Читать книгу The Portion of Labor - Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman - Страница 10

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Ellen had clung fast all the time to her doll, her bunch of pinks, and her cup and saucer; or, rather, she had guarded them jealously. “Where did you get all these things?” her aunt Eva had asked her, amazedly, when she first caught sight of her, and then had not waited for an answer in her wild excitement of joy at the recovery of the child. The great, smiling wax doll had ridden between Jim and Eva in the buggy, Eva had held the pink cup and saucer with a kind of mechanical carefulness, and Ellen herself clutched the pinks in one little hand, though she crushed them against her aunt's bosom as she sat in her lap. Ellen's grandmother and aunt had glanced at these treasures with momentary astonishment, and so had her mother, but curiosity was in abeyance for both of them for the time; rapture at the sight of the beloved child at whose loss they had suffered such agonies was the one emotion of their souls. But later investigation was to follow.

When Ellen did not seem to care for her hot milk liberally sweetened in her own mug, and griddle-cakes with plenty of syrup, her mother looked at her, and her eyes of love sharpened with inquiry. “Ain't you hungry?” she said. Ellen shook her head. She was sitting at the table in the dining-room, and her father, mother, and aunt were all hovering about her, watching her. Some of the neighbor women were also in the room, staring with a sort of deprecating tenderness of curiosity.

“Do you feel sick?” Ellen's father inquired, anxiously.

“You don't feel sick, do you?” repeated her mother.

Ellen shook her head.

Just then Mrs. Zelotes Brewster came in with her black-and-white-checked shawl pinned around her gaunt old face, which had in it a strange softness and sweetness, which made Fanny look at her again, after the first glance, and not know why.

“We've got our blessing back again, mother,” said her son Andrew, in a broken voice.

“But she won't eat her breakfast, now mother has gone and cooked it for her, so nice, too,” said Fanny, in a tone of confidence which she had never before used towards Mrs. Zelotes.

“You don't feel sick, do you, Ellen?” asked her grandmother.

Ellen shook her head. “No, ma'am,” said she.

“She says she don't feel sick, and she ain't hungry,” Andrew said, anxiously.

“I wonder if she would eat one of my new doughnuts. I've got some real nice ones,” said a neighbor—the stout woman from the next house, whose breadth of body seemed to symbolize a corresponding spiritual breadth of motherliness, as she stood there looking at the child who had been lost and was found.

“Don't you want one of Aunty Wetherhed's nice doughnuts?” asked Fanny.

“No; I thank you,” replied Ellen. Eva started suddenly with an air of mysterious purpose, opened a door, ran down cellar, and returned with a tumbler of jelly, but Ellen shook her head even at that.

“Have you had your breakfast?” said Fanny.

Then Ellen was utterly quiet. She did not speak; she made no sign or motion. She sat still, looking straight before her.

“Don't you hear, Ellen?” said Andrew. “Have you had your breakfast this morning?”

“Tell Auntie Eva if you have had your breakfast,” Eva said.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster spoke with more authority, and she went further.

“Tell grandmother if you have had your breakfast, and where you had it,” said she.

But Ellen was dumb and motionless. They all looked at one another. “Tell Aunty Wetherhed: that's a good girl,” said the stout woman.

“Where are those things she had when I first saw her?” asked Mrs. Zelotes, suddenly. Eva went into the sitting-room, and fetched them out—the bunch of pinks, the cup and saucer, and the doll. Ellen's eyes gave a quick look of love and delight at the doll.

“She had these, luggin' along in her little arms, when I first caught sight of her comin',” said Eva.

“Where did you get them, Ellen?” asked Fanny. “Who gave them to you?”

Ellen was silent, with all their inquiring eyes fixed upon her face like a compelling battery. “Where have you been, Ellen, all the time you have been gone?” asked Mrs. Zelotes. “Now you have got back safe, you must tell us where you have been.”

Andrew stooped his head down to the child's, and rubbed his rough cheek against her soft one, with his old facetious caress. “Tell father where you've been,” he whispered. Ellen gave him a little piteous glance, and her lip quivered, but she did not speak.

“Where do you s'pose she got them?” whispered one neighbor to another.

“I can't imagine; that's a beautiful doll.”

“Ain't it? It must have cost a lot. I know, because my Hattie had one her aunt gave her last Christmas; that one cost a dollar and ninety-eight cents, and it didn't begin to compare with this. That's a handsome cup and saucer, too.”

“Yes, but you can get real handsome cups and saucers to Crosby's for twenty-five cents. I don't think so much of that.”

“Them pinks must have come from a greenhouse.”

“Yes, they must.”

“Well, there's lots of greenhouses in the city besides the florists. That don't help much.” Then the first woman inclined her lips closely to the other woman's ear and whispered, causing the other to start back. “No, I can't believe she would,” said she.

“She came from those Louds on her mother's side,” whispered the first woman, guardedly, with dark emphasis.

“Ellen,” said Fanny, suddenly, and almost sharply, “you didn't take those things in any way you hadn't ought to, did you? Tell mother.”

“Fanny!” cried Andrew.

“If she did, it's the first time a Brewster ever stole,” said Mrs. Zelotes. Her face was no longer strange with unwonted sweetness as she looked at Fanny.

Andrew put his face down to Ellen's again. “Father knows she didn't steal the things; never mind,” he whispered.

Suddenly the stout woman made a soft, ponderous rush out of the room and the house. She passed the window with oscillating swiftness.

“Where's Miss Wetherhed gone?” said one woman to another.

“She's thought of somethin'.”

“Maybe she left her bread in the oven.”

“No, she's thought of somethin'.”

A very old lady, who had been sitting in a rocking-chair on the other side of the room, rose trembling and came to Ellen and leaned over her, looking at her with small, black, bright eyes through gold-rimmed spectacles. The old woman was deaf, and her voice was shrill and high-pitched to reach her own consciousness. “What did such a good little girl as you be run away from father and mother for?” she piped, going back to first principles and the root of the whole matter, since she had heard nothing of the discussion which had been going on about her, and had supposed it to deal with them.

Ellen gasped. Suddenly all her first woe returned upon her recollection. She turned innocent, accusing eyes upon her father's loving face, then her mother's and aunt's. “You said—you said—you—” she stammered out, but then her father and mother were both down upon their knees before her in her chair embracing her, and Eva, too, seized her little hands. “You mustn't ever think of what you heard father and mother say, Ellen,” Andrew said, solemnly. “You must forget all about it. Father and mother were both very wrong and wicked—”

“And Aunt Eva, too,” sobbed Eva.

“And they didn't mean what they said,” continued Andrew. “You are the greatest blessing in this whole world to father and mother; you're all they have got. You don't know what father and mother have been through, thinking you were lost and they might never see their little girl again. Now you mustn't ever think of what they said again.”

“And you won't ever hear them say it again, Ellen,” Fanny Brewster said, with a noble humbling of herself before her child.

“No, you won't,” said Eva.

“Mother is goin' to try to do better, and have more patience, and not let you hear such talk any more,” said Fanny, kissing Ellen passionately, and rising with Andrew's arm around her.

“I'm going to try, too, Ellen,” said Eva.

The stout woman came padding softly and heavily into the room, and there was a bright-blue silken gleam in her hand. She waved a whole yard of silk of the most brilliant blue before Ellen's dazzled eyes. “There!” said she, triumphantly, “if you will tell Aunty Wetherhed where you've been, and all about it, she'll give you all this beautiful silk to make a new dress for your new dolly.”

Ellen looked in the woman's face, she looked at the blue silk, and she looked at the doll, but she was silent.

“Only think what a beautiful dress it will make!” said a woman.

“And see how pretty it goes with the dolly's light hair,” said Fanny.

“Ellen,” whispered Andrew, “you tell father, and he'll buy you a whole pound of candy down to the store.”

“I shouldn't wonder if I could find something to make your dolly a cloak,” said a woman.

“And I'll make her a beautiful little bonnet, if you'll tell,” said another.

“Only think, a whole pound of candy!” said Andrew.

“I'll buy you a gold ring,” Eva cried out—“a gold ring with a little blue stone in it.”

“And you shall go to ride with mother on the cars to-morrow,” said Fanny.

“Father will get you some oranges, too,” said Andrew.

But Ellen sat silent and unmoved by all that sweet bribery, a little martyr to something within herself; a sense of honor, love for the lady who had concealed her, and upon whom her confession might bring some dire penalty; or perhaps she was strengthened in her silence by something less worthy—possibly that stiff-neckedness which had descended to her from a long line of Puritans upon her father's side. At all events she was silent, and opposed successfully her one little new will to the onslaught of all those older and more experienced ones before her, though nobody knew at what cost of agony to herself. She had always been a singularly docile and obedient child; this was the first persistent disobedience of her whole life, and it reacted upon herself with a cruel spiritual hurt. She sat clasping the great doll, the pinks, and the pink cup and saucer before her on the table—a lone little weak child, opposing her single individuality against so many, and to her own hurt and horror and self-condemnation, and she did not weaken; but all at once her head drooped on one side, and her father caught her.

“There! you can all stop tormentin' this blessed child!” he cried. “Ellen, Ellen, look at Father! Oh, mother, look here; she's fainted dead away!”

“Fanny!”

When Ellen came to herself she was on the bed in her mother's room, and her aunt Eva was putting some of her beautiful cologne on her head, and her mother was trying to make her drink water, and her grandmother had a glass of her currant wine, and they were calling to her with voices of far-off love, as if from another world.

And after that she was questioned no more about her mysterious journey.

“Wherever she has been, she has got no harm,” said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, “and there's no use in trying to drive a child, when it comes of our family. She's got some notion in her head, and you've got to leave her alone to get over it. She's got back safe and sound, and that's the main thing.”

“I wish I knew where she got those things,” Fanny said. Looseness of principle as to property rights was not as strange to her imagination as to that of her mother-in-law.

For a long time afterwards she passed consciously and uneasily by cups and saucers in stores, and would not look their way lest she should see the counterpart of Ellen's, which was Sèvres, and worth more than the whole counterful, had she only known it, and she hurried past the florists who displayed pinks in their windows. The doll was evidently not new, and she had not the same anxiety with regard to that.

No one was allowed to ask Ellen further questions that day, not even the reporters, who went away quite baffled by this infantile pertinacity in silence, and were forced to draw upon their imaginations, with results varying from realistic horrors to Alice in Wonderland. Ellen was kissed and cuddled by some women and young girls, but not many were allowed to see her. The doctor had been called in after her fainting-fit, and pronounced it as his opinion that she was a very nervous child, and had been under a severe strain, and he would not answer for the result if she were to be further excited.

“Let her have her own way: if she wants to talk, let her, and if she wants to be silent, let her alone. She is as delicate as that cup,” said the doctor, looking at the shell-like thing which Ellen had brought home, with some curiosity.