beef? — out of your
jewelry-box!”
“I do not think,” said Perley, faintly smiling,
“that you understand, Maverick.”
“I do not think I understand,” said Maverick.
“You do not understand,” repeated Perley,
firmly but faintly still. “Maverick! Maverick!
if you cannot understand, I am afraid we shall
both be very sorry!”
Perley got up and crossed the room two or
three times. There was a beautiful restlessness
about her which Maverick, leaning back upon
the tête-à-tête, with his mustache between his
fingers, noted and admired.
“I cannot tell you,” pursued Perley in a low
voice, “how the world has altered to me, nor how
I have altered to myself, within the past few
weeks. I have no words to say how these people
seem to me to have been thrust upon my hands,—
as empty, idle, foolish hands, God knows, as
ever he filled with an unsought gift!”
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“Now I thought,” mentioned Maverick, gracefully,
“that both the people and the hands did
well enough as they were.”
Perley spread out the shining hands, as if in
appeal or pain, and cried out, as before, “Maverick!
Maverick!” but hardly herself knowing,
it seemed, why she cried.
“One would think,” pursued Maverick, with a
jerk at his mustache, “to hear and to see you,
Perley, that there were no evils in the country
but the evils of the factory system; that there
was no poverty but among weavers earning ten
dollars a week. Questions which political economists
spend life in disputing, you expect a mill-master—”
“Who does n't care a fig about them,” interrupted
Perley.
“Who does n't care a fig about them,” admitted
the mill-master, “you are right; between you
and me, you are right; who does n't care a fig
about them — to settle. Now there 's father; he
is au fait in all these matters; has a theory for
every case of whooping-cough, — and a mission
school. Once for all, I must beg to have it
understood that I turn you and the State
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committees over to father. You should hear him
talk to a State committee!”
“And yet,” said Perley, sadly, “your father
and you tie my hands to precisely the same extent
by different methods.”
“No?” said Maverick, “really?”
“He with Adam Smith, and you with a tête-a-t
ête. He is too learned, and you are too lazy. I
have not been educated to reason with him, and
I suppose I am too fond of you to deal with
you,” said the young lady. “But, Maverick,
there is something in this matter which neither
of you touch. There is something about the
relations of rich and poor, of master and man,
with which the state of the market has nothing
whatever to do. There is something, — a claim,
a duty, a puzzle, it is all too new to me to know
what to call it, — but I am convinced that there
is something at which a man cannot lie and twirl
his mustache forever.”
Being a woman, and having no mustache to
twirl, urged Maverick, nothing could well be more
natural than that she should think so. An appropriate
opinion, and very charmingly expressed.
Should he order the horses at half past ten?
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“Maverick!” cried Perley, thrusting out her
hands as before, and as before hardly knowing, it
seemed, why she cried, — “Maverick, Maverick!”
Possibly it was a week later that the new
partner called one evening upon Miss Kelso.
He was there, he said, at the request of Mr.
Hayle the junior; was sorry to introduce business
into a lady's parlor; but there was a little
matter about the plans —
“Ah, yes,” said Miss Kelso, hastily, “plans of
the new mill?”
“A plan for the new mill; yes. Mr. Hayle
desired your opinion about some mouldings, I
believe; and, as I go in town to-morrow to meet
an appointment with the architect, it fell to my
lot to confer with you. Mr. Hayle desired me to
express to you our wish — I think he said our
wish — that any preference you might have in
the ornamentation of the building should be
rigidly regarded.”
“Very thoughtful in Mr. Hayle,” said Perley,
“and characteristic. Sit down, if you please, Mr.
Garrick.”
He was a grave man, this Mr. Garrick; if there
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were a biting breath in the young lady's even
voice, if a curl as light as a feather fell across her
unsmiling mouth, one would suppose that Stephen
Garrick, sitting gravely down with mill plans in
his hand, beside her, was the last man upon earth
to detect either.
“Now,” said Miss Kelso, pulling towards her
across the table a marvellous green mill on a
gray landscape, with full-grown umber shade-trees
where a sand heap rightfully belonged, and
the architect's name on a sign above the counting-room,
“what is this vital question concerning
which Mr. Hayle desires my valuable opinion?”
“The question is, whether you would prefer
that the mouldings — here is a section; you can
see the design better about this door — should be
of Gloucester granite or not.”
“Or what?” asked Perley.
“Or not,” said Mr. Garrick, smiling.
“I never saw you smile before,” said Miss
Kelso, abruptly, tossing away the plans. “I did
not know that you could. It is like —”
“What is it like?” asked Stephen Garrick,
smiling again.
“It is like making a burning-glass out of a
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cast-iron stove. Excuse me. That mill has
tumbled over the edge of the table, Mr. Garrick.
Thank you. Is Gloucester granite of a violet
tint?”
“Outside of an architect's privileged imagination,
not exactly. What shall I tell Mr. Hayle?”
“You may tell Mr. Hayle that I do not care
whether the mouldings are of Gloucester granite
or of green glass. No; on the whole, I will tell
him myself.
“You see, Mr. Garrick,” said Miss Kelso after
an awkward pause, “when you are a woman and
a silent partner, it is only the mouldings of a
matter that fall to you.”
Mr. Garrick saw.
“And so,” piling up the plans upon the table
thoughtfully, “you become a little sensitive upon
the subject of mouldings. You would so much
rather be a brick-maker!”
“I suppose,” said Stephen Garrick, “that I
have been what you would call a brick-maker.”
“I suppose you have,” said Miss Kelso, still
thoughtfully. “Mr. Garrick?”
Mr. Garrick lifted his grave face inquiringly.
“I suppose you know what it is to be very poor?”
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“Very poor.”
“And now you will be very rich. That must
be a singular life!”
“It is in some respects a dangerous life, Miss
Kelso.”
“It is in other respects a privileged life, Mr.
Garrick.”
“It is proverbial of men with my history,”
said Garrick, slowly, — “men who have crawled on
their hands and knees from the very quagmires
of life, — men who know, as no other men can
know, that the odds are twenty to one when a
poor man makes a throw in the world's play —”
“Are they?” interrupted the lady.
“Twenty to one,” said Stephen Garrick, in a
dry statistical tone, “against poverty, always. It
is proverbial, I say, that men who know as God
knows that it is by `him who hath no money'
that the upright, downright, unmistakable miseries
of life are drained to the dregs, — that such
men prove to be the hardest of masters and the
most conservative of social reformers. It has been
the fancy of my life, I may say that it has been
more like a passion than a fancy,” said the parvenu
in Hayle and Kelso, laying his hard hand hardly
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clenched upon the colored plates that Perley had
piled up beside him, “as fast and as far as I got
out of the mud myself to bring other people with
me. I cannot find any dainty words in which to
put this, Miss Kelso, for it is a very muddy thing
to be poor.”
“I have thought it — but very lately — to be
a hard thing,” said Perley.
The hard lines about Stephen Garrick's mouth
worked, but he said nothing. Perley, looking up
suddenly, saw what hard lines they were; and
when he met her look he smiled, and she
thought what a pleasant smile it was.
“Mr. Garrick, do you think it is possible, —
this thing of which you speak? Possible to be
Hayle and Kelso, and yet to pick people out of
the mud?”
“I believe it to be possible.”
“You are not in an easy position, it strikes
me, Mr. Garrick.”
“It strikes me — I beg your pardon — that
you are not in another, Miss Kelso.”
Stephen Garrick took his leave with this;
wisely, perhaps; would have taken his leave with
a gravely formal bow, but that Miss Kelso held
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out to him a sudden, warm, impulsive woman's
hand.
Walking home with his pile of colored plans
under his arm, Mr. Garrick fell in with two of the
mill-people, the young watchman Burdock and a
girl whom he did not recognize. He said, What a
pleasant evening for a walk it was! as he went
by them, cheerily.
“It 's nothing to say `A pleasant evening,' I
know,” said Dirk as he passed them; “but it 's a
way I like about Mr. Garrick. A man thinks
better of himself for it; feels as if he was somebody—
almost. I mean to be somebody yet, Sip.”
“Do you?” said Sip, with a patient smile. He
said it so often! She had so little faith that he
would ever do any more than say it.
“It 's a hard rut to wrench out of, Dirk, — the
mills. How many folks I 've seen try to get out
of the mills! They always came back.”
“But they don't always come back, Sip. Look
at Stephen Garrick.”
“Yes, yes,” said Sip patiently, “I know they
don't always come back, and I 've looked at Stephen
Garrick; but the folks as I knew came
back. I 'd go back. I know I should.”
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“It would be never you that would go back,”
urged Dirk, anxiously. “You 're the last girl I
know for that.”
Sip shook her head. “It 's in the blood, maybe.
I know I should go back. What a kind of
a pleasantness there is about the night, Dirk!”
There was somehow a great pleasantness to
Sip about the nights when she had a walk with
Dirk; she neither understood nor questioned
how; not a passion, only a pleasantness; she noticed
that the stars were out; she was apt to hear
the tiny trail of music that the cascades made
above the dam; she saw twice as many lighted
windows with the curtains up as she did when
she walked alone; if the ground were wet, it did
did not trouble her; if the ground were dry, it
had a cool touch upon her feet; if there were a
geranium anywhere upon a window-sill, it pleased
her; if a child laughed, she liked the sound; if
Catty had been lost since supper, she felt sure that
they should find her at the next corner; if she
had her week's ironing to do when she got home,
she forgot it; if a rough word sprang to her lips,
it did not drop; if her head ached, she smiled;
if a boy twanged a jew's-harp, she could have
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danced to it; if poor little Nynee Mell flitted
jealously by with Jim, in her blue ribbons, she
could sit down and cry softly over her, — such a
gentleness there was about the night.
It was only pleasantness and gentleness that
ever lay between her and Dirk. Sip never
flushed or frowned, never pouted or coquetted
at her sparse happiness; it might be said that
she never hoped or dreamed about it; it might
even be that the doggedness of her little brown
face came over it or into it, and that it was not
without a purpose that she neither dreamed nor
hoped. Miss Kelso sometimes wondered. Dirk
dully perplexed himself about her now and then.
“I wish,” said Sip, as they came into the yard
of the damp stone house, “that you 'd look in at
the window for me a minute, Dirk.”
“What shall I look at?” said Dirk, stepping
up softly to the low sill, “her?”
Catty was in view from the window; sitting on
the floor with her feet crossed, stringing very
large yellow beads; she did this slowly, and with
some hesitation; now and then a kind of ill-tempered
fright seemed to fall upon her repulsive
face; once or twice she dropped the toys, and
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once she dashed them with a little snarl like an
annoyed animal's upon her lap.
“I give them to her to try her,” whispered Sip.
“Do you see anything about her that is new?
anything, Dirk, that you never took a notice of
before?”
“Why, no,” said Dirk, “I don't see nothin' uncommon.
What 's the matter?”
“Nothing! It 's nothing only a fear I had.
Never mind!”
Sip drew a sudden long breath, and turned
away.
Now it was pleasant to Sip to share even a fear
with Dirk.
“Look in again,” she said, with a low laugh,
“over on the wall beyond Catty. Look what is
hanging on the wall.”
“O, that big picture over to the left of the
chiny-closet?” Dirk pointed to the Beethoven
dreaming wildly in the dingy little room.
“A little to the left of the cupboard, — yes.
One night I walked in and found it, Dirk! She
hung it there for me to walk in and find. I laid
awake till three o'clock next morning, I laid and
looked at it. I don't know anybody but you,
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Dirk, as could guess what a strangeness and a
forgetting it makes about the room.”
Now it was very new to Sip to have a “forgetting”
that she could share with even Dirk.
“It looks like the Judgment Day,” said Dirk,
looking over Catty's head at the plunging dream
and the solitary dreamer.
There chanced that night two uncommon occurrences;
for one, the watchman at the Old
Stone was sleepy; for another, Miss Kelso was
not.
The regulations in Hayle and Kelso were inexorable
at night. Two fires and three drunken
watchmen within the limits of a year had put it
out of the question to temper justice with mercy.
To insure the fidelity of the watch, he was required
to strike the hour with the factory bell
from nine at night till four o'clock in the morning.
Now upon the night in question Miss Kelso's
little silver clock struck twelve, but the great
tongue of the Old Stone did not. In perhaps
twenty minutes, Old Stone woke up with a jerk,
and rang in the midnight stoutly.
To be exact, I should have said that there
chanced that night three uncommon occurrences.
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For that a young lady should get up on a
chilly and very dark spring midnight, dress herself,
steal down stairs, unlock the front door, and
start off alone to walk a quarter of a mile, and
save a sleepy young watchman from disgrace, is
not, it must be allowed, so characteristic an
event as naturally to escape note.
It happened, furthermore, that it did not escape
the note of the new partner, coming out
on precisely the same errand at the same time.
They met at the lady's gate: she just passing
through, he walking rapidly by; she with a smile,
he with a start.
“Miss Kelso!”
“Mr. Garrick?”
“Is anything wrong?”
“With the watchman? Yes, or will be. I had
hoped I was the only person who knew that midnight
came in at twenty minutes past twelve.”
“And I had hoped that I was.”
“It was very thoughtful in you, Mr. Garrick,”
said Perley, heartily,
He did not say that it was thoughtful in her.
He turned and looked at her as she stood shivering
and smiling, with her hand upon the gate, —
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the bare hand on which the bruise had been.
He would have liked to say what he thought
it, but it struck him as a difficult thing to do.
Graceful words came so hardly to him; he felt
this hardly at the moment.
“I suppose I must leave the boy to you then,”
said Perley, slowly.
“You are taking cold,” said the mill-master, in
his hard way. It was very dark where they
stood, yet not so dark but that he could see, in
bowing stiffly, how Miss Kelso, with her bruised
hand upon the gate, shot after him a warm, sweet,
impulsive woman's smile.
Dirk was sitting ruefully upon an old boiler
in the mill-yard. He rubbed his eyes when Mr.
Garrick came up. When he saw who it was, the
boy went white to the lips.
“Burdock, the bell was not struck to-night at
twelve o'clock.”
“Certainly, sir,” said Dirk, desperately making
his last throw.
“Not at twelve o'clock.”
“Punctually, sir, you may be sure; I never
missed a bell in Hayle and Kelso yet.”
“The bell rang,” observed Mr. Garrick, with
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quiet sternness, “at twenty-one minutes past
midnight, exactly.”
“Mr. Garrick —” begged the watchman, but
stammered and stopped.
“Of course you know the consequences,” said
the master, more gently, sitting down upon the
rusty boiler beside the man, “of a miss in the
bell, — of a single miss in a bell.”
“I should think I 'd been in Hayle and Kelso
long enough to know,” said Dirk, with his head
between his knees. “Mr. Garrick, upon my word
and honor, I never slept on watch before. I was
kind of beat out to-night.” The truth was, that
Dirk had been carrying in coal for Sip half the
afternoon. “Had n't so much sleep as common
to-day; but that 's no excuse for me, I know.”
He thought he would not say anything about
the coal. “I would n't ha' cared so much about
keepin' the place,” broke forth the young man,
passionately, “but for a reason I had, — I worked
so hard for the place! and so long, sir! And,
God knows, sir, I had such a reason for lookin'
on to keep the place!”
“Infidelity on the part of a watchman, you see,
Burdock,” urged the master, “is not a matter that
his employer can dally with.”
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“I 'm no fool, sir,” said the man; “I see that.
Of course I look to lose the place.”
“Suppose I were to offer to you, with a reprimand
and warning, the trial of the place again?”
“Sir!” Dirk's head came up like a diver's
from between his knees. “You 're — your 're
good to me, sir! I — I did n't look for that,
sir!”
Mr. Garrick made no reply, but got up and
paced to and fro between the boiler and a little
old, disused cotton-house that stood behind it,
absorbed in thought.
“Mr. Garrick,” said the watchman, suddenly,
“did you get out of bed and come over here to
save the place for me?”
“For some such reason, I believe.”
“Mr. Garrick, I did n't look to be treated like
that. I thank you, sir. Mr. Garrick —”
“Well?” said the master, stopping his walk
between the boiler and the cotton-house.
“I told you the first lie, sir, that I 've told any
man since I lied sick to stay to home from the
warping-room, when I was n't much above that
boiler there in highness. I think I 'd not have
been such a sneak, sir, but for the reason that I
had.”
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It seemed that the master said “Well?” again,
though in fact he said nothing, but only stood
between the boiler and the cotton-house, gravely
looking at the man.
“There 's a — girl I know,” said Dirk, wiping
rust from his hands upon his blue overalls, “I
don't think, sir, there 's a many like her, I don't
indeed.”
“Ah!” said Stephen Garrick, restlessly pacing
to and fro again, in the narrow limit that the
boiler and the cotton-house shut in.
“I don't indeed, sir. And I 've always looked
to being somebody, and pushin' in the mills on
account of her. And I should have took it very
hard to lose the place, sir, — on account of her.
there don't seem to be what you might call a
fair chance for a man in the mills, Mr. Garrick.”
“No, not what might be called a fair chance, I
think,” said Mr. Garrick.
“Not comparing with some other calls in life,
it don't seem to me,” urged Dirk, disconsolately.
“The men to the top they stay to the top, and
the men to the bottom they stay to the bottom.
There is n't a many sifts up like yourself, sir.
It 's like a strawberry-box packed for market, the
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[figure description] Page 157.[end figure description]
factory trade is. And when there 's a reason,—
and a girl comes into the account, it 's none
so easy.”
“No, it 's not easy, I grant you, Burdock.
What a place this is to spend a night in!”
“A kind of a churchly place,” said the young
watchman, glancing over the cotton-house at the
purple shadow that the mill made against the
purple sky; and at purple shadows that the silent
village made, and the river, and the bridge.
“Takin' in the screech of the dam, it 's a solemn
place; a place where if a man knows a reason, —
or a girl, he thinks o' 't. It 's a place where, if a
man has ever any longin's for things 't he can
call hisn, — wife, and home, and children, and
right and might to make 'em comfortable, you
know, — he 'll consider of 'em. It is a kind of a
surprising thing, sir, — the feelin's that a man
will have for a good woman.”
“A surprising thing,” said Stephen Garrick
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CHAPTER VII. CHECKMATE!
[figure description] Page 158.[end figure description]
“I DO not love you, Maverick Hayle.”
May sweetness was in the breakfast-room;
broken, warm airs from the river; a breath of
yellow jonquils, and a shadow of a budding bough;
on a level with the low window-sill a narcissus
with a red eye winked steadily. The little silver
service was in the breakfast-room, in sharp
rilievo against a mourning-dress and the curve of
a womanly, warm arm. Maverick Hayle, struck
dumb upon his feet, where he stood half pushing
back his chair, was in the breakfast-room.
On either side of the tiny teapot the man's
face and the woman's lay reflected; it was a
smooth, octagonal little teapot, and the two faces
struck upon it without distortion; hung, like
delicate engraving, as if cut into the pretty toy.
There was something very cosey and homelike
about this senseless little teapot, and there was
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something very lonely and cold about the man's
face and the woman's, fixed and separated by the
wee width of the polished thing.
Both faces in the teapot were a trifle pale.
Both faces out of the teapot were a trifle paler.
“It is not possible!” exclaimed the man,
instinctively.
“It is quite possible,” explained the woman,
calmly.
His face in the teapot flushed now scorching
red. Hers in the teapot only whitened visibly.
The young man flung himself back into his
chair and ground his teeth. The young woman
sat and looked at the teapot and trembled.
“I do not believe it, Perley!” said her plighted
husband, fiercely.
“I do not love you, Maverick,” repeated Perley,
firmly. “I have been afraid of it for a long time.
I am very certain of it now. Maverick, Maverick,
I am very sorry! I told you we should both be
very sorry! But you could not understand.”
“If it was your foolish furor over a parcel of
factory-girls that I could not understand —”
began Maverick.
But Perley sternly stopped him.
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[figure description] Page 160.[end figure description]
“Never mind about the poor little factory-girls,
Maverick. It is you that I do not love.”
This was a thrust which even Maverick Hayle
could not lightly parry; he was fond of Perley
and fond of himself, and he writhed in his chair
as if it actually hurt him.
“I do not know how it is nor why it is,” said
Perley, sadly, “but I feel as if there had been a
growing away between us for a great while. It
may be that I went away and you stood still; or
that we both went away and both in different
ways; or that we had never, Maverick, been in
the same way at all, and did not know it. You
kissed me, and I did not know it!”
“And if I kiss you again, you will not know
it,” said Maverick, with an argument of smothered
passion in his voice.
“I would rather,” said the lady, evenly, “that
you did not kiss me again.”
Her face in the teapot shone as if a silver veil
fell over it. His face in the teapot clouded and
dropped.
“We have loved each other for a long time,
Perley,” said the young man in a husky voice.
“A long time,” said Perley, sorrowfully.
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“And were very happy.”
“Very happy.”
“And should have had — I had thought we
should have had such a pleasant life!”
“A miserable life, Maverick; a most miserable
life.”
“What in Heaven's name has come over you,
Perley!” expostulated the young man. “There
is no other man —”
“No other man,” said Perley, thoughtfully,
“could come between you and me. I do not see,
Maverick, how I could ever speak of love to any
other man.” This she said with her head bent,
and with grave, far-reaching eyes. “A woman
cannot do that thing. I mean there 's nothing in
me that understands how she can do it. I was
very fond of you, Maverick.”
“That is a comfort to me now,” said Maverick,
bitterly.
“I was fond of you, Maverick. I promised to
be your wife. I do not think I could ever say that
to another man. The power to say it has gone
with the growing away. There was the love
and the losing, and now there 's only the sorrow.
I gave you all I had to give. You used it up, I
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[figure description] Page 162.[end figure description]
think. But the growing-away came just the
same. I do not love you.”
“You women do not understand yourselves
any better than you do the rest of the world!”
exclaimed the rejected lover with a bewildered
face. “Why should we grow away? You have
n't thought how you will miss me.”
“I shall miss you,” said Perley. “Of course I
shall miss you, Maverick. So I should miss the
piano, if it were taken out of the parlor.”
Maverick made no reply to this. He felt more
humiliated than pained, as was natural. When
a man becomes only an elegant piece of furniture
in a woman's life, to be dusted at times,
and admired at others, and shoved up garret at
last by remorseless clean fingers that wipe the
cobwebs of him off, it will be generally found
that he endures the annoyance of neglected furniture—
little more. The level that we strike in
the soul that touches us most nearly is almost
sure to be the high-water mark of our own.
Now Maverick, it will be seen, struck no tidemark
in Perley. It had never been possible for
him to say to the woman, “Thus far shalt thou
go.” Men say that to women, and women to
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[figure description] Page 163.[end figure description]
men. The flood mistakes a nilometer for a
boundary line, placidly. It is one of the bittersweet
blunders of love, that we can stunt ourselves
irretrievably for the loved one's sake, and
be only a little sadder, but never the wiser,
for it.
Perley Kelso thus swept herself over and
around her plighted husband; and in her very
fulness lay his content. He would probably
have loved her without a question, and rested in
her, without a jar, to his dying day. A man
often so loves and so rests in a superior woman.
He thinks himself to be the beach against which
she frets herself; he is the wreck which she has
drowned.
Maverick Hayle, until this morning in the
breakfast-room, had loved Perley in this unreasonable,
unreasoning, and, I believe, irreclaimable
masculine manner; had accepted her as serenely
as a child would accept the Venus de Milo for a
ninepin. One day the ninepin will not roll.
There is speculation in the beautiful dead eyes
of the marble. The game is stopped. He
gathers up his balls and sits down breathless.
“But you love me!” cries the player. “It
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[figure description] Page 164.[end figure description]
must be that you love me at times. It must be
that you will love me in moods and minutes,
Perley. I cannot have gone forever out of all
the moods and minutes of your life. I have
filled it too long.”
He filled it, forsooth! Perley slightly, slowly,
sadly smiled.
“If there is any love in the world, Maverick,
that ought to be independent of moods and
master of all moods, it is the love that people
marry on. Now I 'm neither very old nor very
wise, but I am old enough and wise enough to
understand that it is only that part of me which
gets tired, and has the blues, and minds an
easterly storm, and has a toothache, and wants
to be amused, and wants excitement, and — somebody
the other side of a silver teapot — which
loves you. I do not love you, Maverick Hayle!”
“In that case,” said Maverick, after a pause,
“it is rather awkward for me to be sitting here
any longer.”
“A little.”
“And I might as well take your blessing —
and my hat.”
“Good by,” said Perley, very sadly.
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“Good by,” said Maverick, very stiffly.
“You 'll tell your father?” asked the young
lady.
“We 're in an awkward fix all around,” said
the young man, shortly. “I suppose we shall
have to make up our minds to that.”
“But you and I need not be on awkward
terms, — need we?” asked Perley.
“Of course not. `Mutual thing; and part
excellent friends,”' bitingly from Maverick.
“But I shall always be — a little fond of you!”
urged the woman, with a woman's last clutch at
the pleasantness of an old passion.
“Perley,” said Maverick, suddenly holding out
his hand, “I won't be cross about it. I 've
never deserved that you should be any more
than a little fond of me. You 've done the honorable
thing by me, and I suppose I ought to
thank you.”
He shut the door of the breakfast-room upon a
breath of yellow jonquils, and a shadow of a budding
bough, and the narcissus winking steadily;
upon the little silver service, and the curving,
womanly, warm arm, and the solitary face that
hung engraved upon the senseless little teapot.
-- 166 -- p476-171
Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844-1911 [1871], The silent partner. (James R. Osgood and Company, Boston) [word count] [eaf476T].
