THE-POKTIDN een in the slightest doubt as to what the other thought of her, for it was openly proclaimed to her a dozen times a daj', and the conclusion was never complimentary. Ellen learned very early to form her own opinions of character from her own intuition, otherwise she would have held her aunt and mother in somewhat slighting estimation, and she loved them both detirly; They were headstrong, violent - tempered women, but she 3 THE PORTION OF LABOR had an instinct for the staple quaHties below that sur- face turbulence, which was lashed higher by every gust of opposition. These two loud, contending voices, which filled the house before and after shop-hours — for Eva worked in the shop with her brother-in-law — with a duet of discords instead of harmonies, meant no more to Ellen than the wrangle of the robins in the cherry-trees. She supposed that two sisters always conversed in that way. She never knew why her father, after a fiery but ineffectual attempt to quell the feminine tumult, would send her across the east yard to her grandmother Brewster's, and seat himself on the east door-step in summer, or go down to the store in the winter. She would sit at the window in her grand- mother's sitting-room, eating peacefully the slice of pound - cake or cooky with which she was always regaled, and listen to the scolding voices across the yard as she might have listened to any outside dis- turbance. She was never sucked into the whirlpool of wrath which seemed to gyrate perpetually in her home, and wondered at her grandmother Brewster's impatient exclamations concerning the poor child, and her poor boy, and that it was a shame and a disgrace, when now and then a louder explosion of wrath struck her ears. Ellen's grandmother — Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, as she was called, though her husband Zelotes had been dead for many years — -was an aristocrat by virtue of in- born prejudices and convictions, in despite of circum- stances. The neighbors said that Mrs. Zelotes Brewster had always been high-feeling, and had held up her head with the best, ft would have been nearer the truth to say that she held up her head above the best. No one seeing the erect old woman, in her draperies of the finest black goods to be bought in the city, could es- timate ill what heights of thin upper air of spiritual con- 4 THE PORTION OF LABOR sequence her head was elevated. She had always a clear sight of the head-tops of any throng in which she found herself, and queens or duchesses would have been no exception. She would never have failed to find some stool of superior possessions or traits upon which to raise herself, and look down upon crown and coro- net. When she read in the papers about the marriage of a New York belle to an English duke, she reflected that the duke could be by no means as fine a figure of a man as Zelotes had been, and as her son Andrew was, although both her husband and son had got all their education in the town schools, and had worked in shoe-shops all their lives. She could have looked at a palace or a castle, and have remained true to the splen- dors of her little one-story-and-a-half house with a best parlor and sitting-room, and a shed kitchen for use in hot weather. She would not for one instant have been swerved from utmost admiration and faith in her set of white-and-gold wedding china by the contemplation of Copeland and Royal Sevres. She would have pitted her hair-cloth furniture of the ugliest period of household art against all the Chippendales and First Empire pieces in exist- ence. As Mrs. Zelotes had never seen any household pos- sessions to equal her own, let alone to surpass them, she was of the same mind with regard to her husband and his family, herself and her family, her son and little granddaughter. She never saw any gowns and shawls which compared with hers in fineness and richness; she never tasted a morsel of cookery which was not as sawdust when she reflected upon her own; and all that humiliated her in the least, or caused her to feel in the least dissatisfied, was her son's wife and her family and antecedents. Mrs. Zelotes Brewster had considered that her son THK PORTION OP LABOR Andrew was marrj'ing inimeasurablj^ beneath him when he married Fannj- Loud, of LoudviUe. Loudville was a humble, an ahuost disreputably huml^le, suljurb of the httle provnicial cit_v. The Louds from whom the locaht3' look its name ^^•cre no^-cr held in much repute, being considered of a stratum decidedly below the ordinary- social one of the city. When Andrew told his mother that he was to marry a Loud, she declared that she would not go to his wedding, nor receive the girl at her house, and she kept her word. When one day Andrew brought his sweetheart to his home to call, trusting to her pretty face and graceful though rather sharp manner to win his mother's heart, he found her intrenched in the kitchen, and tibsolutely indif- ferent to the charms of his Fanny in her stylish, albeit somewhat tawdr5?, finery, though she had peeped to good purpose from her parlor window, which command- ed the road, before she fled kitchenward. Mrs. Zelotes was beating eggs with as firm an im- petus as if she were heaving up earth-works to strengthen her own pride when her son thrust his timid face into the kitchen. "Mother, Fannj^'s in the parlor," he said, beseechingly. "Let her set there, then, if she wants to," said his mother, and that was all she would say. \'ery soon Fannj^ went home on her lover's arm, freeing her mind with no uncertain voice on the way, though she was on the public road, and within hearing of sharp ears in open windows. Fannj- had a pride as fierce as Mrs. Zelotes Brewster's, though it was not so well sustained, and she would then and there have re- fused to marry Andrew had she not loved him with all her passionate and ill-regulated heart. But she never forgave her mother-in-law for the slight she had put upon her that day, and the slights which she put upon her later. She would have refused to live next 6 THE PORTION OF LABOR door to Mrs. Zelotes had not Andrew owned the land and been in a measure forced to build there. Every time she had flaunted out of her new house-door in her wedding finery she had an uncomfortable feeling of defiance under a fire of hostile ej^es in the next house. She kept her own A\indows upon that side as clear and bright as diamonds, and her curtains in the stiffest, snowy slants, lest her terrible mother-in-law should have occasion to impeach her housekeeping, she being a notable housewife. The habits of the Louds of I^oud- ville were considered shiftless in the extreme, and poor Fanny had heard an insinuation of Mrs. Zelotes to that effect. The elder Mrs. Brewster's knowledge of her son's house and his wife was limited to the view from her west windows, but there was half -truce when little Ellen was born. Mrs. Brewster, who considered that no woman could be obtained with such a fine knowledge of nursing as she possessed, and who had, moreover, a regard for her poor boy's pocket-book, appeared for the first time in his doorway, and opened her heart to her son's child, if not to his wife, whom she began to tolerate. However, the two women had almost a hand-to-hand encounter over little Ellen's cradle, the elder Mrs. Brew- ster judging that it was for her good to be rocked to sleep, the younger not. Little Ellen herself, however, turned the balance that time in favor of her grandmother, since she cried every time the gentle, swaying motion was hushed, and absolutely refused to go to sleep, and her mother from the first held every course which seemed to contribute to her pleasure and comfort as a sacred duty. At last it came to pass that the two women met only upon that small neutral ground of love, and upon all other territory were sworn foes. Especially was Mrs. Zelotes wroth when Eva Loud, after the death of her 7 THE PORTION OF LABOR father, one of the most worthless and shiftless of the Louds of Loudville, came to live with her married sister. She spoke openly to Fanny concerning her opinion of another woman's coming to live on poor Andrew, and paid no heed to the assertions that Eva would work and pay her way. Mrs. Zelotes, although she acknowledged it no social degradation for a man to work in a shoe-factory, re- garded a woman who worked therein as having hope- lessly forfeited her caste. Eva Loud had worked in a shop ever since she was fourteen, and had tagged the grimy and leathery procession of Louds, who worked in shoe-factories when they worked at all, in a short skirt with her hair in a strong black pigtail. There was a kind of bold grace and showy beauty about this Eva Loud which added to Mrs. Zelotes's scorn and dislike. " She walks off to work in the shop as proud as if she was going to a party," she said, and she fairly trembled with anger when she saw the girl set out with her son in the morning. She would have considered it much more according to the eternal fitness of things had her son Andrew been attending a queen whom he would have dropped at her palace on the way. She writhed inwardly whenever little Ellen spoke of her aunt Eva, and would have forbidden her to do so had she dared. "To think of that child associating with a shop- girll" she said to Mrs. Pointdexter. Mrs. Pointdexter was her particular friend, whom she regarded with loving tolerance of superiority, though she had been the daughter of a former clergyman of the town, and had wedded another, and might presumably have been accounted herself of a somewhat higher estate. The gentle and dependent clergyman's widow, when she came back to her native city after the death of her hus- band, found herself all at once in a pleasant little valley of humiliation at the feet of her old friend, and was THE PORTION OF LABOR contented to abide there. "Perhaps your son's sister- in-law will marry and go away," she said, consolingly, to Mrs. Zelotes, who indeed lived in that hope. But Eva remained at her sister's, and, though she had ad- mirers in plenty, did not marry, and the dissension grew. It was an odd thing that, however the sisters quar- relled, the minute Andrew tried to take sides with his wife and assail Eva in his turn, Fanny turned and defended her. " I am not going to desert all the sister I have got in the world," she said. "If you want me to leave, say so, and I will go, but 1 shall never turn Eva out of doors. I would rather go with her and work in the shop." Then the next moment the wrangle would recommence, and the harsh trebles of wrath would swell high. Andrew could not appreciate this savageness of race loyalty in the face of anger and dissension, and his brain reeled with the apparent in- consistency of the thing. "Sometimes I think they are both crazy," he used to tell his mother, who sympathized with him after a covertly triumphant fashion. She never said, "I told you so," but the thought was evident on her face, and her son saw it there. However, he said not a word against his wife, except by implication. Though she and her sister were mak- ing his home unbearable, he still loved her, and, even if he did not, he had something of his mother's pride. However, at last, when Ellen was almost eight years old, matters came suddenly to a climax one evening in November. The two sisters were having a fiercer dis- pute than usual. Eva was taking her sister to task for cutting over a dress of hers for Ellen, Fanny claiming that she had given her permission to do so, and Eva denying it. The child sat listening in her little chair with a look of dawning intelligence of wrath and wicked 9 THE PORTION OF LABOR temper in her face, because she was herself in a manner the cause of the dissension. Suddenly Andrew Brew- ster, with a fiery outburst of inconsequent masculine wrath with the whole situation, essayed to cut the Gordian knot. He grabbed the little dress of bright woollen stuff, which lay partly made upon the table, and crammed it into the stove, and a reek of burning wool filled the room. Then both women turned upon him with a combination of anger to which his wrath was wildfire. Andrew caught up little Ellen, who was beginning to look scared, wrapped the first thing he could seize around her, and fairly fled across the yard to his mother's. Then he sat down and wept hke a boy, and his pride left him at last. "Oh, mother," he sobbed, " if it were not for the child, I would go away, for my home is a hell!" Mrs. Zelotes stood clasping little Ellen, who clung to her, trembling. "Well, come over here with me," she said, "you and Ellen." "Live here in the next house!" said Andrew. "Do you suppose Fanny would have the child living under her very eyes in the next house? No, there is no way out of the misery — no wayj but if it was not for the child, I would go!" Andrew burst out in such wild sobs that his mother released Ellen and ran to him ; and the child, trembling and crying with a curious softness, as of fear at being heard, ran out of the house and back to her home. " Oh, mother," she cried, breaking in upon the dialogue of anger which was still going on there with her little tremulous flute — "oh, mother, father is crying 1" "I don't care," answered her mother, fiercely, her temper causing her to lose sight of the child's agitation. " I don't care. If it wasn't for you, I would leave him. I wouldn't live as I am doing. I would leave everj'body. 10 THE PORTION OF LABOR I aia tired of this awful life. Oh, if it wasn't for you, Ellen, I would leave everybody and start fresh!" "You can leave me whenever you want to," said Eva, her handsome face burning red with wrath, and she went out of the room, which was suffocating with the fumes of the burning wool, tossing her black head, all banged and coiled in the latest fashion. Of late years Fanny had sunk her personal vanity further and further in that for her child. She brushed her own hair back hard from her temples, and candidly revealed all her unyouthful lines, and dwelt fondly upon the arrangement of little Ellen's locks, which were of a fine, pale yellow, as clear as the color of amber. She never recut her skirts or her sleeves, but she studied anxiously all the slightest changes in chil- dren's fashions. After her sister had left the room with a loud bang of the door, she sat for a moment gazing straight ahead, her face working, then she burst into such a passion of hysterical wailing as the child had never heard. Ellen, watching her mother with eyes so frightened and full of horror that there was no room for childish love and pity in them, grew very pale. She had left the door by which she had entered open; she gazed one moment at her mother, then she turned and slipped out of the room, and, open- ing the outer door softly, though her mother would not have heard nor noticed, went out of the house. Then she ran as fast as she could down the frozen road, a little, dark figure, passing as rapidly as the shadow of a cloud between the earth and the full moon. CHAPTER II The greatest complexity in the world attends the motive-power of any action. Infinite perspectives of mental mirrors reflect the whys of all doing. An adult with long practice in analytic introspection soon be- comes bewildered when he strives to evolve the primary and fundamental reasons for his deeds; a child so striving would be lost in unexpected depths; but a child never strives. A child obeys unquestioningly and absolutely its own spiritual impellings without a backward glance at them. Little Ellen Brewster ran down the road that Novem- ber night, and did not know then, and never knew afterwards, why she ran. Loving renunciation was surging high in her childish heart, giving an indication of tidal possibilities for the future, and there was also a bitter, angry hurt of slighted dependency and affection. Had she not heard them say, her own mother and father say, that they would be better off and happier with her out of the way, and she their dearest loved and most carefully cherished possession in the whole world? It is a cruel fall for an apple of the eye to the ground, for its law of gravitation is of the soul, and its fall shocks the infinite. Little Ellen felt herself sorely hurt by her fall from such fair heights; she was pierced by the sharp thorns of selfish interests which flourish below all the heavenward windows of life. Afterwards, when her mother and father tried to make her tell them why she ran away, she could not say; the answer was beyond her own power. 12 THE PORTION OP LABOR There was no snow on the ground, but the earth was frozen in great ribs after a late thaw. Ellen ran pain- fully between the ridges which a long line of ice-wagons had made with their heavy wheels earlier in the day. When the spaces between the ridges were too narrow for her little feet, she ran along the crests, and that was precarious. She fell once and bruised one of her delicate knees, then she fell again, and struck the knee on the same place. It hurt her, and she caught her breath with a gasp of pain. She pulled up her little frock and touched her hand to her knee, and felt it wet, then she whimpered on the lonely road, and, curiously enough, there was pity for her mother as well as for herself in her solitary grieving. "Mother would feel pretty bad if she knew how I was hurt, enough to make it bleed," she murmured, between her soft sobs. Ellen did not dare cry loudly, from a certain unvoiced fear which she had of shocking the stillness of the night, and also from a dehcate sense of personal dignity, and a dislike of violent manifestations of feeling which had strengthened with her growth in the midst of the tur- bulent atmosphere of her home. Ellen had the softest childish voice, and she never screamed or shouted when excited. Instead of catching the motion of the wind, she still lay before it, like some slender-stemmed flower. If Ellen had made much outcry with the hurt in her heart and the smart of her knee, she might have been heard, for the locality was thickly settled, though not in the business portion of the little city. The houses, set prosperously in the midst of shaven lawns — for this was a thrifty and emulative place, and democracy held up its head confidently — were built closely along the road, though that was lonely and deserted at that hour. It was the hour between half-past six and half-past seven, when people were lingering at their supper-tables, and had not yet started upon their evening pursuits. 13 THE PORTION OF LABOR The lights shone for the most part from the rear windows of the houses, and there v/as a vague compound odor of tea and bread and beefsteak in the air. Poor Ellen had not had her supper ; the wrangle at home had dis- missed it from everybody's mind. She felt more pitiful towards her mother and herself when she smelt the food and reflected upon that. To think of her going away without any supper, all alone in the dark night! There was no moon, and the solemn brilliancy of the stars made her think with a shiver of awe of the Old Testament and the possibility of the Day of Judgment. Suppose it should come, and she all alone out in the night, in the midst of all those worlds and the great White Throne, without her mother? Ellen's grand- mother, \\ho was of a stanch orthodox breed, and was, moreover, anxious to counteract any possible detriment as to religious training from contact with the degenerate Louds of Loudville, had established a strict course of Bible study for her granddaughter at a very early age. All celestial phenomena were in consequence trans- posed into a Biblical key for the child, and she regarded the heavens swarming with golden stars as a Hebrew child of a thousand years ago might have done. She was glad when she came within the radius of a street light from time to time; they were stationed at wide intervals in that neighborhood. Soon, however, she reached the factories, when all mystery and awe, and vague terrors of what beside herself might be near unrevealed beneath the mighty brooding of the night, were over. She was, as it were, in the mid-current of the conditions of her own life and times, and the material force of it swept away all symbolisms and unstable drift, and left only the bare rocks and shores of exist- ence. Always when the child had been taken by one of her elders past the factories, humming like gigantic hives, with their windows alert with eager eyes of toil, 14 THE PORTION OF LABOR glancing out at her over bench and machine, Ellen had seen her secretly cherished imaginings recede into a night of distance like stars, and she had felt her little footing upon the earth with a shock, and had clung more closely to the leading hand of love. "That's where your poor father works," her grandmother would say. "Maybe you'll have to work there some day," her aunt Eva had said once; and her mother, who had been with her also, had cried out sharply as if she had been stung, "I guess that little delicate thing ain't never goin' to work in a shoe-shop, Eva Loud." And her aunt Eva had laughed, and declared with emphasis that she guessed there was no need to worry yet awhile. "She never shall, while I live," her mother had cried; and then Eva, coming to her sister's aid against her own suggestion, had declared, with a vehemence which frightened Ellen, that she would bum the shop down herself first. As for Ellen's father, he never at that time dwelt upon the child's future as much as his wife did, having a masculine sense of the instability of houses of air which prevented him from entering them without a shivering of walls and roof into naught but star-mediums by his downrightness of vision. "Oh, let the child be, can't you, Fanny?" he said, when his wife speculated whether Ellen would be or do this or that when she should be a woman. ITe resented the conception of the woman which would swallow up, like some metaphysical sorcer- ess, his fair little child. So when he now and then led Ellen past the factories it was never with the slightest surmise as to any connection which she might have with them beyond the present one. " There's the shop where father works," he would tell Ellen, with a tender sense of his own importance in his child's eyes, and he was as proud as Punch when Ellen was able to point with her tiny pink finger at the window where father 15 THE PORTION OF LABOR worked. " That's where father works and earns money to buy nice things for httle Ellen," Andrew would repeat, beaming at her with divine foolishness, and Ellen looked at the roaring, vibrating building as she might have looked at the wheels of progress. She realized that her father was very great and smart to work in a place like that, and earn money — so much of it. Ellen often heard her mother remark with pride how much money Andrew earned. To-night, when Ellen passed in her strange flight, the factories were still, though they were yet blazing with light. The gigantic buildings, after a style of architecture as simple as a child's block house, and adapted to as primitive an end, loomed up beside the road like windowed shells enclosing massive concrete- nesses of golden light. They looked entirely vacant except for light, for the workmen had all gone home, and there were only the keepers in the buildings. There were three of them, representing three different firms, rival firms, grouped curiously close together, but Lloyd's was much the largest. Andrew and Eva worked in Lloyd's. She was near the last factory when she met a man hastening along with bent shoulders, of intent, middle- aged progress. After he had passed her with a careless glance at the small, swift figure, she smelt coffee. He was carrying home a pound for his breakfast supply. That suddenly made her cry, though she did not know why. That familiar odor of home and the wontedness of life made her isolation on her little atom of the un- usual more pitiful. The man turned round sharply when she sobbed. "Hullo! what's the matter, sis?" he called back, in a pleasant, hoarse voice. Ellen did not answer; she fled as if she had wings on her feet. The man had many children of his own, and was ac- customed to their turbulence over trifles. He kept on, i6 THE PORTION OF LABOR thinking that there was a sulky child who had been sent on an errand against her will, that it was not late, and she was safe enough on that road. He resumed his calculation as to whether his income would admit of a new coal-stove that winter. He was a workman in a factory, with one accumulative interest in life — coal- stoves. He bought and traded and swapped coal- stoves every winter with keenest enthusiasm. Now he had one in his mind which he had just viewed in a window with the rapture of an artist. It had a little nickel statuette on the top, and that quite crowded Ellen out of his mind, which had but narrow accommodations. So Ellen kept on unmolested, though her heart was beating loud with fright. When she came into the brilliantly lighted stretch of Main Street, which was the business centre of the city, her childish mind was partly diverted from herself. Ellen had not been down town many times of an evening, and always in hand of her hurrying father or mother. Now she had run away and cut loose from all restrictions of time ; there was an eternity for observation before her, with no call in-doors in prospect. She stopped at the first bright shop win- dow, and suddenly the exultation of freedom was over the child. She tasted the sweets of rebellion and dis- obedience. She had stood before that window once before of an evening, and her aunt Eva had been with her, and one of her young men friends had come up behind, and they had gone on, the child dragging backward at her aunt's hand. Now she could stand as long as she wished, and stare and stare, and drink in everything which her childish imagination craved, and that was much. The imagination of a child is often like a voracious maw, seizing upon all that comes within reach, and producing spiritual indigestions and assimilations almost endless in their effects upon the growth. This window before which Ellen stood was 17 THE PORTION OF LABOR that of a market : a great expanse of plate-glass fram- ing a crude study in the clearest color tones. It takes a child or an artist to see a picture without the intru- sion of its second dimension of sordid use and the gross reflection of humanity. Ellen looked at the great shelf laid upon with flesh and vegetables and fruits with the careless precision of a kaleidoscope, and did not for one instant connect anything thereon with the ends of physical appetite, though she had not had her supper. What had a meal of beefsteak and potatoes and squash served on the little white-laid table at home to do with those great golden globes which made one end of the window like the remove from a mine, those satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of red and white marble? She had eaten apples, but these were as the apples of the gods, lying in a heap of opulence, with a precious light-spot like a ruby on every outward side. The turnips affected her imagination like ivory carvings : she did not rec- ognize them for turnips at all. She never afterwards believed them to l^e turnips; and as for cabbages, they were green inflorescences of majestic bloom. There is one position from which all common things can be seen with reflections of preciousness, and Ellen had insensibly taken it. The window and the shop behind were illuminated with the yellow glare of gas, but the glass was filmed here and there with frost, which tem- pered it as with a veil. In the background rosy-faced men in white frocks were moving to and fro, customers were passing in and out, but they were all glorified to the child. She did not see them as butchers, and as men and women selling and buying dinners. However, all at once everything was spoiled, for her fairy castle of illusion or a higher reality was demolished, and that not by any blow of practicality, but by pity and sentiment. Ellen was a woman-child, and suddenly i8 THE Portion of labor she struck the rock upon which women so often wreck or effect harbor, whichever it may be. All at once she looked up from the dazzling mosaic of the window and saw the dead partridges and grouse hanging in their rumpled brown mottle of plumage, and the dead rabbits, long and stark, with their fur pointed with frost, hanging in a piteous headlong company, and all her delight and wonder vanished, and she came down to the hard ac- tualities of things. "Oh, the poor birds!" she cried out in her heart. "Oh, the poor birds, and the poor bunnies!" Just at that moment, when the sudden rush of com- passion and indignation had swollen her heart to the size of a woman's, and given it the aches of one, when her eyes were so dilated with the sight of helpless injury and death that they reflected the mystery of it and lost the outlook of childhood, when her pretty babj' mouth was curved like an inverted bow of love with the im- pulse of tears, Cynthia Lennox came up the street and stopped short when she reached her. Suddenly Ellen felt some one pressing close to her, and, looking up, saw a woman, only middle-aged, but whom she thought very old, because her hair was white, standing looking at her very keenly with clear, light- blue eyes under a high, pale forehead, from which the gray hair was combed uncompromisingly back. The woman had been a beauty once, of a delicate, nervous type, and had a certain beauty now, a something which had endured like the fineness of texture of a web when its glow of color has faded. Her black garments draped her with sober richness, and there was a gleam of dark fur when the wind caught her cloak. A small tuft of ostrich plumes nodded from her bonnet. Ellen smelt flowers vaguely, and looked at the lady's hand, but she did not carry any. "Whose little girl are you?" Cynthia Lemiox asked, 19 THE PORTION OF LABOR softly, and Ellen did not answer. " Can't you tell me whose little girl you are?" Cyntliia Lennox asked again. Ellen did not speak, but there was the swift flicker of a thought over her face which told her name as plainly as language if the woman had possessed the skill to in- terpret it. "Ellen Brewster — Ellen Brewster is my name," Ellen said to herself very hard, and that was how she endured the reproach of her own silence. The woman looked at her with surprise and admira- tion that were fairly passionate. Ellen was a beautiful child, with a face like a white flower. People had al- ways turned to look after her, she was so charming, and had caused her mother's heart to swell with pride. " The way everybody we met has stared after that child to-day!" she would whisper her husband when she brought Ellen home from some little expedition; then the two would look at the little one's face with the one holy vanity of the world. Ellen wore to-night the little white shawl which her father had caught up when he carried her over to her grandmother's. She held it tightly together under her chin with one tiny hand, and her face looked out from between the soft folds with the absolute purity of curve and color of a pearl. "Oh, you darling!" said the woman, suddenly; "you darling!" and Ellen shrank away from her. " Don't be afraid, dear," said Cynthia Lennox. " Don't be afraid, only tell me who you are. What is your name, dear?" But Ellen remained silent; only, as she shrank aloof, her eyes grew wild and bright with startled tears, and her sweet baby mouth quivered piteously. She wanted to run, but the habit of obedience was so strong upon her little mind that she feared to do so. This strange woman seemed to have gotten her in some invisible leash. "Tell me what your name is, darling," said the 20 THE PORTION OF LABOR woman, but she might as well have importuned a flower. Ellen was proof against all commands in that direction. She suddenly felt the furry sweep of the lady's cloak against her cheek, and a nervous, tender arm drawing her close, though she strove feebly to resist. "You are cold, you have nothing on but this little white shawl, and perhaps you are hungry. What were you looking in this window for ? Tell me, dear, where is your mother ? She did not send you on an errand, such a little girl as you are, so late on such a cold night, with no more on than this?" A tone of indignation crept into the lady's voice. "No, mother didn't send me," Ellen said, speaking for the first time. "Then did you run away, dear?" Ellen was silent. "Oh, if you did, darling, you must tell me where you hve, what your father's name is, and I will take you home. Tell me, dear. If it is far, I will get a carriage, and you shall ride home. Tell me, dear." There was an utmost sweetness of maternal persuasion in Cynthia Lennox's voice ; Ellen was swayed by it as a child might have been swayed by the magic pipe of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. She half yielded to her lead- ing motion, then" she remembered. " No," she cried out, with a sob of utter desolation. " No, no." "Why not, dear?" "They don't want; they don't want. No, no!" " They don't want you ? Your own father and mother don't want you? Darling, what is the matter?" But Ellen was dumb again. She stood sobbing, with a painful restraint, and pulling futilely from the lady's persuasive hand. But it ended in the mastery of the child. Suddenly Cynthia Lennox gathered her up in her arms under her great fur-lined cloak, and carried her a little farther down the street, then across it to a dwelling-house, one of the very few which had with- 21 THE PORTION OF LABOR stood the inarch of business blocks on this crowded main street of the provincial city, A few people looked curi- ously at the lady carrying such a heavy, weeping child, but she met no one whom she knew, and the others looked indifferently away after a second backward stare. Cynthia Lennox was one to bear herself with such dignity over all jolts of circumstances that she might almost convince others of her own exemption from them. Her mental bearing disproved the evi- dence of the senses, and she could have committed a crime with such consummate self-poise and grace as to have held a crowd in abeyance with utter distrust of their own eyes before such unquestioning confidence in the sovereignty of the situation. Cynthia Lennox had alwaj^s had her own way except in one respect, and that experience had come to her lately. Though she was such a slender woman, she seemed to have great strength in her arms, and she bore Ellen easily and as if she had been used to such a burden. She wrapped her cloak closely around the child. "Don't be afraid, darling," she kept whispering. Ellen panted in bewilderment, and a terror which was half assuaged by something like fascination. She was conscious of a soft smother of camphor, in which the fur-lined cloak had lain through the summer, and of that flower odor, which was violets, though she did not know it. Only the wild American scentless ones had come in little Ellen's way so far. She felt herself carried up steps, then a door was thrown open, and a warm breath of air came in her face, and the cloak was tossed back, and she was set softly on the floor. The hall in which she stood seemed very bright ; she blinked and rubbed her eyes. The lady stood over her, laughing gently, and when the child looked up at her, seemed much younger than she had at first, very young in spite of her white hair. 22 THE PORTION OF LABOR There was a soft red on her cheek; her Hps looked full and triumphant with smiles; her eyes were like stars. An emotion of her youth which had never become dulled by satisfaction had suddenly blossomed out on her face, and transformed it. An unassuaged longing may serve to preserve youth as well as an undestroyed illusion; indeed, the two are one. Cynthia Lennox looked at the child as if she had been a young mother, and she her first-bom; triumph over the future, and daring for all odds, and perfect faith in the kingdom of joy were in her look. Had she nursed one child like Ellen to womanhood, and tasted the bitter in the cup, she would not have been capable of that look, and would have been as old as her years. She threw off her cloak and took off her bonnet, and the light struck her hair and made it look like silver. A brooch in the laces at her throat shone with a thousand hues, and as Ellen gazed at it she felt curiously dull and dizzy. She did not re- sist at all when the lady removed her little white shawl, but stared at her with the look of some small and help- less thing in too large a grasp of destiny to admit of a struggle. "Oh, you darling I" Cynthia Lennox said, and stooped and kissed her, and half carried her into a great, warm, dazzling room, with light reflected in long lines of gold from picture-frames on the wall, and now and then startling patches of lurid color blazing forth urmieaningly from the dark incline of their canvases, with gleams of crystal and shadows of bronze in set- tings of fretted ebony, with long swayings of rich draperies at doors and windows, a red light of fire in a grate, and two white lights, one of piano keys, the other of a flying marble figure in a corner, outlined clearly against dusky red. The light in this room was very dim. It was all beyond Ellen's imagination. The White North where the Norway spruces lived would not have seemed as strange to her as this. Neither would THE PORTION OF LABOR Bluebeard's Castle, nor the House that Jack Built, nor the Palace of King Solomon, nor the tent in which lived little Joseph in his coat of many colors, nor even the Garden of Eden, nor Noah's Ark. Her imagina- tion had not prepared her for a room like this. She had formed her ideas of rooms upon her grandmoth- er's and her mother's and the neighbors' best parlors, with their glories of crushed plush and gilt and onyx and cheap lace and picture - throws and lambrequins. This room was such a heterodoxy against her creed of civilization that it did not look beautiful to her as much as strange and bewildering, and when she was bidden to sit down in a little inlaid precious chair she put down her tiny hand and reflected, with a sense of strengthening of her household faith, that her grand- mother had beautiful, smooth, shiny hair-cloth. Cynthia Lennox pulled the chair close to the fire, and bade her hold out her little feet to the blaze to warm them well. "I am afraid you are chilled, darling," she said, and looked at her sitting there in her dainty little red cashmere frock, with her spread of baby-yellow hair over her shoulders. Then Ellen thought that the lady was younger than her mother ; but her mother had borne her and nursed her, and suffered and eaten of the tree of knowledge, and tasted the bitter after the sweet ; and this other woman was but as a child in the garden, though she was fairly old. But along with Ellen's conviction of the lady's youth had come a con- viction of her power, and she yielded to her unques- tioningly. Whenever she came near her she gazed with dilating eyes upon the blazing circle of diamonds at her throat. When she was bidden, she followed the lady into the dining-room, where the glitter of glass and silver and the soft gleam of precious china made her think for a little while that she must be in a store. She had never 24 THE PORTION OF LABOR seen anything like this except in a store, when she had been with her mother to buy a lamp-chimney. So she decided this to be a store, but she said nothing. She did not speak at all, but she ate her biscuits, and slice of breast of chicken, and sponge-cake, and drank her milk. She had her milk in a little silver cup which seemed as if it might have belonged to another child; she also sat in a small high-chair, which made it seem as if an- other child had lived or visited in the house. Ellen became singularly possessed with this sense of the pres- ence of a child, and when the door opened she would look around for her to enter, but it was always an old black woman with a face of imperturbable bronze, which caused her to huddle closer into her chair when she drew near. There were not many colored people in the city, and Ellen had never seen any except at Long Beach, where she had sometimes gone to have a shore dinner with her mother and Aunt Eva. Then she always used to shrink when the black waiter drew near, and her mother and aunt would be convulsed with furtive mirth. " See the little gump," her mother would say in the tenderest tone, and look about to see if others at the other tables saw how cunning she was — what a charming little goose to be afraid of a colored waiter. Ellen saw nobody except the lady and the black woman, but she was still sure that there was a child in the house, and after supper, when she was taken up- stairs to bed, she peeped through every open door with the expectation of seeing her. But she was so weary and sleepy that her curiosity and capacity for any other emotion was blunted. She had become simply a little, tired, sleepy animal. She let herself be undressed; she was not even moved to much self-pity when the lady discovered the cruel 25 THE PORTION OF LABOR bruise on her delicate knee, and kissed it, and dressed it with a heahng salve. She was put into a little night-gown which she knew dreamily belonged to that other child, and was laid in a little bedstead which she noted to be made of gold, with floating lace over the head. She sleepily noted, too, that there were flowers on the walls, and more floating lace o^-er the bureau. This room did not look so strange to her as the others; she had somehow from the treasures of her fancy provided the family of big bears and little bears with a similar one. Then, too, one of the neighbors, Mrs. George Crocker, had read many articles in women's papers relative to the beautifying of homes, and had furnished a wonderful chamber with old soap-boxes and rolls of Japanese paper which was a sort of a cousin many times removed of this. When she was in bed the lady kissed her, and called her darling, and bade her sleep well, and not be afraid, she was in the next room, and could hear if she spoke. Then she stood looking at her, and Ellen thought that she must be younger than Minnie Swensen, who lived on her street, and wore a yellow pigtail, and went to the high-school. Then she closed her heavy eyes, and forgot to cry about her poor father and mother ; still, there was, after all, a hurt about them down in her childish heart, though a great wave of new circumstances had rolled on her shore and submerged for the time her memory and her love, even, she was so feeble and young. She slept very soundly, and awoke only once, about two o'clock in the morning. Then a passing lantern flashed into the chamber into her eyes, and woke her up, but she only sighed and stretched drowsily, then turned her little body over with a luxurious roll and went to sleep again. It was poor Andrew Brewster's lantern which flashed 26 THE PORTION OF LABOR in her eyes, for he was out with a posse of police and s\'mpatiiizing neighbors and friends searching for his lost little girl. He was frantic, and when he came under the gas-lights from time to time the men that sa\^' him shuddered; they would not have known him, for almost the farthest agony of which he was capable had changed his face. CHAPTER III By the next morning all the city was in a commotion over little Ellen's disappearance. Woods on the out- skirts were being searched, ponds were being dragged, posters with a stare of dreadful meaning in large charac- ters of black and white were being pasted all over the fences and available barns, and already three of the local editors had been to the Brewster house to obtain particulars and photographs of the missing child for reproduction in the city papers. The first train from Boston brought two reporters representing great dailies. Fannj' Brewster, white - cheeked, with the rasped redness of tears around her eyes and mouth, clad in her blue calico wrapper, received them in her best parlor. Eva had made a fire in the best parlor stove early that morning. "Folks will be comin' in all day, I expect," said she, speaking with nervous catches of her breath. Ever since the child had been missed, Eva's anxiety had driven her from point to point of unrest as with a stinging lash. She had pelted bareheaded down the road and up the road ; she had invaded all the neighbors' houses, insisting upon looking through their farthest and most unlikely closets ; she had even penetrated to the woods, and joined wild-eyed the groups of peering workers on the shore of the nearest pond. That she could not endure long, so she had rushed home to her sister, who was either pacing her sitting-room with inarticulate murmurs and wails of distress in the sym- pathizing ears of several of the neighboring women, 28 THE PORTION OF LABOR or else was staring with haggard eyes of fearful hope from a window. When she looked from the eastern window she could see her mother-in-law, Mrs. Zelotes Brewster, at an opposite one, sitting immovable, with her Bible in her lap, prayer in her heart, and an eye of grim holding to faith upon the road for the fulfilment of promise. She felt all her muscles stiffen with anger when she saw the wild eyes of the child's mother at the other window. "It is all her fault," she said to herself—" all her fault — hers and that bold trollop of a sister of hers." When she saw Eva run down the road, with her black hair rising like a mane to the morning wind, she was an embodiment of an imprecatory psalm. When, later on, she saw the three editors coming — Mr. Walsey, of The Spy, and Mr. Jones, of The Observer, and young Joe Bemis, of The Star, on his bicycle — she watched jealously to see if they were admitted. When Fanny's head disappeared from the eastern window she knew that Eva had let them in and Fanny was receiving them in the parlor. "She will tell them all about the words they had last night, that made the dear child run away," she thought. "All the town will know what doings there are in our family." Mrs. Zelotes made up her mind to a course of action. Each editor was granted a long audience with Fanny and Eva, who entertained them with hysterical solemnity and displayed Ellen's photographs in the red plush album, from the last, taken in her best white frock, to one when she was three weeks old, and seeming weakly and not likely to live. This had been taken by a photog- rapher summoned to the house at great expense. " Her father has never spared expense for Ellen," said Fanny, with an outburst of grief. "That's so," said Eva. "I'll testify to that. Andrew Brewster never thought anything was too good for that young one." Then she burst out with a sob louder than her sister's. Eva had 29 THE PORTION OF LABOR usually a coarsely well-kempt appearance, her heavj' black hair being securely twisted, and her neck ribbons tied with smart jerks of neatness; but to-day her hair was still in the fringy braids of yesterday, and her cotton blouse humped untidily in the back. Her face was red and her lips swollen; she looked like a very bacchante of sorrow, and as if she had been on some mad orgy of grief. Mr. Walse3^ of The Spy, who had formerly conducted a paper in a college town and was not accustomed to the feminine possibilities of manufacturing localities, felt almost afraid of her. He had never seen a ^A'oman of that sort, and thought vaguely of the French Revolu- tion and fish-wives when she gave vent to her distress over the loss of the child. He fairly jumped when she cut short a question of his with a volley of self-recrimina- tory truths, accompanied with fierce gesturing. He stood back involuntarily out of reach of those power-, ful, waving arms. " Do I know of any reason for the child to run away?" shrieked Eva, in a voice shrilly hideous with emotion, now and then breaking into hoarseness with the strain of tears. " I guess I know why, I guess I do, and I wish I had been six foot under ground before I did what I did. It was all my fault, every bit of it. When I got home, and found that Fan had been making that precious young one a dress out of my old blue one, I pitched into her for it, and she gave it back to me, and then we jawed, and kept it up, till Andrew, he grabbed the dress and flung it into the fire, and did just right, too, and took Ellen and run over to old lady Brewster's with her ; then Ellen, she see him cryin', and it scared her 'most to death, poor little thing, and she heard him say that if it wasn't for her he'd quit, and then she come runnin' home to her mother and me, and her mother said the same thing, and then that poor young one, she 30 THE PORTION OP LABOR thought she wa'n't wanted nowheres, and she run. She ahvays was as easy to hurt as a baby robin; it didn't take nothing to set her all of a flutter and a twitter; and now she's just flown out of the nest. Oh, my God. I wish my tongue had been torn out by the roots before I'd said a word about her blessed little dress; I wish Fan had cut up every old rag I've got; I'd go dressed in fig-leaves before I'd had it happen. Oh! oh! oh!" Young Joe Bemis, of The Star, was the first to leave, whirling madly and precariously down the street on his wheel, which was dizzily tall in those days. Mrs. Zelotes, hailing him from her open window, might as well have hailed the wind. Her family dissensions were well aired in The Star next morning, and she always kept the cutting at the bottom of a little rosewood work- box where she stored away divers small treasures, and never looked at the box without a swift dart of pain as from a hidden sting and the consciousness as of the presence of some noxious insect caged therein. Mrs. Zelotes was more successful in arresting the progress of the other editors, and (standing at the win- dow, her Bible on the little table at her side) flatly con- tradicted all that had been told them by her daughter- in-law and her sister. " The Louds always give way, no matter what comes up. You can always tell what kind of a family anybody comes from by the way they take things when anything comes across them. You can't depend on anything she says this morning. My son did not marry just as I wished; everybody knows that; the Louds weren't equal to our family, and every- body knows it, and I have never made any secret as to how I felt, but we have always got along well enough. The Brewsters are not quarrelsome; they never have been. There were no words whatever last night to make my granddaughter run away. Eva and Fanny are all 31 THE PORTION OF LABOR wrong about it. Ellen has been stolen; I know it as well as if I had seen it. A strange-looking woman came to the door j'esterday afternoon; she was the tallest woman I ever saw, and she took the widest steps ; she measured her dress skirt every step she took, and she spoke gruff. I said then I knew she was a man dressed up. Ellen was playing out in the yard, and she saw the child as she went out, and I see her stoop and look at her real sharp, and my blood run kind of cold then, and I called Ellen away as quick as I could ; and the woman, she turned round and gave me a look that I won't ever forget as long as I live. My belief is that that woman was laying in wait when Ellen was go- ing across the yard home from here last night, and she has got her safe somewhere till a reward is offered. Or maybe she wants to keep her, Ellen is such a beau- tiful child. You needn't put in your papers that my grandchild run away because of quarrelling in our family, because she didn't. Eva and Fanny don't know what they are talking about, they are so wrought up; and, coming from the family they do, thej^ don't know how to control themselves and show any sense. I feel it as much as they do, but I have been sitting here all the morning; I know I can't do anything to help, and I am working a good deal harder, waiting, than they are, rushing from pillar to post and taking on, and I'm doing more good. I shall be the only one fit to do anything when they find the poor child. I've got blankets warming by the fire, and my tea-kettle on, and I'm going to be the one to depend on when she's brought home." Mrs. Zelotes gave a glance of defiant faith from the window down the road as she spoke. Then she settled back in her chair and re- sumed her Bible, and dismissed the tall and forbidding woman whom she had summoned to save the honor of her family resolutely from her conscience. The 32 THE PORTION OF LABOR editors of The Spy and The Observer had a row of ingratiating photographs of little Ellen from three weeks to seven years of age ; and their opinions as to the cause of her disappearance, while fully agreeing in all points of sensationalism with those of young Bemis, of The Star, differed in detail. Young Bemis read about the mysterious kidnapper, and wondered, and the demand for The Star was chiefly among the immediate neighbors of the Brewsters. Both The Observer and The Spy doubled their circulation in one day, and every face on the night cars was hidden behind poor little Ellen's baby countenances and the fairy-story of the witch- woman who had lured her away. Mothers kept their children carefully in -doors that evening, and pulled down curtains, fearful lest She look in the windows and be tempted. Mrs. Zelotes also waylaid both of the Boston reporters, but with results upon which she had not counted. One presented her story and Fanny's and Eva's with impartial justice; the other kept wholly to the latter version, with the addition of a shrewd theory of his own, deduced from the circumstances which had a parallel in actual history, and boldly stated that the child had probably committed suicide on account of family troubles. Poor Fanny and Eva both saw that, when night was falling and Ellen had not been found. Eva rushed out and secured the paper from the newsboy, and the two sisters gasped over the startling column together. "It's a lie! oh, Fanny, it's a lie!" cried Eva. "She never would ; oh, she never would ! That little thing, just because she heard you and me scoldin', and you said that to her, that if it wasn't for her you'd go away. She never would." " Go away?" sobbed Fanny — " go away? I wouldn't go away from hell if she was there. I would burn; I would hear the clankin' of chains, and groans, and 33 THE PORTION OF LABOR screeches, and devils whisperin' in my ears what I had done wrong, for all eternity, before I'd go where they were playin' harps in heaven, if she was there. I'd Hke it better, I would. And I'd stay here if I had twenty sisters I didn't; get along with, and be happier than I would be anywhere else on earth, if she was here. But she couldn't have done it. She didn't know how. It's awful to put such things into papers." Eva jumped up with a fierce gesture, ran to the stove, and crammed the paper in. "There!" said she; "I wish I could serve all the papers in the country the same way. I do, and I 'd like to put all the editors in after 'em. I'd like to put 'em in the stove with their own papers for kindlin's." Suddenly Eva turned with a swish of skirts, and was out of the room and pounding up-stairs, shaking the little house with every step. When she re- turned she bore over her arm her best dress — a cherished blue silk, ornate with ribbons and cheap lace. " Where's that pattern?" she asked her sister. " She wouldn't ever do such a thing," moaned Fanny. "Where's that pattern?" "What pattern?" Fanny said, faintly. "That little dress pattern. Her little dress pattern, the one you cut over my dress for her by." " In the bureau drawer in my room. Oh, she wouldn't." Eva went into the bedroom, returned with the pattern, got the scissors from Fanny's work-basket, and threw her best silk dress in a rustling heap upon the table. Fanny stopped moaning and looked at her with wretched wonder. "What be you goin' to do?" "Do?" cried Eva, fiercely — "do? I'm goin' to cut this dress over for her." "You ain't." " Yes, I be. If I drove her away from home, scoldin' because you cut over that other old thing of mine for 34 THE PORTION OF LABOR her, I'm goin' to make up for it now. I'm goin' to give her my best blue silk, that I paid a dollar and a half a yard for, and 'ain't worn three times. Yes, I be. She's goin' to have a dress cut out of it, an' she's comin' back to wear it, too. You'll see she is comin' home to wear it." Eva cut wildly into the silk with mad slashes of her gleaming shears, while two neighboring women, who had just come into the room, stared aghast, and even Fanny was partly diverted from her sorrow. "She's crazy," whispered one of the women, backing away as she spoke. "Oh, Eva, don't; don't do so," pleaded Fanny, trem- ulouslj''. " I be," said Eva, and she cut recklessly up the front breadth. " You ain't cutting it right," said the other neighbor, who was skilful in such matters, and never fully moved from her own household grooves by any excitement. "If you are a-goin' to cut it at all, you had better cut it right." "I don't care how I cut it," returned Eva, thrusting the woman away. "Oh, I don't care how I cut it; I want to waste it. I will waste it. " The other neighbor backed entirely out of the room, then turned and fled across the yard, her calico wrapper blowing wildly and lashing about her slender legs, to her own house, the doors of which she locked. Pres- ently the other woman followed her, stepping with the ponderous leisure which results from vastness of body and philosophy of mind. The autumn wind, swirling in impetuous gusts, had little effect upon her broadside of woollen shawl. She had not come out on that raw evening with nothing upon her head. She shook the kitchen door of her friend, and smiled with calm reas- surance when it was cautiously set ajar to disclose 35 THE PORTION OF LABOR a wide-eyed and open-mouthed face of terror. "Who is it?" "It's me. What have you got your door locked for?" " I think that Eva Loud is raving crazy. I'm afraid of her." " Lord ! you 'ain't no reason to be 'f raid of her. She ain't crazy. She's only lettin' the birds that fly over your an' my heads settle down to roost. You and me, both of us, if we was situated jest as she is, might think of doin' jest what she's a-doin', but we won't neither of us do it. We'd let our best dresses hang in the closet, safe and sound, while we cut them up in our souls; but Eva, she's different." "Well, I don't care. I believe she's crazy, and I'm going to keep my doors locked. How do you know she hasn't killed Ellen and put her in the well?" "Stuff! Now you're lettin' your birds roost, Hattie Monroe." "I read something that wasn't any worse than that in the paper the other day. I should think they would look in the well. Have Mrs. Jones and Miss Cross gone home?" "No; they are over there. There's poor Andrew coming now; I wonder if he has heard anything?" Both women eyed hesitatingly poor Andrew Brew- ster's dejected figure creeping up the road in the dark. "You holler and ask him," said the woman in the door. "I hate to, for I know by his looks he 'ain't heard anything of her. I know he's jest comin' home to rest a minute, so he can start again. I know he 'ain't eat a thing since last night. Well, Maria has got some coffee all made, and a nice little piece of steak ready to cook." "You holler and ask him." 36 "EVA SPRANG FORWARD AND CLUTCHED HIM BY THE ARM' THE PORTION OP LABOR "What is the use? Just see the way he walks; I know without askin' However, as Andrew neared his house he involun- tarily quickened his pace, and his head and shoulders became suddenly alert. It had occurred to him that possibly Fanny and Eva might have had some news of Eller during his absence. Possibly she might have come home even. Then he was hailed by the stout woman standing at the door of the next house. " Heard anything yet, Andrew?" Andrew shook his head, and looked with despairing eyes at the windows where he used to see Ellen's little face. She had not come, then, for these women would have known it. He entered the house, and Fanny greeted him with a tremulous cry. " Have you heard anything; oh, have you heard anything, Andrew?" Eva sprang forward and clutched him by the arm. "Have you?" Andrew shook his head, and moved her hand from his arm, and pushed past her roughly. Fanny stood in his way, and threw her arms around him with a wild, sobbing cry, but he pushed her away also with sternness, and went to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. The four women — his wife, her sister, and the two neighbors — stood staring at him; his face was terrible as he dipped the water from the pail on the sink corner, and the terribleness of it was accentuated by the homely and every-day nature of his action. They all stared, then Fanny burst out with a loud and desperate w^ail. " He won't speak to me, he pushes me away, when it is our child that's lost — his as well as mine. He hasn't any feelings for me that bore her. He only thinks of himself. Oh, oh, my own husband pushes me away." Andrew went on washing his hands and his ghastly 37 THE PORTION OF LABOR face, and made no reply. He had actually at that moment not the slightest sympathy with his wife. All liis other outlets of affection were choked by his con- cern for his lost child ; and as for pity, he kept reflect- ing, with a cold cruelty, that it served her right — it served both her and her sister right. Had not they driven the child away between them? He would not eat the supper which the neighbors had prepared for him; finally he went across the yard to his mother's. It seemed to him at that time that his mother could enter into his state of mind better than any one else. When he went out, Fanny called after him, fran- tically, "Oh, Andrew, you ain't going to leave me?" When he made no response, she gazed for a second at his retreating back, then her temper came to her aid. She caught her sister's arm, and pulled her away out of the kitchen. " Come with me," she said, hoarse- ly. "I've got nobody but you. My own husband leaves me when he is in such awful trouble, and goes to that old woman, that has always hated me, for com_- fort." The sisters went into Fanny's bedroom, and sat down on the edge of the bed, with their arms round each other. "Oh, Fannyl" sobbed EA'a; "poor, poor Fannyl if Andrew turns against you, I will stand by you as long as I live. I will work my fingers to the bone to support you and Ellen. I will never get married. I will stay and work for you and her. And I will never get mad with you again as long as I live, Fanny. Oh, it was all my fault, every bit my fault, but, but — " Eva's voice broke ; suddenly she clasped her sister tighter, and then she went down on her knees beside the bed, and hid her tangled head in her lap. " Oh, Fanny," she sobbed out miserably, "there ain't much excuse for me, but there's a little. When Jim Tenny stopped goin' with 38 THE PORTION OF LABOR me last summer^ my heart 'most broke. I don't care if you do know it. That's what made me so much worse than I used to be. Oh, my heart 'most broke, Fannj'I He's treated me awful, but I can't get over it; and now little Ellen's gone, and I drove her awayl" Fanny bent over her sister, and pressed her head close to her bosom. "Don't you feel so bad, Eva," said she. " You wasn't any more to blame than I was, and we'll stand by each other as long as we live." " I'll work my fingers to the bone for you and Ellen, and I'll never get married," said Eva again. CHAPTER IV Ellen Brewster was two nights and a day at Cynthia Lennox's, and no one discovered it. All day the searching - parties passed the house. Once Ellen was at the window, and one of the men looked up and saw her, and since his solicitude for the lost child filled his heart with responsiveness towards all childhood, he waved his hand and nodded, and bade another man look at that handsome little kid in the window. " Guess she's about Ellen's size," said the other. "Shouldn't wonder if she looked something like her," said the first. "Answers the description well enough," said the other, "same light hair." Both of the men waved their hands to Ellen as they passed on, but she shrank back afraid. That was about ten o'clock of the morning of the day after Miss Lennox had taken her into her house. She had waked at dawn with a full realization of the situation. She remembered perfectly all that had happened. She was a child for whom there were very few half-lights of life, and no spiritual twilights connected her sleeping and waking hours. She opened her eyes and looked around the room, and remembered how she had run away and how her mother was not there, and she remembered the strange lady with that same odd combination of terror and attraction and docility with which she had regarded her the night before. It was a very cold morning, and there was a delicate film of frost on the windows between the sweeps of the muslin 40 THE PORTION OF LABOR curtains, and the morning sun gave it a rosj^ glow and a crusting sparkle as of diamonds. The sight of the frost had broken poor Andrew Brewster's heart M'hen he saw it, and reflected how it might have meant death to his little tender child out under the blighting fall of it, like a little house-flower. Ellen lay winking at it when Cj^nthia Lennox came into the room and leaned over her. The child cast a timid glance up at the tall, slender figure clad in a dressing-gown of quilted crimson silk which dazzled her eyes, accustomed as she was to morning wrappers of dark-blue cotton at ninety-eight cents apiece; and she was filled with undefined apprehensions of splen- dor and opulence which might overwhelm her simple grasp of life and cause her to lose all her old standards of value. She had always thought her mother's wrappers very beautiful, but now look at this! Cynthia's face, too, in the dim, rosy light, looked very fair to the child, who had no discernment for those ravages of time of which adults either acquit themselves or by which they meas- ure their own. She did not see the faded color of the woman's face at all; she did not see the spread- ing marks around mouth and eyes, or the faint parallels of care on the temples; she saw only that which her unbiased childish vision had ever sought in a human face, love and kindness, and tender admiration of herself; and her conviction of its beauty was complete. But at the same time a bitter and piteous jealousy for her mother and home, and all that she had ever loved and believed in, came over her. What right had this strange woman, dressed in a silk dress like that, to be leaning over her in the morning, and looking at her like that — to be leaning over her in the morning instead of her own mother, and looking at her in that way, when she was 41 THE PORTION OF LABOR not her mother? She shrank away towards the other side of the bed with that nesthng motion which is the natural one of all young and gentle children even towards vacancy^ but suddenly Cynthia was lean- ing close over her, and she was conscious again of that soft smother of violets, and Cynthia's arms were em- bracing all her delicate little body with tenderest violence, folding her against the soft red silk over her bosom, and kissing her little, blushing cheeks with the lightest and carefulest kisses, as though she were a butterfly which she feared to harm with her adoring touch. "Oh, you darling, you precious darling!" whispered Cynthia. "Don't be afraid, darling; don't be afraid, precious; you are very safe; don't be afraid. You shall have such a little, white, new-laid egg for your breakfast, and some slices of toast, such a beautiful brown, and some honey. Do you love honey, sweet? And some chocolate, all in a little pink-and-gold cup which you shall have for your very own." "I want my mother!" Ellen cried out suddenly, with an exceedingly bitter and terrified and indignant cry. "There, there, darling!" Cynthia whispered; "there is a beautiful red-and-green parrot down-stairs in a great cage that shines like gold, and you shall have him for your own, and he can talk. You shall have him for your very own, sweetheart. Oh, you darling! you darling!" Ellen felt herself overborne and conquered by this tide of love, which compelled like her mother's, though this woman was not her mother, and her revolt of loyalty was subdued for the time. After all, whether we like it or not, love is somewhat of an impersonal quality to all children, and perhaps to their elders, and it may be in such wise that the goddess is evident. She did not shrink from Cynthia any more then, but suffered her to lift her out of bed as if she were a baby 42 THE PORTION OF LABOR and set her on a white fur rug, into which her feet sank, to her astonishment. Her mother had only drawn-in rugs, which Ellen had watched her make. She was a little afraid of the fur rug. Ellen was very small, and seemed much younger than she was by reason of her baby silence and her little clinging ways. Then, too, she had always been so petted at home, and through never going to school had not been in contact with other children. Often the bloom of childhood is soonest rubbed off by friction with its own kind. Diamond cut diamond holds good in many cases. Cynthia did not think she was more than six years old, and never dreamed of allowing her to dress herself, and indeed the child had always been largely assisted in so doing. Cynthia washed her and dressed her, and curled her hair, and led her down-stairs into the dining-room of the night before, which Ellen still re- garded with wise eyes as the store. Then she sat in the tall chair which must have been vacated by that mysterious other child, and had her breakfast, eating her new-laid egg, which the black woman broke for her, while she leaned delicately away as far as she could with a timid shrug of her little shoulder, and sipping her chocolate out of the beautiful pinli-and-gold cup. That, however, Ellen decided within herself was not nearly as pretty as one with "A Gift of Friendship" on it in gilt letters which her grandmother kept on the whatnot in her best parlor. This had been given to her aunt Ellen, who died when she was a young girl, and was to be hers when she grew up. She did not care as much for the egg and toast either as for the griddle- cakes and maple syrup at home. All through break- fast Cynthia talked to her, and in such manner as the child had never heard. That fine voice, full of sweetest modulations and cadences, which used the language 43 THE PORTION OF LABOR with the precision of a musician, was as different from the voices at home with their guttural slurs and maimed terminals as the song of a spring robin from the scream of the parrot which Ellen could hear in some distant room. And what Cynthia said was as different from ordinary conversation to the child as a fairy tale, being interspersed with terms of endearment which her mother and grandmother would have considered high-flown, and ha\e been shamefaced in employing, and full of a whimsical playfulness which had an undertone of pathos in it. Cynthia was not still for a minute, and seemed to feel that much of her power lay in her speech and \'oice, like some enchantress who cast her spell bj^ means of her silver tongue. Nobody knew how she dreaded that outcry of Ellen's, "I want my mother!" It gave her the sensations of a murderess, even while she persisted in her crime. So she talked, diverting the child's mind from its natural channel by sheer force of eloquence. She told a story about the parrot, which caused Ellen's eyes to widen with thoughtful wonder; she promised her treasures and pleasures which made her mouth twitch into smiles in spite of herself; but with all her efforts, when after breakfast they went into another room, Ellen broke out again, " I want my mother ! " Cynthia turned white and struggled with herself for a moment, then she spoke. That which she was doing of the nature of a crime was in reality more foreign to her nature than virtue, and her instinct was to re- turn to her narrow and straight way in spite of its cramping of love and natural longings. " Who is your mother, darling?" she asked. " And what is your namer But Ellen was silent, except for that one cry, "I want my mother I" The persistency of the child, in spite of her j'outh and her distress, was almost invulner- 44 THE PORTION OF LABOR able. She came of a stiff-necked family on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more pro- nounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered by experience and policy. "I want my mother! I want my mother I" Ellen repeated in her gentle wail as plaintively inconsequent as the note of a bird, and would say no more. Then Cynthia displayed the parrot, but a parrot was too fine and fierce a bird for Ellen. She would have preferred him as a subject for her imagination, which could not be harmed by his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the gor- geous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong talons to his cage wires, against which he pressed cruelly his red breast and beat his gold-green wings, and through which he thrust his hooked beak, and glared with his yellow eyes. Ellen fairly sobbed at last when the parrot thrust out a wicked and deceiving claw towards her, and said something in his unearthly shriek which seemed to have a distinct reference to her, and fired at her a volley of harsh "How do's" and "Good-mornings," and "Good-nights," and "Polly want a cracker's," then finished with a wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth. "I want my mother!" she panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted. Then Cynthia took her away from the parrot and produced the doll. Then truly did the sentiment of emulative motherhood in her childish breast console her for the time for her need of her own mother. Such a doll as that she had never seen, not even in the store-windows at Christmas-time. Still, she had very fine dolls for a little girl whose relatives were not wealthy, but this doll was like a princess, and nearly as large as Ellen. 45 THE PORTION OF LABOR Ellen held out her arms for this ravishing creature m a French gown, looked into its countenance of unflinching infantile grace and amiability and inno- cence, and her fickle heart betrayed her, and she laughed with delight, and the tension of anxiety re- laxed in her face. " Where is her mother?" she asked of Cj'nthia, having a very firm belief in the little girl-motherhood of dolls. She could not imagine a doll without her little mother, and even in the cases of the store-dolls, she wondered how their mothers could let them be sold, and mothered by other little girls, howe\'er poor they might be. But she never doubted that her own dolls were her very own children even if they had been bought in a store. So now she asked Cynthia with an indescribably pitying innocence, " Where is her mother?" Cynthia laughed and looked adoringly at the child with the doll in her arms. " She has no mother but you," said she. " She is yours, but once she belonged to a dear little boy, who used to live with me." Ellen stared thoughtfully : she had never seen a little boy with a doll. The lady seemed to read her thought, for she laughed again. " This little boy had curls, and he wore dresses like a little girl, and he was just as pretty as a little girl, and he loved to play with dolls like a little girl, " said she. " Where is he?" asked Ellen, in a small, gentle voice. " Don't he want her now?" " No, darling," said Cynthia; " he is not here; he has been gone away two years, and he had left off his baby curls and his dresses, and stopped playing with her for a year before that." Cynthia sighed and drew down her mouth, and Ellen looked at her lovingly and won- deringly. "Be you his mother?" she asked, piteously; then, before Cynthia could answer, her own lip quivered and 46 THE PORTION OF LABOR she sobbed out again, even while she hugged her doll- child to her bosom, "I want my mother 1 I want my mother I" All that day the struggle went on. Cynthia Lennox, leading her little guest, who always bore the doll, trav- ersed the fine old house in search of distraction, for the heart of the child was sore for its mother, and suc- cess was always intermittent. The music-box played, the pictures were explained, and even old trunks of laid- away treasures ransacked. Cynthia took her through the hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment was very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old colored couple had lived in her family since she was born, and would have been silent had she stolen a whole family of children. Ellen caught a glimpse of a bent, dark figure at one end of the pink- house as they entered; he glanced up at her with no appearance of surprise, only a broad, welcoming ex- pansion of his whole face, which caused her to shrink; then he shuffled out in response to an order of his mis- tress. Ellen stared at the pinks, swarming as airily as butter- flies in motley tints of palest rose to deepest carmine over the blue-green jungle of their stems; she sniffed the warm, moist, perfumed atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom, then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia led her into the rose-house, then into one where the grapes hung low overhead and the air was as sweet and strong as wine, but even there Ellen wanted her mother. But it was not until the next morning when she was 47 THE PORTION OF LABOR eating her breakfast that the cHniax came. Then the door-bell rang, and presently Cynthia was summoned into another room. She kissed Ellen, and bade her go on with her breakfast and she would return shortly; but before she had quite left the room a man stood un- expectedly in the door- way, a man who looked younger than Cynthia. He had a fair mustache, a high forehead scowling over near-sighted blue eyes, and stood with a careless slouch of shoulders in a gray coat. "Good-morning," he began. Then he stopped short when he saw Ellen in her tall chair staring shyly around at him through her soft golden mist of hair. " What child is that?" he demanded; but Cynthia with a sharp cry sprang to him, and fairly pulled him out of the room, and closed the door. Then Ellen heard voices rising higher and higher, and Cynthia say, in a voice of shrill passion : " I cannot, Lyman. I cannot give her up. You don't know what I have suffered since George married and took little Robert away. I can't let this child go." Then came the man's voice, hoarse with excitement : "But, Cynthia, you must; you are mad. Think what this means. Why, if people know what j-ou have done, kept this child, while all this search has been going on, and made no effort to find out who she was — " " I did ask her, and she would not tell me," Cynthia said, miserably. "Good Lord! what of that? That is nothing but a subterfuge. You must have seen in the papers — " " I have not looked at a paper since she came." " Of course you have not. You were afraid to. Why, good God! Cynthia Lennox, I don't know but you will stand in danger of lynching if people ever find this out, that you have taken in this child and kept her in this way — I don't know what people will do.'' Ellen waited for no more ; she rose softly, she gathered 48 THE PORTION OF LABOR up her great doll which sat in a little chair near by^ she gathered up her pink-and-gold cup which had been given her, and the pinks which had been brought from the hot-house the day before, which Cynthia had ar- ranged in a vase beside her plate, then she stole very softly out of the side door, and out of the house, and ran down the street as fast as her little feet could carry her. CHAPTER V That morning, after the street in front of Lloyd's factory had been cleared of the flocking employes with their little dinner-boxes, and the great broadside of the front windows had been set with faces of the workers, a distracted figure came past. A young fellow at a window of the cutting-room noticed her first. " Look at that, Jim Tenny," said he, with a shove of an elbow towards his next neighbor. " Get out, will ye?" growled Jim Tenny, but he looked. Then three girls from the stitching-room came crowd- ing up behind with furtively tender pressings of round arms against the shoulders of the young men. "We come in here to see if that was Eva Loud," said one, a sharp-faced, alert girl, not pretty, but a favorite among the male employ6s, to the constant wonder of the other girls. " Yes, it's her fast enough," rejoined another, a sweet- faced blonde with an exaggeratedly fashionable coiffure and a noticeable smartness in the tie of her neck-ribbon and the set of her cotton waist. " Just look at the poor thing's hair. Only see how frowsly it is, and she has come out without her hat." "Well, I don't wonder," said the third girl, who was elderlj^ and whose complexion was tanned and weather- beaten almost to the color of the leather upon which she worked. Yet through this seamed and discolored face, with thin grayish hair drawn back tightly from the temples, one could discern, as through a transparent mask, a past prettiness and an exceeding gentleness 50 THE PORTION OF LABOR and faithfulness. " If my sister's little Helen was to be lost I shouldn't know whether my hat was on or not," said she. " I believe I should go raving mad." " You wouldn't have to slave as you have done sup- portin' it ever since your sister's husband died," said the pretty girl. "Only look how Eva's waist bags in the back and she 'ain't got any belt on. I wouldn't come out lookin' so." " I should die if I didn't have something to work for. That's the difference between being a worker and a slave," said the other girl, simply. " Poor Eva!" " Well, it was a pretty young one," said the first girl. "Looks to me as if Eva Loud's skirt was comin' off," said the pretty girl. She pressed close to Jim Tenny with a familiar air of proprietorship as she spoke, but the young man did not seem to heed her. He was looking over his bench at the figure on the street below, and his heavy black eyebrows were scowling, and his mouth set. Jim Termy was handsome after a swarthy and grimy fashion, for the tint of the leather seemed to have be- come absorbed into his skin. His black mustache bristled roughly, but his face was freer than usual from his black beard-stubble, because the day before had been Sunday and he had shaved. His black right hand with its squat discolored nails grasped his cutting-knife with a hard clutch, his left held the piece of leather firmly in place, while he stared out with that angry and anxious scowl at Eva, who had paused on the street be- low, and was staring up at the windows, as if she meditat- ed a wild search in the factory for the lost child. There was a curious likeness between the two faces; people had been accustomed to say that Eva Loud and her gentleman looked more like brother and sister than a courting couple, and there was, moreover, a curious spirit of comradeship between the two. It asserted it- 51 THE PORTION OF LABOR self now with the young man, in opposition to the more purely sexual attraction of the pretty girl who was lean- ing against him, and for whom he had deserted Eva. After all, friendship and good comradeship are a steadier force than love, if not as overwhelming, and it may be that tortoise of the emotions which outruns the hare. " Well, for my part, I think a good deal more of Eva Loud than if she had come out all frizzed and ruffled — shows her heart is in the right place," said the man who had spoken first. He spoke with a guttural drawl, and kept on with his work, but there was a meaning in his words for the pretty girl, who had coquetted with him before taking up with Jim Tenny. "That is so," said another man at Jim Tenny's right. "She is right to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child." This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried, slurring intonations of the other men. He had been taught the language by a philanthropic young lady, a college graduate, in whose father's family he had lived when he first came to America, and in consequence he spoke like a gentleman and had some considerable difficulty in understanding his companions. "Eva Loud has had a damned hard time, take it all together," spoke out another man, looking over his bench at the girl on the street. He was small and thin and wiry, a mass of brown-coated muscles under his loose-hanging gingham shirt. He plied feverishly his cutting-knife with his lean, hairy hands as he spoke. He was accounted one of the best and swiftest cutters in Lloyd's, and he worked unceasingly, for he had an invalid wife and four children to support. Now and then he had to stop to cough, then he worked faster. " That's so," said the first man. 52 THE PORTION OF LABOR " Yes, that is so," said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head. "And now to lose this young one that she set her life by," said the first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny's side. Jim Tenny paled under his grune; the hand which held the knife cHnched. " What do you s'pose has become of the young one?" said the first girl. "There's a good many out from the shop huntin' this mornin', ain't there?" I j Fifty," said the first man, laconically. 1^ You three were out all day yesterday, wa'n't you?" " Yes, Jim and Carl and me were out till after mid- night." " Well, I wonder whether the poor little young one is alive? Don't seem as if she could be— but— " "Look there! look there!" screamed the elderly girl suddenly. "Look at there!" She began to dance, she laughed, she sobbed, she waved her lean hands frantically out of the window, leaning far over the bench. "Look at there!" she kept crying. Then she turned and ran out of the room, with the other girls and half the cutting-room after her. "Damn it, she's got the child!" said the thin man. He kept on working, his dark, sinewy hands flying over the .sheets of leather, but the tears ran down his cheeks. Lloyd's emptied itself into the street, and sur- rounded Eva Loud and Ellen, who, running aimless- ly, had come straight to her aunt. Jim Tenny was first. Eva stood clasping the child, who was too frightened to cry, and was breathing in hushed gasps, her face hidden on her aunt's broad bosom. Eva had caught her up at the first sight of her, and now she stood clasp- ing her fiercely, and looking at them all as if she thought they wanted to rob her of the child. Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd, and was echoed by 53 THE PORTION OF LABOR another from the factory, with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and hands, that ex- pression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of re- covery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny's face working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory of old comradeship. Then her bold heart and her pride all melted and she burst out in a great wail before them all. " Oh, Jim I" she cried out. " Oh, Jim, I lost you, and then I thought I'd lost her! Oh, Jiml" Then there was a chorus of feminine sobs, for Eva's wild weeping had precipitated the ready sympathy of half the girls present. The men started a cheer to cover a certain chivalrous shamefacedness which was upon them at the sight of the girl's grief, and another cheer from the factory echoed it. Then came another sound, the great steam- whistle of Lloyd's; then the whistles of the other neighboring factories responded, and people began to swarm out of them, and the win- dows to fill with eager faces. Jim Tenny grasped Eva's arm with a grasp like a vise. " Come this way," said he, sharply. "Come this way, Eva." "Oh, Jim! oh, Jim!" Eva sobbed again; but she followed him, little Ellen's golden fleece tossing over her shoulder. "She's got her; she's got her!" shouted the people. Then the leather-stained hands gyrated, the cheers went up, and again the whistles blew. Jim Tenny, with his hand on Eva's arm, pushed his way through the crowd. "Where you goin', Jim?" asked the pretty girl at his elbow, but he pushed past her roughly, and did not seem to hear. Eva's face was all inflamed and con- vulsed with sobs, but she did not dream of covering it — she was full of the holy shamelessness of grief and joy. " Let me see her ! let me see her I Oh, the dear little 54 THE PORTION OF LABOR thing, only look at her 1 Where have you been, precious ? Are you hungry? Oh, Nellie, she is hungry, I know! She looks thin. Run over to the bakery and buy her some cookies, quick 1 Are you cold? Give her this sacque. Only look at her! Kate, only look at her! Are you hurt, darling? Has anybody hurt you? If anybody has, he shall be hung! Oh, you darling! Only see her, 'Liza." But Jim Tenny, his mouth set, his black brows scowl- ing, his hard grasp on Eva's arm, pushed straight through the gathering crowd until they came to Clark- son's stables at the rear of Lloyd's, where he kept his horse and buggy — for he lived at a distance from his work, and drove over every morning. He pointed to a chair which a hostler had occupied, tilted against the wall, for a morning smoke, after the horses were fed and watered, and which he had vacated to join the jubilant crowd. "Sit down there," he said to Eva. Then he hailed a staring man coming out of the office. "Here, help me in with my horse, quick!" said he. The man stared still, with slowly rising indignation. He was portly and middle-aged, the senior partner of the firm, who seldom touched his own horses of late years, and had a son at Harvard. "What's to pay? What do you mean? Anybody sick?" he asked. "Help me into the buggy with my horse!" shouted Jim Tenny. "I tell you the child is found, and I've got to take it home to its folks." " Don't they know yet? Is that it?" "Yes, I tell you." Jim was backing out his horse as he spoke. Mr. Clarkson seized a harness and threw the collar over the horse's head, while Jim ran out the buggy. When Mr. Clarkson lifted Eva and Ellen into the buggy he gave the child's head a pat. " God bless it ! " he said, and his voice broke. 55 THE PORTION OF LABOR The horse was restive. Jim took a leap into the buggy at Eva's side, and they were out with a dash and a swift rattle. The crowd parted before them, and cheer after cheer went up. The whistles sounded again. Then all the city bells rang out. Thej' were signalling the other searchers that the child was found. Jim and Eva and Ellen made a progress of triumph down the street. The crowd pursued them with cheers of rejoicing; doors and windows flew open; the house- yards were full of people. Jiin drove as fast as he could, scowling hard to hide his tenderness and pity. Eva sat by his side, weeping in her terrible candor of grief and joy, and Ellen's golden locks tossed on her shoulder. CHAPTER VI As Jim Tenny, with Eva Loud and the child, drove down the road towards the Brewster house, his horse and buggy became the nucleus of a gathering procession, shouting and exclaiming, with voices all tuned to one key of passionate sympathy. There were even many women of the poorer class who had no sense of inde- cency in following the utmost lead of their tender emo- tions. Some of them bore children of their own in their arms, and were telling them with passionate croonings to look at the other little girl in the carriage who had been lost, and gone away a whole day and two nights from her mother. They often called out fondly to Ellen and Eva, and ordered Jim to wait a moment that they might look at the poor darling. But Jim drove on as fast as he was able, though he had sometimes to rein his horse sharply to a^'oid riding down some lean racing boys, who would now and then shoot ahead of him with loud whoops of triumph. Once as he drove he laid one hand caressingly over Eva's. "Poor girl!" he said, hoarsely and shamefacedly, and Eva sobbed loudly. When Jim reached Mrs. Zelotes Brewster's house there was a swift displacement of lights and shadows in a window, a door flew open, and the gaunt old woman was at the wheel. "Stop!" she cried. "Stop! Bring her in here to me ! Let me have her 1 Give her to me ; I have got everything ready ! Come, Ellen — come to grand- mother 1" Then there was a mad rush from the opposite direc- 57 THE PORTION OF LABOR tion, and the child's mother was there, reaching into the buggy with fierce arms of love and longing. " Give her to me I" she shrieked out. "Give me my baby, Eva Loud! Oh, Ellen, where have you been?" Fanny Brewster dragged her child from her sister's arms so forcibly that she seemed fairly to fly over the wheel. Then she strained her to her hungry bosom, covering her with kisses, wetting her soft face and yellow hair with tears. "My baby, mother's darling, mother's baby!" she gasped out with great pants of satisfied love; but an- other pair of lean, wiry old arms stole around the child's slender body. "Give her to me !" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. " She is my son's child, and I have a right to her ! You will kill her, goin' on so over her. Give her to me ! I have everything all ready in my house to take care of her. Give her to me, Fanny Loud !" "Keep your hands off her!" cried Fanny. "She's my own baby, and nobody's goin' to take her away from me, I guess." "Give her to me this minute!" said Mrs. Zelotes Brewster. "You'll kill her, goin' on so. You're frightenin' her to death. Give her to me this minute 1" Ellen, meanwhile, that little tender blossom tossed helplessly by contending waves of love, was weeping and trembling with joy at the feel of her mother's arms and with awe and terror at this tempest of passion which she had evoked. "Give her to mel" demanded Mrs. Zelotes Brew- ster. The crowd who had followed stood gaping with work- ing faces. The mothers wept over their own children. Eva stood at her sister's elbow, with a hand on one of the child's, which was laid over Fanny's shoulder. Jim Tenny had his face hidden on his horse's neck 58 " ' SHE'S GOT HER I' SHOUTED THE PEOPLE ' THE PORTION OF LABOR "Give her to me !" said Mrs. Zelotes again. "Give her to me, I saj- 1 I am her own grandmother I" " And I am her own mother I" called out Fanny, with a great master-note of love and triumph and defiance. " I'm her own mother, and I've -got her, and nobody but God shall take her from me again." The tears streamed down her cheeks ; she kissed the child with pale, parted lips. She was at once pathetic and terrible. She was human love and selfishness incarnate. Mrs. Zelotes Brewster stared at her, and her face changed suddenly and softened. She turned and went back into her own house. Her gray head appeared a second beside her window, then sank out of sight. She was kneeling there with her Bible at her side, a sudden sweet humility of thankfulness rising from her whole spirit like a perfume, when Fanny, v>'ith Eva following, still clinging to the child's little hand over her sister's shoulder, went across the yard to her own house to tell her husband. The others followed, and stood about outside, listening with curiosity sanctified by intensest S5mipathy. One nervous-faced boy leaped on the slant of the bulkhead to peer in a window of the sitting- room, and when his mother pulled him back forcibly, rubbed his grimy little knuckles across his eyes, and a dark smooch appeared on his nose and cheeks. He was a young boy, very small and thin for his age. He whispered to his mother and she nodded, and he darted off in the direction of his own home. Andrew Brewster had just come home after an all- night's search, and he was in his bedroom in the bitter sleep of utter exhaustion and despair. Suddenly his heart had failed him and his brain had reeled. He had begun to feel dazed, to forget for a minute what he was looking for. He had made incoherent replies to the men with him, and finally one, after a whispered consultation with the others, had said: "Look at here, Andrew, 59 THE PORTION OF LABOR old fellow; you'd better go home and rest a bit. We'll look all the harder while you're gone, and maybe she'll be found when you wake up." "Who will be found?" Andrew asked, with a dazed look. He reeled as if he were drunk. " Ain't had anything, has he?" one of the men whis- pered. "Not a drop to my knowledge." Andrew's lips trembled perceptibly; his forehead was knitted with vacuous perplexity; his eyes reflected blanks of unreason; his whole body had an effect of weak settling and subsidence. The man who worked next to him in the cutting-room at Lloyd's, and had searched at his side indefatigably from the first, stole a tender hand under his shoulder. " Come along with me, old man," he said, and Andrew obeyed. When Fanny and Eva came in with the child, he lay prostrate on the bed, and scarcely seemed to breathe. A great qualm of fear shot over Fanny for a second. His father had died of heart-disease. "Is he — dead?" she gasped to Eva. "No, of course he ain't," said Eva. "He's asleep; he's wore out. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew, wake up! She's found, Andrew; Ellen's found." But Andrew did not stir. " lie is!" gasped Fanny, again. " No, he ain't. Andrew, Andrew Brewster, wake up, wake up! Ellen's here! She's found!" Fanny put Ellen down, and bent over Andrew and listened. "No, I can hear him breathe," she cried. Then she kissed him, and leaned her mouth close to his ear. "Andrew!" she said, in a voice which Eva and Ellen had never heard before. "Andrew, poor old man, wake up; she's found ! Our child is found I" When Andrew still did not wake, but only stirred, 60 THE PORTION OF LABOR and moaned faintly, Fanny lifted Ellen onto the bed. " Kiss poor father, and wake him," she told her. Ellen, whose blue eyes were big with fright and wonder, whose lips were quivering, and whose little body was vibrating with the strain of her nerves, laid her soft cheek against her father's rough, pale one, and stole a little arm under his neck. "Father, wake up!" she called out in her little, trembling, sweet voice, and that reached Andrew Brewster in the depths of his own physical inertness. He opened his eyes and looked at the child, and the light came into them, and then the sound of his sobbing filled the house and reached the people out in the yard, and an echo arose from them. Gradually the crowd dispersed. Jim Tenny, before he drove away, went to the door and spoke to Eva. "Anything I can do?" he asked, with a curious, ten- der roughness. He did not look at her as he spoke. " No ; thank you, Jim," replied Eva. Suddenly the young man reached out a hand and stroked her rough hair. "Well, take care of yourself, old girl," he said. Eva went to her sister as Jim went out of the yard. Ellen was in the sitting-room with her father, and Fanny had gone to the kitchen to heat some milk for the child, whom she firmly believed to have had nothing to eat during her absence. "Fanny," said Eva. " Well?" said Fanny. " I can't stop ; I must get some milk for her; she must be 'most starved." Fanny turned and looked at Eva, who cast down her eyes before her in a very shamefacedness of happiness and contrition. "Why, what is it?" repeated Fanny, staring at her. "I've got Jim back, I guess, as well as Ellen," said Eva, " and I'm going to be a good woman." After all the crowd of people outside had gone, the 6i THE PORTION OF LABOR little nervous boy raced into the Brewster yard with a tin cup of chestnuts in his hand. He knocked at the side door, and when Fanny opened it he thrust them upon her. " They're for her 1" he blurted out, and was gone, racing like a deer. "Don't you want the cup back?" Fanny shouted after him. " No, ma'am," he called back, and that, although his mother had charged him to bring back the cup or he would get a scolding. CHAPTER VII 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, amazed- ly, 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 liber- ally 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, anx- iously. 63 THE PORTION OF LABOR "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. "1 wonder if she would eat one of my new dough- nuts. 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 Ijreadth 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 sud- denly 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?" 64 THE PORTION OF LABOR "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." « 65 THE PORTION OF LABOR " Yes, but you can get real handsome cups and sau- cers 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 em- phasis. "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 spec- tacles. The old woman was deaf, and her voice was 66 THE PORTION OF LABOR 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 A\ ith them. Ellen gasped. Suddenly all her first woe returned upon her recollection. She turned innocent, accusing ej-es upon her father's loving face, then her mother's and aunt's. "You said — you said — you — " she stam- mered out, but then her father and mother were both down upon their knees before her in her chair embrac- ing 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 Farmy, 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 heElYJly 67 THE PORTION OF LABOR 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 I" 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 j'ou 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 68 THE PORTION OF LABOR 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-con- demnation, 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," Fannj^ 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 69 THE PORTION OF LABOR Ellen's, which was Sevres, and worth more than the whole counterful, liad she only known it, and she hurried ]