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Page 16
"Well, may they be good,--these rich folks!"
"That's so. I'd be good if I was rich; wouldn't you, Moll?"
"You'd keep growing wilder than ever, if you went to hell, Meg Match:
yes you would, because my teacher said so."
"So, then, he wouldn't marry her, after all; and she--"
"Going to the circus to-night, Bess?"
"I can't help crying, Jenny. You don't _know_ how my head aches! It
aches, and it aches, and it seems as if it would never stop aching. I
wish--I wish I was dead, Jenny!"
They separated at last, going each her own way,--pretty Del Ivory to
her boarding-place by the canal, her companion walking home alone.
This girl, Asenath Martyn, when left to herself, fell into a contented
dream not common to girls who have reached her age,--especially girls
who have seen the phases of life which she had seen. Yet few of the
faces in the streets that led her home were more gravely lined. She
puzzled one at the first glance, and at the second. An artist, meeting
her musing on a canal-bridge one day, went home and painted a May-flower
budding in February.
It was a damp, unwholesome place, the street in which she lived, cut
short by a broken fence, a sudden steep, and the water; filled with
children,--they ran from the gutters after her, as she passed,--and
filled to the brim; it tipped now and then, like an over-full
soup-plate, and spilled out two or three through the break in the fence.
Down in the corner, sharp upon the water, the east-winds broke about a
little yellow house, where no children played; an old man's face watched
at a window, and a nasturtium-vine crawled in the garden. The broken
panes of glass about the place were well mended, and a clever little
gate, extemporized from a wild grape-vine, swung at the entrance. It
was not an old man's work.
Asenath went in with expectant eyes; they took in the room at a glance,
and fell.
"Dick hasn't come, father?"
"Come and gone child; didn't want any supper, he said. Your 're an hour
before time, Senath."
"Yes. Didn't want any supper, you say? I don't see why not."
"No more do I, but it's none of our concern as I knows on; very like the
pickles hurt him for dinner; Dick never had an o'er-strong stomach, as
you might say. But you don't tell me how it m' happen you're let out at
four o'clock, Senath," half complaining.
"O, something broke in the machinery, father; you know you wouldn't
understand if I told you what."
He looked up from his bench,--he cobbled shoes there in the corner on
his strongest days,--and after her as she turned quickly away and up
stairs to change her dress. She was never exactly cross with her father;
but her words rang impatiently sometimes.
She came down presently, transformed, as only factory-girls are
transformed, by the simple little toilet she had been making; her thin,
soft hair knotted smoothly, the tips of her fingers rosy from the water,
her pale neck well toned by her gray stuff dress and cape;--Asenath
always wore a cape: there was one of crimson flannel, with a hood, that
she had meant to wear to-night; she had thought about it coming home
from the mill; she was apt to wear it on Saturdays and Sundays; Dick had
more time at home. Going up stairs to-night, she had thrown it away into
a drawer, and shut the drawer with a snap; then opened it softly, and
cried a little; but she had not taken it out.
As she moved silently about the room, setting the supper-table for two,
crossing and recrossing the broad belt of sunlight that fell upon the
floor, it was easy to read the sad story of the little hooded capes.
They might have been graceful shoulders. The hand which had scarred her
face had rounded and bent them,--her own mother's hand.
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