Chapter 20

________________________________________________
_ Chapter XX

Robert Lloyd when he came to Rowe was confronted with one of the hardest tasks in the world, that of adjustment to circumstances which had hitherto been out of his imagination. He had not dreamed of a business life in connection with himself. Though he had always had a certain admiration for his successful uncle, Norman Lloyd, yet he had always had along with the admiration a recollection of the old tale of the birthright and the mess of pottage. He had expected to follow the law, like his father, but when he had finished college, about two years after his father's death, he had to face the unexpected. The stocks in which the greater part of the elder Lloyd's money had been invested had depreciated; some of them were for the time being quite worthless as far as income was concerned. There were two little children--girls--by his father's second marriage, and there was not enough to support them and their mother and allow Robert to continue his reading for the law. So he pursued, without the slightest hesitation, but with bitter regret, the only course which he saw open before him. He wrote to his uncle Norman, and was welcomed to a position in his factory with more warmth than he had ever seen displayed by him. In fact, Norman Lloyd, who had no son of his own, saw with a quickening of his pulses the handsome young fellow of his own race who had in a measure thrown himself upon his protection. He had never shared his wife's longing for children as children, and had never cared for Robert when a child; but now, when he was a man grown and bore his name, he appealed to him.

Norman Lloyd was supposed to be heaping up riches, and wild stories of his wealth were told in Rowe. He gave large sums to public benefactions, and never stinted his wife in her giving within certain limits. It would have puzzled any one when faced with facts to understand why he had the name of a hard man, but he had it, whether justly or not. "He's as hard as nails," people said. His employes hated him--that is, the more turbulent and undisciplined spirits hated him, and the others regarded him as slaves might a stern master. When Robert started his work in his uncle's office he started handicapped by this sentiment towards his uncle. He looked like his uncle, he talked like him, he had his same gentle stiffness, he was never unduly familiar. He was at once placed in the same category by the workmen.

Robert Lloyd did not concern himself in the least as to what the employes in his uncle's factory thought of him. Nothing was more completely out of his mind. He was conscious of standing on a firm base of philanthropic principle, and if ever these men came directly under his control, he was resolved to do his duty by them so far as in him lay.

Ellen, since her graduation, had been like an animal which circles about in its endeavors to find its best and natural place of settlement.

"What shall I do next?" she had said to her mother. "Shall I go to work, or shall I try to find a school somewhere in the fall, or shall I stay here, and help you with some work I can do at home? I know father cannot afford to support me always at home."

"I guess he can afford to support his only daughter at home a little while after she has just got out of school," Fanny had returned indignantly, with a keen pain at her heart.

Fanny mentioned this conversation to Andrew that night after Ellen had gone to bed.

"What do you think--Ellen was asking me this afternoon what she had better do!" said she.

"What she had better do?" repeated Andrew, vaguely. He looked shrinkingly at Fanny, who seemed to him to have an accusing air, as if in some way he were to blame for something. And, indeed, there were times when Fanny in those days did blame Andrew, but there was some excuse for her. She blamed him when her own back was filling her very soul with the weariness of its ache as she bent over the seams of those grinding wrappers, and when her heart was sore over doubt of Ellen's future. At those times she acknowledged to herself that it seemed to her that Andrew somehow might have gotten on better. She did not know how, but somehow. He had not had an expensive family. "Why had he not succeeded?" she asked herself. So there was in her tone an unconscious recrimination when she answered his question about Ellen.

"Yes--what she had better go to work at," said Fanny, dryly, her black eyes cold on her husband's face.

Andrew turned so white that he frightened her. "Go to work!" said he. Then all at once he gave an exceedingly loud and bitter groan. It betrayed all his pride in and ambition for his daughter and his disgust and disappointment over himself. "Oh! my God, has it come to this," he groaned, "that I cannot support my one child!"

Fanny laid down her work and looked at him. "Now, Andrew," said she, "there's no use in your taking it after such a fashion as this. I told Ellen that it was all nonsense--that she could stay at home and rest this summer."

"I guess, if she can't--" said Andrew. He dropped his gray head into his hands, and began to sob dryly. Fanny, after staring at him a moment, tossed her work onto the floor, went over to him, and drew his head to her shoulder.

"There, old man," said she, "ain't you ashamed of yourself? I told her there was no need for her to worry at present. Don't do so, Andrew; you've done the best you could, and I know it, if I stop to think, though I do seem sort of impatient sometimes. You've always worked hard and done your best. It ain't your fault."

"I don't know whether it is or not," said Andrew, in a high, querulous voice like a woman's. "It seems as if it must be somebody's fault. If it ain't my fault, whose is it? You can't blame the Almighty."

"Maybe it ain't anybody's fault."

"It must be. All that goes wrong is somebody's fault. It can't be that it just happens--that would be worse than the other. It is better to have a God that is cruel than one that don't care, and it is better to be to blame yourself, and have it your fault, than His. Somehow, I have been to blame, Fanny. I must have. It would have been enough sight better for you, Fanny, if you'd married another man."

"I didn't want another man," replied Fanny, half angrily, half tenderly. "You make me all out of patience, Andrew Brewster. What's the need of Ellen going to work right away? Maybe by-and-by she can get an easy school. Then, we've got that money in the bank."

Andrew looked away from her with his face set. Fanny did not know yet about his withdrawal of the money for the purpose of investing in mining-stocks. He never looked at her but the guilty secret seemed to force itself between them like a wedge of ice.

"Then Grandma Brewster has got a little something," said Fanny.

"Only just enough for herself," said Andrew. Then he added, fiercely, "Mother can't be stinted of her little comforts even for Ellen."

"I 'ain't never wanted to stint your mother of her comforts," Fanny retorted, angrily.

"She 'ain't got but a precious little, unless she spends her principal," said Andrew. "She 'ain't got more'n a hundred and fifty or so a year clear after her taxes and insurance are paid."

"I ain't saying anything," said Fanny. "But I do say you're dreadful foolish to take on so when you've got so much to fall back on, and that money in the bank. Here you haven't had to touch the interest for quite a while and it has been accumulating."

It was agreed between the two that Ellen must say nothing to her grandmother Brewster about going to work.

"I believe the old lady would have a fit if she thought Ellen was going to work," said Fanny. "She 'ain't never thought she ought to lift her finger."

So Ellen was charged on no account to say anything to her grandmother about the possible necessity of her going to work.

"Your grandmother's awful proud," said Fanny, "and she's always thought you were too good to work."

"I don't think anybody is too good to work," replied Ellen, but she uttered the platitude with a sort of mental reservation. In spite of herself, the attitude of worship in which she had always seen all who belonged to her had spoiled her a little. She did look at herself with a sort of compunction when she realized the fact that she might have to go to work in the shop some time. School-teaching was different, but could she earn enough school-teaching? There was a sturdy vein in the girl. All the time she pitied herself she blamed herself.

"You come of working-people, Ellen Brewster. Why are you any better than they? Why are your hands any better than their hands, your brain than theirs? Why are you any better than the other girls who have gone to work in the shops? Do you think you are any better than Abby Atkins?"

And still Ellen used to look at herself with a pitying conviction that she would be out of place at a bench in the shoe-factory, that she would suffer a certain indignity by such a course. The realization of a better birthright was strong upon her, although she chided herself for it. And everybody abetted her in it. When she said once to Abby Atkins, whom she encountered one day going home from the shop, that she wondered if she could get a job in her room in the fall, Abby turned upon her fiercely.

"Good Lord, Ellen Brewster, you ain't going to work in a shoe-shop?" she said.

"I don't see why not as well as you," returned Ellen.

"Why not?" repeated the other girl. "Look at yourself, and look at us!"

As she spoke, Ellen saw projected upon her mental vision herself passing down the street with the throng of factory operatives which her bodily eyes actually witnessed. She had come opposite Lloyd's as the six o'clock whistle was blowing. She saw herself in her clean, light summer frock, slight and dainty, with little hands like white flowers in the blue folds of her skirt, with her fine, sensitive outlook of fair face, and her dainty carriage; and she saw others--those girls and women in dingy skirts and bagging blouses, with coarse hair strained into hard knots of exigency from patient, or sullen faces, according to their methods of bearing their lots; all of them rank with the smell of leather, their coarse hands stained with it, swinging their poor little worn bags which had held their dinners. There were not many foreigners among them, except the Irish, most of whom had been born in this country, and a sprinkling of fair-haired, ruddy Swedes and keen Polanders, who bore themselves better than the Americans, being not so apparently at odds with the situation.

The factory employes in Rowe were a superior lot, men and women. Many of the men had put on their worn coats when they emerged from the factory, and their little bags were supposed to disguise the fact of their being dinner satchels. And yet there was a difference between Ellen Brewster and the people among whom she walked, and she felt it with a sort of pride and indignation with herself that it was so.

"I don't see why I should be any better than the rest," said she, defiantly, to Abby Atkins. "My father works in a shop, and you are my best friend, and you do. Why shouldn't I work in a shop?"

"Look at yourself," repeated the other girl, mercilessly. "You are different. You ain't to blame for it any more than a flower is to blame for being a rose and not a common burdock. If you've got to do anything, you had better teach school."

"I would rather teach school," said Ellen, "but I couldn't earn so much unless I got more education and got a higher position than a district school, and that is out of the question."

"I thought maybe your grandmother could send you," said Abby.

"Oh no, grandma can't afford to. Sometimes I think I could work my own way through college, if it wasn't for being a burden in the mean time, but I don't know."

Suddenly Abby Atkins planted herself on the sidewalk in front of Ellen, and looked at her sharply, while an angry flush overspread her face.

"I want to know one thing," said she.

"What?"

"It ain't true what I heard the other day, is it?"

"I don't know what you heard."

"Well, I heard you were going to be married."

Ellen turned quite pale, and looked at the other girl with a steady regard of grave, indignant blue eyes.

"No, I am not," said she.

"Well, don't be mad, Ellen. I heard real straight that you were going to marry Granville Joy in the fall."

"Well, I am not," repeated Ellen.

"I didn't suppose you were, but I knew he had always wanted you."

"Always wanted me!" said Ellen. "Why, he's only just out of school!"

"Oh, I know that, and he's only just gone to work, and he can't be earning much, but I heard it."

The stream of factory operatives had thinned; many had taken the trolley-cars, and others had gone to the opposite side of the street, which was shady. The two girls were alone, standing before a vacant lot grown to weeds, rank bristles of burdock, and slender spikes of evanescent succory. Abby burst out in a passionate appeal, clutching Ellen's arm hard.

"Ellen, promise me you never will," she cried.

"Promise you what, Abby?"

"Oh, promise me you never will marry anybody like him. I know it's none of my business--I know that is something that is none of anybody's business, no matter how much they think of anybody; but I think more of you than any man ever will, I don't care who he is. I know I do, Ellen Brewster. And don't you ever marry a man like Granville Joy, just an ordinary man who works in the shop, and will never do anything but work in the shop. I know he's good, real good and steady, and it ain't against him that he ain't rich and has to work for his living, but I tell you, Ellen Brewster, you ain't the right sort to marry a man like that, and have a lot of children to work in shops. No man, if he thinks anything of you, ought to ask you to; but all a man thinks of is himself. Granville Joy, or any other man who wanted you, would take you and spoil you, and think he'd done a smart thing." Abby spoke with such intensity that it redeemed her from coarseness. Ellen continued to look at her, and two red spots had come on her cheeks.

"I don't believe I'll ever get married at all," she said.

"If you've got to get married, you ought to marry somebody like young Mr. Lloyd," said Abby.

Then Ellen blushed, and pushed past her indignantly.

"Young Mr. Lloyd!" said she. "I don't want him, and he doesn't want me. I wish you wouldn't talk so, Abby."

"He would want you if your were a rich girl, and your father was boss instead of a workman," said Abby.

Then she caught hold of Ellen's arm and pressed her own thin one in its dark-blue cotton sleeve lovingly against it.

"You ain't mad with me, are you, Ellen?" she said, with that indescribable gentleness tempering her fierceness of nature which gave her caresses the fascination of some little, untamed animal. Ellen pressed her round young arm tenderly against the other.

"I think more of you than any man I know," said she, fervently. "I think more of you than anybody except father and mother, Abby."

The two girls walked on with locked arms, and each was possessed with that wholly artless and ignorant passion often seen between two young girls. Abby felt Ellen's warm round arm against hers with a throbbing of rapture, and glanced at her fair face with adoration. She held her in a sort of worship, she loved her so that she was fairly afraid of her. As for Ellen, Abby's little, leather-stained, leather-scented figure, strung with passion like a bundle of electric wire, pressing against her, seemed to inform her farthest thoughts.

"If I live longer than my father and mother, we'll live together, Abby," said she.

"And I'll work for you, Ellen," said Abby, rapturously.

"I guess you won't do all the work," said Ellen. She gazed tenderly into Abby's little, dark, thin face. "You're all worn out with work now," said she, "and there you bought that beautiful pin for me with your hard earnings."

"I wish it had been a great deal better," said Abby, fervently.

She had given Ellen a gold brooch for a graduating-gift, and had paid a week's wages for it, and gone without her new dress, and stayed away from the graduation, but that last Ellen never knew; Abby had told her that she was sick.

That evening Robert Lloyd and his aunt Cynthia Lennox called on the Brewsters. Ellen was under the trees in the west yard when she heard a carriage stop in front of the house and saw the sitting-room lamp travel through the front entry to the front door. She wondered indifferently who it was. Carriages were not given to stopping at their house of an evening; then she reflected that it might be some one to get her mother to do some sewing, and remained still.

It was a bright moonlight night; the whole yard was a lovely dapple of lights and shadows. Ellen had a vivid perception of the beauty of it all, and also that unrest and yearning which comes often to a young girl in moonlight. This beauty and strangeness of familiar scenes under the silver glamour of the moon gave her, as it were, an assurance of other delights and beauties of life besides those which she already knew, and along with the assurance came that wild yearning. Ellen seemed to scent her honey of life, and at the same time the hunger for it leaped to her consciousness. She had begun by thinking of what Abby had said to her that afternoon, and then the train of thought led her on and on. She quite ignored all about the sordid ways and means of existence, about toil and privation and children born to it. All at once the conviction was strong upon her that love, and love alone, was the chief end and purpose of life, at once its source and its result, the completion of its golden ring of glory. Her thought, started in whatever direction, seemed to slide always into that one all-comprehending circle--she could not get her imagination away from it. She began to realize that the mind of mortal man could not get away from the law which produced it. She began to understand dimly, as one begins to understand any great truth, that everything around her obeyed that unwritten fundamental law of love, expressed it, sounded it, down to the leaves of the trees casting their flickering shadows on the silver field of moonlight, and the long-drawn chorus of the insects of the summer night. She thought of Abby and how much she loved her; then that love seemed the step which gave her an impetus to another love. She began to remember Granville Joy, how he had kissed her that night over the fence and twice since, how he had walked home with her from entertainments, how he had looked at her. She saw the boy's face and his look as plain as if he stood before her, and her heart leaped with a shock of pain which was joy.

Then she thought of Robert Lloyd, and his face came before her. Ellen had not thought as much of Robert as he of her. For some two weeks after his call she had watched for him to come again; she had put on a pretty dress and been particular about her hair, and had stayed at home expecting him; then when he had not come, she had put him out of mind resolutely. When her mother and aunt had joked her about him she had been sensitive and half angry. "You know it is nothing, mother," she said; "he only came to bring back my valedictory. You know he wouldn't think of me. He'll marry somebody like Maud Hemingway." Maud Hemingway was the daughter of the leading physician in Rowe, and regarded with a mixture of spite and admiration by daughters of the factory operatives. Maud Hemingway was attending college, and rode a saddle-horse when home on her vacations. She had been to Europe.

But that evening in the moonlight Ellen began thinking again of Robert Lloyd. His face came before her as plainly as Granville Joy's. She had arrived at that stage when life began to be as a picture-gallery of love. Through this and that face the goddess might look, and the look was what she sought; as yet, the man was a minor quantity.

All at once it seemed to Ellen, looking at her mental picture of young Lloyd, that she could see love in his face yet more plainly, more according to her conception of it, than in the other. She began to build an air-castle which had no reference whatever to Robert's position, and to his being the nephew of the richest factory-owner in Rowe, and so far as that went he had not a whit the advantage of Granville Joy in her eyes. But Robert's face wore to her more of the guise of that for which the night and the moonlight, and her youth, had made her long. So she began innocently to imagine a meeting with him at a picnic which would be held some time at Liberty Park. She imagined their walking side by side, through a lovely dapple of moonlight like this, and saying things to each other. Then all at once the man of her dreams touched her hand in a dream, and a faintness swept over her. Then suddenly, gathering shape out of the indetermination of the shadows and the moonlight, came a man into the yard, and Ellen thought with awe and delight that it was he; but instead Granville Joy stood before her, lifting his hat above his soft shock of hair.

"Hullo!" he said.

"Good-evening," responded Ellen, and Granville Joy felt abashed. He lay awake half the night reflecting that he should have greeted her with a "Good-evening" instead of "Hullo," as he had been used to do in their school-days; that she was now a young lady, and that Mr. Lloyd had accosted her differently. Ellen rose with a feeling of disappointment that Granville was himself, which is the hardest greeting possible for a guest, involving the most subtle reproach in the world--the reproach for a man's own individuality.

"Oh, don't get up, Ellen," the young man said, awkwardly. "Here--I'll sit down here on the rock." Then he flung himself down on the ledge of rock which cropped out like a bare rib of the earth between the trees, and Ellen seated herself again in her chair.

"Beautiful night, ain't it?" said Granville.

Ellen noticed that Granville said "ain't" instead of "isn't," according to the fashion of his own family, although he was recently graduated from the high-school. Ellen had separated herself, although with no disparaging reflections, from the language of her family. She also noticed that Granville presently said "wa'n't" instead of "wasn't." "Hot yesterday, wa'n't it?" said he.

"Yes, it was very warm," replied Ellen. That "wa'n't" seemed to insert a tiny wedge between them. She would have flown at any one who had found fault with her father and mother for saying "wa'n't," but with this young man in her own rank and day it was different. It argued something in him, or a lack of something. An indignation all out of proportion to the offence seized her. It seemed to her that he had in this simple fashion outraged that which was infinitely higher than he himself. He had not lived up to her thought of him, and fallen short by a little slip in English which argued a slip in character. She wanted to reproach him sharply--to ask him if he had ever been to school.

He noticed her manner was cool, and was as far as the antipodes from suspecting the cause. He never knew that he said "ain't" and "wa'n't," and would die not knowing. All that he looked at was the substance of thought behind the speech. And just then he was farther than ever from thinking of it, for he was single-hearted with Ellen.

The boy crept nearer her on the rock with a shy, nestling motion; the moonlight shone full on his handsome young face, giving it a stern quality. "Ellen, look at here," he said.

Then he stopped. Ellen waited, not dreaming what was to follow. She had never had a proposal; then, too, he had just been chased out of her mental perspective by the other man.

"Look at here, Ellen," said Granville. He stopped again; then when he spoke his voice had an indescribably solemn, beseeching quality. "Oh, Ellen," he said, reaching up and catching her hand. He dragged himself nearer, leaned his cheek against her hand, which it seemed to burn; then he began kissing it with soft, pouting lips.

Ellen tried to pull her hand away. "Let my hand go this minute, Granville Joy," she said, angrily.

The boy let her hand go immediately, and stood up, leaning over her.

"Don't be angry; I didn't mean any harm, Ellen," he whispered.

"I shall be angry if you do such a thing again," said Ellen. "We aren't children; you have no right to do such a thing, and you know it."

"But I thought maybe you wouldn't mind, Ellen," said Granville. Then he added, with his voice all husky with emotion and a kind of fear: "Ellen, you know how I feel about you. You know how I have always felt."

Ellen made no reply. It seemed inconceivable that she for the minute should not know his meaning, but she was bewildered.

"You know I've always counted on havin' you for my wife some day when we were both old enough," said the boy, "and I've gone to work now, and I hope to get bigger pay before long, and--"

Ellen rose with sudden realization. "Granville Joy," cried she, with something like panic in her voice, "you must not! Oh, if I had known! I would not have let you finish. I would not, Granville." She caught his arm, and clung to it, and looked up at him pitifully. "You know I wouldn't have let you finish," she said. "Don't be hurt, Granville."

The boy looked at her as if she had struck him.

"Oh, Ellen," he groaned. "Oh, Ellen, I always thought you would!"

"I am not going to marry anybody," said Ellen. Her voice wavered in spite of herself; the young man's look and voice were shaking her through weakness of her own nature which she did not understand, but which might be mightier than her strength. Something crept into her tone which emboldened the young man to seize her hand again. "You do, in spite of all you say--" he began; but just then a long shadow fell athwart the moonlight, and Ellen snatched her hand away imperceptibly, and young Lloyd stood before them. _

Read next: Chapter 21

Read previous: Chapter 19

Table of content of Portion of Labor


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book