The little girl, over-weary, had eaten her supper and fallen asleep beside her, with the trusting, ignorant rest of early childhood; but her boy sat by her bedside with that look of precocious responsibility, that air of anxious thought, which seems unnatural in early childhood, and contrasted painfully with the slight childish figure, the little hands, and little voice. He was, as we have said, but nine years of age, well grown for his years, but with that style of growth which indicates delicacy of fibre rather than strength of organization. His finely formed head, with its clustering curls of yellow hair, his large, clear blue eyes, his exquisitely delicate skin, and the sensitiveness betrayed by his quivering lips, spoke of a lineage of gentle blood, and an organization fitted rather to æsthetic and intellectual development than to sturdy material toil. The little girl, as she lay sleeping, was a beautiful picture. Her head was a wilderness of curls of a golden auburn, and the defined pencilling of the eyebrows, and the long silken veil of the lashes that fell over the sleeping eyes, the delicate polished skin and the finely moulded limbs, all indicated that she was one who ought to have been among the jewels, rather than among the potsherds of this mortal life. And these were the children that she was going to leave alone, without a single friend and protector in this world. For there are intuitions that come to the sick and dying which tell them when the end is near; and as this wanderer sunk down upon her bed this night, there had fallen upon her mind a perfect certainty that she should never be carried thence till carried to the grave; and it was this which had given her soul so deadly a wrench, and caused her to cry out in such utter agony.
What happens to desolate souls, who, thus forsaken by all the world, cry out to God, is a mystery, good brother and sister, which you can never fathom until you have been exactly where they are. But certain it is that there is a very near way to God’s heart, and so to the great heart of all comfort, that sometimes opens like a shaft of light between heaven and the soul, in hours when everything earthly falls away from us. A quaint old writer has said, “God keeps his choicest cordials for the time of our deepest fainting.” And so it came to pass that, as this poor woman closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, there fell a strange clearness into her soul, which calmed every fear, and hushed the voice of every passion, and she lay for a season as if entranced. Words of holy writ, heard years ago in church-readings, in the hours of unconscious girlhood, now seemed to come back, borne in with a living power on her soul. It seemed almost as if a voice within was saying to her: “The Lord hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God. For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and thy foundations with sapphires. And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children.”
It is fashionable now to speak of words like these as fragments of ancient Hebrew literature, interesting and curious indeed, but relating to scenes, events, and states of society long gone by. But it is a most remarkable property of this old Hebrew literature, that it seems to be enchanted with a divine and living power, which strikes the nerve of individual consciousness in every desolate and suffering soul. It may have been Judah or Jerusalem ages ago to whom these words first came, but as they have travelled down for thousands of years, they have seemed to tens of thousands of sinking and desolate souls as the voice of God to them individually. They have raised the burden from thousands of crushed spirits; they have been as the day-spring to thousands of perplexed wanderers. Ah! let us treasure these old words, for as of old Jehovah chose to dwell in a tabernacle in the wilderness, and between the cherubim in the temple, so now he dwells in them; and to the simple soul that seeks for him here he will look forth as of old from the pillar of cloud and of fire.
The poor, ill-used, forsaken, forgotten creature who lay there trembling on the verge of life felt the presence of that mighty and generous, that godlike spirit that inspired these words. And surely if Jehovah ever did speak to man, no words were ever more worthy of Him. She lay as in a blessed trance, as passage after passage from the Scriptures rolled over her mind, like bright waves from the ocean of eternal peace.
“Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God. When thou passest through the waters I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee; for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.”
The little boy, who had heard his mother’s first distressful cry, sat by her anxiously watching the changes of her face as she lay there. He saw her brow gradually grow clear and calm, and every line of trouble fade from her face, as shadows and clouds roll up from the landscape at day-dawn, till at last there was a rapt, peaceful expression, an evenness of breathing, as if she slept, and were dreaming some heavenly dream. It lasted for more than an hour, and the child sat watching her with the old, grave, tender look which had come to be the fashion of his little face when he looked upon his mother.
This boy had come to this mother as a second harvest of heart, hope, and joy, after the first great love and hope of womanhood had vanished. She felt herself broken-hearted, lonely, and unloved, when her first-born son was put into her arms, and she received him as did the first mother, saying, “I have gotten a man from the Lord.” To him her desolate heart had unfolded its burden of confidence from the first dawning hours of intelligence. His tiny faculties had been widened to make room for her sorrows, and his childish strength increased by her leaning. There had been hours when this boy had stood between the maniac rage of a drunken father and the cowering form of his mother, with an unchildlike courage and steadiness that seemed almost like an inspiration. In days of desertion and poverty he had gone out with their slender stock of money and made bargains such as it is pitiful to think that a little child should know how to make; and often, in moments when his mother’s heart was overwhelmed, he would come to her side with the little prayers and hymns which she had taught him, and revive her faith and courage when it seemed entirely gone.
Now, as he thought her sleeping, he began with anxious care to draw the coverlet over her, and to move his little sister back upon the bed. She opened her eyes, – large, clear blue eyes, the very mirror of his own, – and, smiling with a strange sweetness, stretched out her hand and drew him towards her. “Harry, my dear good boy, my dear, dear child, nobody knows what a comfort you have been to me.”
Then holding him from her, and looking intently in his eyes, she seemed to hesitate for words to tell him something that lay on her mind. At last she said, “Harry, say your prayers and psalms.”
The child knelt by the bed, with his hands clasped in his mother’s, and said the Lord’s Prayer, and then, standing up, repeated the beautiful psalm beginning, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Then followed a hymn, which the Methodists had made familiar in those times: –
One there is above all others
Well deserves the name of Friend;
His is love beyond a brother’s,
Costly, free, and knows no end.
“Which of all our friends, to save us,
Could or would have shed his blood
But this Saviour died to have us
Reconciled in him to God.
“When he lived on earth abased,
Friend of Sinners was his name;
Now, above all glory raised,
He rejoiceth in the same.
O for grace our hearts to soften!
Teach us, Lord, at length to love;
We, alas! forget too often
What a friend we have above.”
“Harry,” said his mother, looking at him with an intense earnestness, “I want to tell you something. God, our Father, has called me to come home to him; and I am going. In a little while – perhaps to-morrow – I shall be gone, and you cannot find me. My soul will go to God, and they will put my body in the ground; and then you will have no friend but Jesus, and no father but the Father in heaven.”
The child looked at her with solemn, dilated gaze, not really comprehending the full mystery of that which she was trying to explain; yet the tears starting in his eyes, and the twitching of the muscles of his mouth, showed that he partly understood.
“Mother,” he said, “will papa never come back?”
“No, Harry, never. He has left us and gone away. He does not love us, – nobody loves us but our Father in heaven; but He does. You must always believe this. Now, Harry, I am going to leave your little sister to your care. You must always keep with her and take care of her, for she is a very little girl.”
“Yes, mother.”
“This is a great charge for a little boy like you; but you will live and grow up to be a man, and I want you never, as long as you live, to forget what I say to you now. Promise me, Harry, all your life to say these prayers and hymns that you have just been saying, every morning and every night. They are all I have to leave you; but if you only believe them, you will never be without comfort, no matter what happens to you. Promise me, dear.”
“Yes, mother, I will.”
“And, Harry, no matter what happens, never doubt that God loves you, – never forget that you have a Friend in heaven. Whenever you have a trouble, just pray to Him, and He will help you. Promise this.”
“Yes, mother.”
“Now lie down by me; I am very, very tired.”
The little boy lay down by his mother; she threw her arms around him, and both sunk to sleep.
CHAPTER VIII.
MISS ASPHYXIA.
“THERE won’t be no great profit in this ‘ere these ten year.”
The object denominated “this ‘ere” was the golden-haired child whom we have spoken of before, – the little girl whose mother lay dying. That mother is dead now; and the thing to be settled is, What is to be done with the children? The morning after the scene we have described looked in at the window and saw the woman, with a pale, placid face, sleeping as one who has found eternal rest, and the two weeping children striving in vain to make her hear.
Old Crab had been up early in his design of “carting the ‘hull lot ever to the poor-house,” but made a solemn pause when his wife drew him into the little chamber. Death has a strange dignity, and whatsoever child of Adam he lays his hand on is for the time ennobled, – removed from the region of the earthly and commonplace to that of the spiritual and mysterious. And when Crab found, by searching the little bundle of the deceased, that there was actually money enough in it to buy a coffin and pay ‘Zekiel Stebbins for digging the grave, he began to look on the woman as having made a respectable and edifying end, and the whole affair as coming to a better issue than he had feared.
And so the event was considered in the neighborhood, in a melancholy way, rather an interesting and auspicious one. It gave something to talk about in a region where exciting topics were remarkably scarce. The Reverend Jabez Periwinkle found in it a moving Providence which started him favorably on a sermon, and the funeral had been quite a windfall to all the gossips about; and now remained the question, What was to be done with the children?
“Now that we are diggin’ the ‘taters,” said old Crab, “that ‘ere chap might be good for suthin’, pickin’ on ’em out o’ the hills. Poor folks like us can’t afford to keep nobody jest to look at, and so he ‘ll have to step spry and work smart to airn his keep.” And so at early dawn, the day after the funeral, the little boy was roused up and carried into the fields with the men.
But “this ‘ere” – that is to say, a beautiful little girl of seven years – had greatly puzzled the heads of the worthy gossips of the neighborhood. Miss Asphyxia Smith, the elder sister of old Crab, was at this moment turning the child round, and examining her through a pair of large horn spectacles, with a view to “taking her to raise,” as she phrased it.
Now all Miss Asphyxia’s ideas of the purpose and aim of human existence were comprised in one word, – work. She was herself a working machine, always wound up and going, – up at early cock-crowing, and busy till bedtime, with a rampant and fatiguing industry that never paused for a moment. She conducted a large farm by the aid of a hired man, and drove a flourishing dairy, and was universally respected in the neighborhood as a smart woman.
Latterly, as her young cousin, who had shared the toils of the house with her, had married and left her, Miss Asphyxia had talked of “takin’ a child from the poor-house, and so raisin’ her own help”; and it was with the view of this “raisin’ her help,” that she was thus turning over and inspecting the little article which we have spoken of.
Apparently she was somewhat puzzled, and rather scandalized that Nature should evidently have expended so much in a merely ornamental way on an article which ought to have been made simply for service. She brushed up a handful of the clustering curls in her large, bony hand, and said, with a sniff, “These ‘ll have to come right off to begin with; gracious me, what a tangle!”
“Mother always brushed them out every day,” said the child.
“And who do you suppose is going to spend an hour every day brushing your hair, Miss Pert?” said Miss Asphyxia. “That ain’t what I take ye for, I tell you. You ‘ve got to learn to work for your living; and you ought to be thankful if I ‘m willing to show you how.”
The little girl did not appear particularly thankful. She bent her soft, pencilled eyebrows in a dark frown, and her great hazel eyes had gathering in them a cloud of sullen gloom. Miss Asphyxia did not mind her frowning, – perhaps did not notice it. She had it settled in her mind, as a first principle, that children never liked anything that was good for them, and that, of course, if she took a child, it would have to be made to come to her by forcible proceedings promptly instituted. So she set her little subject before her by seizing her by her two shoulders and squaring her round and looking in her face, and opened direct conversation with her in the following succinct manner.
“What ‘s your name?”
Then followed a resolved and gloomy silence, as the large bright eyes surveyed, with a sort of defiant glance, the inquisitor.
“Don’t you hear?” said Miss Asphyxia, giving her a shake.
“Don’t be so ha’sh with her,” said the little old woman. “Say, my little dear, tell Miss Asphyxia your name,” she added, taking the child’s hand.
“Eglantine Percival,” said the little girl, turning towards the old woman, as if she disdained to answer the other party in the conversation.
“Wh–a–t?” said Miss Asphyxia. “If there ain’t the beatin’est name ever I heard. Well, I tell you I ain’t got time to fix my mouth to say all that ‘ere every time I want ye, now I tell ye.”
“Mother and Harry called me Tina,” said the child.
“Teny! Well, I should think so,” said Miss Asphyxia. “That showed she ‘d got a grain o’ sense left, anyhow. She ‘s tol’able strong and well-limbed for her age,” added that lady, feeling of the child’s arms and limbs; “her flesh is solid. I think she ‘ll make a strong woman, only put her to work early and keep her at it. I could rub out clothes at the wash-tub afore I was at her age.”
“O, she can do considerable many little chores,” said Old Crab’s wife.
“Yes,” said Miss Asphyxia; “there can a good deal be got out of a child if you keep at ’em, hold ’em in tight, and never let ’em have their head a minute; push right hard on behind ’em, and you get considerable. That’s the way I was raised.”
“But I want to play,” said the little girl, bursting out in a sobbing storm of mingled fear and grief.
“Want to play, do you? Well, you must get over that. Don’t you know that that ‘s as bad as stealing? You have n’t got any money, and if you eat folks’s bread and butter, you ‘ve got to work to pay for it; and if folks buy your clothes, you ‘ve got to work to pay for them.”
“But I ‘ve got some clothes of my own,” persisted the child, determined not to give up her case entirely.
“Well, so you have; but there ain’t no sort of wear in ’em,” said Miss Asphyxia, turning to Mrs. Smith. “Them two dresses o’ hern might answer for Sundays and sich, but I ‘ll have to make ‘er up a regular linsey working dress this fall, and check aprons; and she must set right about knitting every minute she is n’t doing anything else. Did you ever learn how to knit?”
“No,” said the child.
“Or to sew?” said Miss Asphyxia.
“Yes; mother taught me to sew,” said the child.
“No! Yes! Hain’t you learned manners? Do you say yes and no to people?”
The child stood a moment, swelling with suppressed feeling; and at last she opened her great eyes full on Miss Asphyxia, said, “I don’t like you. You ain’t pretty, and I won’t go you.”
“O now,” said Mrs. Smith, “little girls must n’t talk so; that ‘s naughty.”
“Don’t like me? – ain’t I pretty?” said Miss Asphyxia, with a short, grim laugh. “May be I ain’t; but I know what I ‘m about, and you ‘d as goods know it first as last. I ‘m going to take ye right out with me in the waggin, and you ‘d best not have none of your cuttin’s up. I keep a stick at home for naughty girls. Why, where do you suppose you ‘re going to get your livin’ if I don’t take you?”
“I want to live with Harry,” said the child, sobbing. “Where is Harry?”
“Harry ‘s to work, – and there ‘s where he ‘s got to be,” said Miss Asphyxia. “He’s got to work with the men in the fields, and you ‘ve got to come home and work with me.”
“I want to stay with Harry, – Harry takes care of me,” said the child, in a piteous tone.
Old Mother Smith now toddled to her milk-room, and, with a melting heart, brought out a doughnut. “There now, eat that,” she said; “and mebbe, if you ‘re good, Miss Asphyxia will bring you down here some time.”
“O laws, Polly, you allers was a fool!” said Miss Asphyxia. “It’s all for the child’s good, and what ‘s the use of fussin’ on her up? She ‘ll come to it when she knows she ‘s got to. ‘T ain’t no more than I was put to at her age, only the child ‘s been fooled with and babied.”
The little one refused the doughnut, and seemed to gather herself up in silent gloom.
“Come, now, don’t stand sulking; let me put your bonnet on,” said Miss Asphyxia, in a brisk, metallic voice. “I can’t be losin’ the best part of my day with this nonsense!” And forthwith she clawed up the child in her bony grasp, as easily as an eagle might truss a chick-sparrow.
“Be a good little girl, now,” said the little gray woman, who felt a strange swelling and throbbing in her poor old breast. To be sure, she knew she was a fool; her husband had told her so at least three times every day for years; and Miss Asphyxia only confirmed what she accepted familiarly as the truth. But yet she could not help these unprofitable longings to coddle and comfort something, – to do some of those little motherly tendernesses for children which go to no particular result, only to make them happy; so she ran out after the wagon with a tempting seed-cake, and forced it into the child’s hand.
“Take it, do take it,” she said; “eat it, and be a good girl, and do just as she tells you to.”
“I ‘ll see to that.” said Miss Asphyxia. as she gathered up the reins and gave a cut to her horse, which started that quadruped from a dream of green grass into a most animated pace. Every creature in her service – horse, cow, and pig – knew at once the touch of Miss Asphyxia, and the necessity of being up and doing when she was behind them; and the horse, who under other hands would have been the slowest and most reflective of beasts, now made the little wagon spin and bounce over the rough, stony road, so that the child’s short legs flew up in the air every few moments.
“You must hold on tight,” was Miss Asphyxia’s only comment on this circumstance. “If you fall out, you ‘ll break your neck.”
It was a glorious day of early autumn, the sun shining as only an autumn sun knows how to shine. The blue fields of heaven were full of fleecy flocks of clouds, drifting hither and thither at their lazy will. The-golden-rod and the aster hung their plumage over the rough, rocky road; and now and then it wound through a sombre piece of woods, where scarlet sumachs and maples flashed out among the gloomy green hemlocks with a solemn and gorgeous light. So very fair was the day, and so full of life and beauty was the landscape, that the child, who came of a beauty-loving lineage, felt her little heart drawn out from under its burden of troubles, and springing and bounding with that elastic habit of happiness which seems hard to kill in children.
Once she laughed out as a squirrel, with his little chops swelled with a nut on each side, sat upon the fence and looked after them, and then whisked away behind the stone wall; and once she called out, “O, how pretty!” at a splendid clump of blue fringed gentian, which stood holding up its hundred azure vases by the wayside. “O, I do wish I could get some of that!” she cried out, impulsively.
“Some of what?” said Miss Asphyxia.
“O, those beautiful flowers!” said the child, leaning far out to look back.
“O, that ‘s nothing but gentian,” said Miss Asphyxia; “can’t stop for that. Them blows is good to dry for weakness,” she added. “By and by, if you ‘re good, mebbe I ‘ll let you get some on ’em.”
Miss Asphyxia had one word for all flowers. She called them all “blows,” and they were divided in her mind, in a manner far more simple than any botanical system, into two classes; namely, blows that were good to dry, and blows that were not. Elder-blow, catnip, hoarhound, hardhack, gentian, ginseng, and various other vegetable tribes, she knew well and had a great respect for; but all the other little weeds that put on obtrusive colors and flaunted in the summer breeze, without any pretensions to further usefulness, Miss Asphyxia completely ignored. It would not be describing her state to say she had a contempt for them: she simply never saw or thought of them at all. The idea of beauty as connected with any of them never entered her mind – it did not exist there.
The young cousin who shared her housework had, to be sure, planted a few flowers in a corner of the garden; there were some peonies and pinks and a rose-bush, which often occupied a spare hour of the girl’s morning or evening; but Miss Asphyxia watched these operations with a sublime contempt, and only calculated the loss of potatoes and carrots caused by this unproductive beauty. Since the marriage of this girl, Miss Asphyxia had often spoken to her man about “clearing out them things”; but somehow he always managed to forget it, and the thriftless beauties still remained.
It wanted but about an hour of noon when Miss Asphyxia set down the little girl on the clean-scrubbed floor of a great kitchen, where everything was even desolately orderly and neat. She swung her at once into a chair. “Sit there,” she said, “till I ‘m ready to see to ye.” And then, marching up to her own room, she laid aside her bonnet, and, coming down, plunged into active preparations for the dinner.
An irrepressible feeling of desolation came over the child. The elation produced by the ride died away; and, as she sat dangling her heels from the chair, and watching the dry, grim form of Miss Asphyxia, a sort of terror of her began slowly to usurp the place of that courage which had at first inspired the child to rise up against the assertion of so uncongenial a power.
All the strange, dreadful events of the last few days mingled themselves, in her childish mind, in a weird mass of uncomprehended gloom and mystery. Her mother, so changed, – cold, stiff, lifeless, neither smiling nor speaking nor looking at her; the people coming to the house, and talking and singing and praying, and then putting her in a box in the ground, and saying that she was dead; and then, right upon that, to be torn from her brother, to whom she had always looked for protection and counsel, – all this seemed a weird, inexplicable cloud coming over her heart and darkening all her little life. Where was Harry? Why did he let them take her? Or perhaps equally dreadful people had taken him, and would never bring him back again.
There was a tall black clock in a corner of the kitchen, that kept its invariable monotone of tick-tack, tick-tack, with a persistence that made her head swim; and she watched the quick, decisive movements of Miss Asphyxia with somewhat of the same respectful awe with which one watches the course of a locomotive engine.
It was late for Miss Asphyxia’s dinner preparations, but she instituted prompt measures to make up for lost time. She flew about the kitchen with such long-armed activity and fearful celerity, that the child began instinctively to duck and bob her little head when she went by, lest she should hit her and knock her off her chair.
Miss Asphyxia raked open the fire in the great kitchen chimney, and built it up with a liberal supply of wood; then she rattled into the back room, and a sound was heard of a bucket descending into a well with such frantic haste as only an oaken bucket under Miss Asphyxia’s hands could be frightened into. Back she came with a stout black iron tea-kettle, which she hung over the fire; and then, flopping down a ham on the table, she cut off slices with a martial and determined air, as if she would like to see the ham try to help itself; and, before the child could fairly see what she was doing, the slices of ham were in the frying-pan over the coals, the ham hung up in its place, the knife wiped and put out of sight, and the table drawn out into the middle of the floor, and invested with a cloth for dinner.
During these operations the child followed every movement with awe-struck eyes, and studied with trembling attention every feature of this wonderful woman.
Miss Asphyxia was tall and spare. Nature had made her, as she often remarked of herself, entirely for use. She had allowed for her muscles no cushioned repose of fat, no redundant smoothness of outline. There was nothing to her but good, strong, solid bone, and tough, wiry, well-strung muscle. She was past fifty, and her hair was already well streaked with gray, and so thin that, when tightly combed and tied, it still showed bald cracks, not very sightly to the eye. The only thought that Miss Asphyxia ever had had in relation to the coiffure of her hair was that it was to be got out of her way. Hair she considered principally as something that might get into people’s eyes, if not properly attended to; and accordingly, at a very early hour every morning, she tied all hers in a very tight knot, and then secured it by a horn comb on the top of her head. To tie this knot so tightly that, once done, it should last all day, was Miss Asphyxia’s only art of the toilet, and she tried her work every morning by giving her head a shake, before she left her looking-glass, not unlike that of an unruly cow. If this process did not start the horn comb from its moorings, Miss Asphyxia was well pleased. For the rest, her face was dusky and wilted, – guarded by gaunt, high cheek-bones, and watched over by a pair of small gray eyes of unsleeping vigilance. The shaggy eyebrows that overhung them were grizzled, like her hair.
It would not be proper to say that Miss Asphyxia looked ill-tempered; but her features could never, by any stretch of imagination, be supposed to wear an expression of tenderness. They were set in an austere, grim gravity, whose lines had become more deeply channelled by every year of her life. As related to her fellow-creatures, she was neither passionate nor cruel. We have before described her as a working machine, forever wound up to high-pressure working-point; and this being her nature, she trod down and crushed whatever stood in the way of her work, with as little compunction as if she had been a steam-engine or a power-loom.
Miss Asphyxia had a full conviction of what a recent pleasant writer has denominated the total depravity of matter. She was not given to many words, but it might often be gathered from her brief discourses that she had always felt herself, so to speak, sword in hand against a universe where everything was running to disorder, – everything was tending to slackness, shiftlessness, unthrift, and she alone was left on the earth to keep things their places. Her hired men were always too late up in the morning, – always shirking, – always taking too long a nap at noon; everybody was watching to cheat her in every bargain; her horse, cow, pigs, – all her possessions, – were ready at the slightest winking of her eye, or relaxing of her watch, to fall into all sorts of untoward ways and gyrations; and therefore she slept, as it were, in her armor; and spent her life as a sentinel on duty.
In taking a child, she had had her eyes open only to one patent fact, – that a child was an animal who would always be wanting to play, and that she must make all her plans and calculations to keep her from playing. To this end she had beforehand given out word to her brother; that, if she took the girl, the boy must be kept away. “Got enough on my hands now, without havin’ a boy trainin’ round my house, and upsettin’ all creation,” said the grim virgin.
“Wal, wal,” said Old Crab, “‘t ain’t best; they ‘ll be a consultin’ together, and cuttin’ up didos. I ‘ll keep the boy tight enough, I tell you.”
Little enough was the dinner that the child ate that day. There were two hulking, square-shouldered men at the table, who stared at her with great round eyes like oxen; and although Miss Asphyxia dumped down Indian pudding, ham, and fried potatoes before her, the child’s eating was scarcely that of a blackbird.
Marvellous to the little girl was the celerity with which Miss Asphyxia washed and cleared up the dinner-dishes. How the dishes rattled, the knives and forks clinked, as she scraped and piled and washed and wiped and put everything in a trice back into such perfect place, that it looked as if nothing had ever been done on the premises!
After this Miss Asphyxia produced thimble, thread, needle, and scissors, and, drawing out of a closet a bale of coarse blue home-made cloth, proceeded to measure the little girl for a petticoat and short gown of the same. This being done to her mind, she dumped her into a chair beside her, and, putting a brown towel into her hands to be hemmed, she briefly said, “There, keep to work”; while she, with great despatch and resolution, set to work on the little garments aforesaid.
The child once or twice laid down her work to watch the chickens who came up round the door, or to note a bird which flew by with a little ripple of song. The first time, Miss Asphyxia only frowned, and said, “Tut, tut.” The second time, there came three thumps of Miss Asphyxia’s thimble down on the little head, with the admonition, “Mind your work.” The child now began to cry, but Miss Asphyxia soon put an end to that by displaying a long birch rod, with a threatening movement, and saying succinctly, “Stop that, this minute, or I ‘ll whip you.” And the child was so certain of this that she swallowed her grief and stitched away as fast as her little fingers could go.
As soon as supper was over that night, Miss Asphyxia seized upon the child, and, taking her to a tub in the sink-room, proceeded to divest her of her garments and subject her to a most thorough ablution.
“I ‘m goin’ to give you one good scrubbin’ to start with,” said Miss Asphyxia; and, truth to say, no word could more thoroughly express the character of the ablution than the term “scrubbing.” The poor child was deluged with soap and water, in mouth, nose, ears, and eyes, while the great bony hands rubbed and splashed, twisted her arms, turned her ears wrong side out, and dashed on the water with unsparing vigor. Nobody can tell the torture which can be inflicted on a child in one of these vigorous old New England washings, which used to make Saturday night a terror in good families. But whatever they were, the little martyr was by this time so thoroughly impressed with the awful reality of Miss Asphyxia’s power over her, that she endured all with only a few long-drawn and convulsed sighs, and an inaudible “O dear!”
When well scrubbed and wiped, Miss Asphyxia put on a coarse homespun nightgown, and, pinning a cloth round the child’s neck began with her scissors the work of cutting off her hair. Snip, snip, went the fatal shears, and down into the towel fell bright curls, once the pride of a mother’s heart, till finally the small head was despoiled completely. Then Miss Asphyxia, shaking up a bottle of camphor, proceeded to rub some vigorously upon the child’s head. “There,” she said, “that ‘s to keep ye from catchin’ cold.”
She then proceeded to the kitchen, raked open the fire, and shook the golden curls into the bed of embers, and stood grimly over them while they seethed and twisted and writhed, as if they had been living things suffering a fiery torture, meanwhile picking diligently at the cloth that had contained them, that no stray hair might escape.
“I wonder now,” she said to herself, “if any of this will rise and get into the next pudding?” She spoke with a spice of bitterness, poor woman, as if it would be just the way things usually went on, if it did.
She buried the fire carefully, and then, opening the door of a small bedroom adjoining, which displayed a single bed, she said, “Now get into bed.”
The child immediately obeyed, thankful to hide herself under the protecting folds of a blue checked coverlet, and feeling that at last the dreadful Miss Asphyxia would leave her to herself.
Miss Asphyxia clapped to the door, and the child drew a long breath. In a moment, however, the door flew open. Miss Asphyxia had forgotten something. “Can you say your prayers?” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the child.
“Say ’em, then,” said Miss Asphyxia; and bang went the door again.
“There, now, if I hain’t done up my duty to that child, then I don’t know,” said Miss Asphyxia.
CHAPTER IX.
HARRY’S FIRST DAY’S WORK.
IT was the fashion of olden times to consider children only as children pure and simple; not as having any special and individual nature which required special and individual adaptation, but as being simply so many little creatures to be washed, dressed, schooled, fed, and whipped, according to certain general and well-understood rules.
The philosophy of modern society is showing to parents and educators how delicate and how varied is their task; but in the days we speak of nobody had thought of these shadings and variations. It is perhaps true, that in that very primitive and simple state of society there were fewer of those individual peculiarities which are the result of the stimulated brains and nervous systems of modern society.
Be that as it may, the little parish of Needmore saw nothing the fact that two orphan children had fallen into the hands of Crab Smith and his sister, Miss Asphyxia, which appeared to its moral sense as at all unsuitable. To be sure, there was a suppressed shrug of the shoulders at the idea of the little fair-haired, pleasant-mannered boy being given up to Old Crab. People said to each other, with a knowing grin: “That ‘ere boy ‘d have to toe the mark pretty handsome; but then, he might do wus. He ‘d have enough to eat and drink anyhow, and old Ma’am Smith, she ‘d mother him. As to Miss Asphyxia and the girl, why, ‘t was jest the thing. She was jest the hand raise a smart girl.”
In fact, we are not certain that Miss Asphyxia, with a few modifications and fashionable shadings suitable for our modern society, is not, after all, the ideal personage who would get all votes as just the proper person to take charge of an orphan asylum, – would be recommended to widowers with large families as just the woman to bring up their children.
Efficiency has always been, in our New England, the golden calf before which we have fallen down and worshipped. The great granite formation of physical needs and wants that underlies life in a country with a hard soil and a severe climate gives an intensity to our valuation of what pertains to the working of the direct and positive force that controls the physical; and that which can keep in constant order the eating, drinking, and wearing of this mortal body is always asserting itself in every department of life as the true wisdom.
But what, in fact, were the two little children who had been thus seized on and appropriated?
The boy was, as we have described, of a delicate and highly nervous organization, – sensitive, æsthetic, – evidently fitted by nature more for the poet or scholar than for the rough grind of physical toil. There had been superinduced on this temperament a precocious development from the circumstance of his having been made, during the earliest years of his consciousness, the companion of his mother. Nothing unfolds a child faster than being thus taken into the companionship of older minds in the first years of life. He was naturally one of those manly, good-natured, even-tempered children that are the delight of nurses and the staff and stay of mothers. Early responsibility and sorrow, and the religious teachings of his mother, had awakened the spiritual part of his nature to a higher consciousness than usually exists in childhood. There was about him a steady, uncorrupted goodness and faithfulness of nature, a simple, direct truthfulness, and a loyal habit of prompt obedience to elders, which made him one of those children likely, in every position of child-life, to be favorites, and to run a smooth course.
The girl, on the contrary, had in her all the elements of a little bundle of womanhood, born to rule and command in a pure womanly way. She was affectionate, gay, pleasure-loving, self-willed, imperious, intensely fond of approbation, with great stores of fancy, imagination, and an under-heat of undeveloped passion that would, in future life, give warmth and color to all her thoughts, as a volcanic soil is said to brighten the hues of flowers and warm the flavor of grapes. She had, too, that capacity of secretiveness which enabled her to carry out the dictates of a strong will, and an intuitive sense of where to throw a tendril or strike a little fibre of persuasion or coaxing, which comes early to those fair parasites who are to live by climbing upon others, and to draw their hues and sweetness from the warmth of other hearts. The moral and religious faculties were as undeveloped in her as in a squirrel or a robin. She had lived, in fact, between her sorrowing mother and her thoughtful little brother, as a beautiful pet, whose little gladsome ways and gay pranks were the only solace of their poverty. Even the father, in good-natured hours, had caressed her, played with her, told her stories, and allowed all her little audacities and liberties with an indulgence that her brother could not dare to hope for. No service or self-denial had ever been required of her. She had been served, with a delicate and exact care, by both mother and brother.
Such were the two little specimens of mortality which the town Needmore thought well provided for when they were consigned to Crab Smith and Miss Asphyxia.
The first day after the funeral of his mother, the boy had been called up before light in the morning, and been off at sunrise to the fields with the men; but he had gone with a heart of manly enterprise, feeling as if he were beginning life on his own account, and meaning, with straightforward simplicity, to do his best.
He assented to Old Crab’s harsh orders with such obedient submission, and set about the work given him with such a steady, manly patience and good-will, as to win for himself, at the outset, golden opinions from the hired men, and to excite in Old Crab that discontented satisfaction which he felt in an employee in whom he could find nothing to scold. The work of merely picking up the potatoes from the hills which the men opened was so very simple as to give no chance for mistake or failure, and the boy was so cheerful and unintermitting in his work that no fault could be found under that head. He was tired enough, it is true, at night; but, as he rode home in the cart, he solaced himself with the idea that he was beginning to be a man, and that he should work and support his sister, – and he had many things to tell her of the result of his first day’s labor. He wondered that she did not come to meet him as the cart drove up to the house, and his first inquiry, when he saw the friendly old woman, was “Where is Tina?”
“She ‘s gone to live with his sister,” said Mrs. Smith, in an undertone, pointing to her husband in the back yard. “Asphyxia ‘s took her to raise.”
“To what?” said the boy, timidly.
“Why, to fetch her up, – teach her to work,” said the little old woman. “But come, sonny, go wash your hands to the sink. Dear me! why, you ‘ve fairly took the skin off your fingers.”
“I ‘m not much used to work,” said the boy, “but I don’t mind it.” And he washed carefully the little hands, which, sure enough, had the skin somewhat abraded on the finger-ends.
“Do ye good,” said Old Crab. “Must n’t mind that. Can’t have no lily-fingered boys workin’ for me.”
The child had not thought of complaining; but as soon as he was alone with Mrs. Smith, he came to her confidentially and said, “How far is it to where Tina lives?”
“Well, it ‘s the best part of two miles, I calculate.”
“Can’t I go over there to-night and see her?”
“Dear heart! no, you can’t. Why, your little back must ache now, and he ‘ll have you routed up by four o’clock in the morning.”
“I ‘m not so very tired,” said the boy; “but I want to see Tina. If you ‘ll show me the way, I ‘ll go.”
“O, well, you see, they won’t let you,” said the old woman confidentially. “They are a ha’sh pair of ’em, him and Sphyxy are; and they ‘ve settled it that you ain’t to see each other no more, for fear you ‘d get to playin’ and idlin’.”
The blood flushed into the boy’s face, and he breathed short. Something stirred within him, such as makes slavery bitter, as he said, “But that is n’t right. She ‘s my only sister, and my mother told me to take care of her; and I ought to see her sometimes.”
“Lordy massy!” said Goody Smith; “when you ‘re with some folks, it don’t make no difference what ‘s right and what ain’t. You ‘ve jest got to do as ye ken. It won’t do to rile him, I tell you. He ‘s awful, once git his back up.” And Goody Smith shook her little old head mysteriously, and hushed the boy, as she heard her husband’s heavy tread coming in from the barn.
The supper of cold beef and pork, potatoes, turnips, and hard cider, which was now dispensed at the farm-house, was ample for all purposes of satisfying hunger; and the little Harry, tired as he was, ate with a vigorous relish. But his mind was still dwelling on his sister.
After supper was over he followed Goody Smith into her milk-room. “Please do ask him to let me go and see Tina,” he said, persuasively.
“Laws a massy, ye poor dear! ye don’t know the critter. If I ask him to do a thing, he ‘s all the more set agin it. I found out that ‘ere years ago. He never does nothin’ I ask him to. But never mind; some of these days, we ‘ll try and contrive it. When he ‘s gone to mill, I ‘ll speak to the men, and tell ’em to let ye slip off. But then the pester on’t is, there ‘s Sphyxy; she ‘s allers wide awake, and would n’t let a boy come near her house no more than ef he was a bulldog.”
“Why, what harm do boys do?” said the child, to whom this view presented an entirely new idea.
“O, well, she ‘s an old maid, and kind o’ set in her ways; and it ain’t easy gettin’ round Sphyxy; but I ‘ll try and contrive it. Sometimes I can get round ’em, and get something done, when they don’t know nothin’ about it; but it ‘s drefful hard gettin’ things done.”
The view thus presented to the child’s mind of the cowering, deceptive policy in which the poor old woman’s whole married life had been spent gave him much to think of after he had gone to his bedroom.
He sat down on his little, lonely bed, and began trying to comprehend in his own mind the events of the last few days. He recalled his mother’s last conversation with him. All had happened just as she had said. She was gone, just as she had told him, and left him and little Tina alone in the world. Then he remembered his promise, and, kneeling down by his bedside, repeated the simple litany – psalm, prayer, and hymn – which his mother had left him as her only parting gift. The words soothed his little lonesome heart; and he thought what his mother said, – he recalled the look of her dying eyes as she said it, – “Never doubt that God loves you, whatever happens, and, if you have any trouble, pray to him.” Upon this thought, he added to his prayer these words: “O dear Father! they have taken away Tina; and she ‘s a very little girl, and cannot work as I can. Please do take care of Tina, and make them let me go and see her.”
CHAPTER X.
MISS ASPHYXIA’S SYSTEM.
WHEN Miss Asphyxia shut the door finally on little Tina the child began slowly to gather up her faculties from the stunning, benumbing influence of the change which had come over her life.
In former days her father had told her stories of little girls that were carried off to giants’ houses, and there maltreated and dominated over in very dreadful ways; and Miss Asphyxia presented herself to her as one of these giants. She was so terribly strong, the child felt instinctively, in every limb, that there was no getting away from her. Her eyes were so keen and searching, her voice so sharp, all her movements so full of a vigor that might be felt, that any chance of getting the better of her by indirect ways seemed hopelessly small. If she should try to run away to find Harry, she was quite sure that Miss Asphyxia could make a long arm that would reach her before she had gone far; and then what she would do to her was a matter that she dared not think of. Even when she was not meaning to be cross to her, but merely seized and swung her into a chair, she had such a grip that it almost gave pain; and what would it be if she seized her in wrath? No; there was evidently no escape; and, as the thought came over the child, she began to cry, – first sobbing, and then, as her agitation increased, screaming audibly.
Miss Asphyxia opened the door. “Stop that!” she said. “What under the canopy ails ye?”
“I – want – Harry!” said the child.
“Well, you can’t have Harry; and I won’t have ye bawling. Now shut up and go to sleep, or I ‘ll whip you!” And, with that, Miss Asphyxia turned down the bedclothes with a resolute hand.
“I will be good, – I will stop,” said the child, in mortal terror compressing the sobs that seemed to tear her little frame.
Miss Asphyxia waited a moment, and then, going out, shut the door, and went on making up the child’s stuff gown outside.
“That ‘ere ‘s goin’ to be a regular limb,” she said; “but I must begin as I ‘m goin’ to go on with her, and mebbe she ‘ll amount to suthin’ by and by. A child ‘s pretty much dead loss the first three or four years; but after that they more ‘n pay, if they ‘re fetched up right.”
“Mebbe that ‘ere child ‘s lonesome,” said Sol Peters, Miss Asphyxia’s hired man, who sat in the kitchen corner, putting in a new hoe-handle.
“Lonesome!” said Miss Asphyxia, with a sniff of contempt.
“All sorts of young critters is,” said Sol, undismayed by this sniff “Puppies is. ‘member how our Spot yelped when I fust got him? Kept me ‘wake the biggest part of one night. And kittens mews when ye take ’em from the cats. Ye see they ‘s used to other critters; and it ‘s sort o’ cold like, bein’ alone is.”
“Well, she ‘ll have to get used to it, anyhow,” said Miss Asphyxia. “I guess ‘t won’t kill her. Ef a child has enough to eat and drink, and plenty of clothes, and somebody to take care of ’em, they ain’t very bad off, if they be lonesome.”
Sol, though a big-fisted, hard-handed fellow, had still rather a soft spot under his jacket in favor of all young, defenceless animals, and the sound of the little girl’s cry had gone right to this spot. So he still revolved the subject, as he leisurely turned and scraped with a bit of broken glass the hoe-handle that he was elaborating. After a considerable pause, he shut up one eye, looked along his hoe-handle at Miss Asphyxia, as if he were taking aim, and remarked, “That ‘ere boy ‘s a nice, stiddy little chap; and mebbe, if he could come down here once and a while after work-hours, ‘t would kind o’ reconcile her.”
“I tell you what, Solomon Peters,” said Miss Asphyxia, “I ‘d jest as soon have the great red dragon in the Revelations a comin’ down on my house as a boy! Ef I don’t work hard enough now, I ‘d like to know, without havin’ a boy raound raisin’ gineral Cain. Don’t tell me! I ‘ll find work enough to keep that ‘ere child from bein’ lonesome. Lonesome! – there did n’t nobody think of no such things when I was little. I was jest put right along, and no remarks made; and was made to mind when I was spoken to, and to take things as they come. O, I ‘ll find her work enough to keep her mind occupied, I promise ye.”
Sol did not in the least doubt that, for Miss Asphyxia’s reputation in the region was perfectly established. She was spoken of with applause under such titles as “a staver,” “a pealer,” “a roarer to work”; and Sol himself had an awful sense of responsibility to her in this regard. He had arrived at something of a late era in single life, and had sometimes been sportively jogged by his associates, at the village store, as to his opportunity of becoming master of Miss Asphyxia’s person and property by matrimonial overtures; to all which he summarily responded by declaring that “a hoss might as soon go a courtin’ to the hoss-whip as he court Miss Sphyxy.” As to Miss Asphyxia, when rallied on the same subject, she expressed her views of the matrimonial estate in a sentence more terse and vigorous than elegant, – that “she knew t’ much to put her nose into hot swill.” Queen Elizabeth might have expressed her mind in a more courtly way, but certainly with no more decision.
The little head and heart in the next room were full of the rudiments of thoughts, desires, feelings, imaginations, and passions which either had never lived in Miss Asphyxia’s nature, or had died so long ago that not a trace or memory of them was left. If she had had even the dawnings of certain traits and properties, she might have doubted of her ability to bring up a child; but she had not.
Yet Miss Asphyxia’s faults in this respect were not so widely different from the practice of the hard, rustic inhabitants of Needmore as to have prevented her getting employment as a district-school teacher for several terms, when she was about twenty years of age. She was held to be a “smart,” economical teacher, inasmuch as she was able to hold the winter term, and thrash the very biggest boys, and, while she did the duty of a man, received only the wages of a woman, – a recommendation in female qualification which has not ceased to be available in our modern days. Gradually, by incredible industries, by a faculty of pinching, saving, and accumulating hard to conceive of, Miss Asphyxia had laid up money till she had actually come to be the possessor of a small but neat house, and a farm and dairy in excellent condition; and she regarded herself, therefore, and was regarded by others, as a model for imitation. Did she have the least doubt that she was eminently fitted to bring up a girl? I trow not.
Miss Asphyxia, in her early childhood, had been taken to raise in the same manner that she had taken this child. She had been trained to early rising, and constant, hard, unintermitted work, without thought of respite or amusement. During certain seasons of the year she had been sent to the district school, where, always energetic in whatever she took in hand, she always stood at the head of the school in the few arts of scholarship in those days taught. She could write a good, round hand; she could cipher with quickness and adroitness; she had learned by heart all the rules of Murray’s Grammar, notwithstanding the fact that, from the habits of early childhood, she habitually set at naught every one of them in her daily conversation, – always strengthening all her denials with those good, hearty double negatives which help out French and Italian sentences, and are unjustly denied to the purists in genteel English. How much of the droll quaintness of Yankee dialect comes from the stumbling of human nature into these racy mistakes will never be known.
Perhaps my readers may have turned over a great, flat stone some time in their rural rambles, and found under it little clovers and tufts of grass pressed to earth, flat, white, and bloodless but still growing, stretching, creeping towards the edges, where their plant instinct tells them there is light and deliverance. The kind of life that the little Tina led, under the care of Miss Asphyxia, resembled that of these poor clovers. It was all shut down and repressed, but growing still. She was roused at the first glimmer of early dawn, dressing herself in the dark, and, coming out, set the table for breakfast. From that time through the day, one task followed another in immediate succession, with the sense of the ever-driving Miss Asphyxia behind her.
Once, in the course of her labors, she let fall a saucer, while Miss Asphyxia, by good fortune, was out of the room. To tell of her mischance, and expose herself to the awful consequences of her anger, was more than her childish courage was equal to; and, with a quick adroitness, she slipped the broken fragments in a crevice between the kitchen doorstep and the house, and endeavored to look as if nothing had occurred. Alas! she had not counted on Miss Asphyxia’s unsleeping vigilance of hearing. She was down stairs in a trice.
“What have you been breaking?”
“Nothing, ma’am,” was the trembling response.
“Don’t tell me! I heard something fall.”
“I think it must have been the tongs,” said the little girl, – not over-wise or ingenious in her subterfuge.
“Tongs!likely story,” said Miss Asphyxia, keenly running her eye over the cups and saucers.
“One, two, – here ‘s one of the saucers gone. What have you done with it?”
The child, now desperate with fear, saw no refuge but in persistent denial, till Miss Asphyxia, seizing her, threatened immediate whipping if she did not at once confess.
“I dropped a saucer,” at last said the frightened child.
“You did, you little slut?” said Miss Asphyxia, administering a box on her ear. “Where is it? what have you done with the pieces?”
“I dropped them down by the doorstep,” said the sobbing culprit.
Miss Asphyxia soon fished them up, and held them up in awful judgment. “You ‘ve been telling me a lie, – a naughty, wicked lie,” she said. “I ‘ll soon cure you of lying. I ‘ll scour your mouth out for you.” And forthwith, taking a rag with some soap and sand, she grasped the child’s head under her arm, and rubbed the harsh mixture through her mouth with a vengeful energy. “There, now, see if you ‘ll tell me another lie,” said she, pushing her from her. “Don’t you know where liars go to, you naughty, wicked girl? ‘All liars shall have their part in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.’ – that ‘s what the Bible says; and you may thank me for keeping you from going there. Now go and get up the potatoes and wash ’em, and don t let me get another lie out of your mouth as long as you live.”
There was a burning sense of shame – a smothered fury of resentment – in the child’s breast, and, as she took the basket, she felt as if she would have liked to do some mischief to Miss Asphyxia. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she said to herself when she got into the cellar, and fairly out of hearing. “I hate you, and when I get to be a woman, I ‘ll pay you for all this.”
Miss Asphyxia, however, went on her way, in the testimony of a good conscience. She felt that she had been equal to the emergency, and had met a crisis in the most thorough and effectual manner.
The teachers of district schools in those days often displayed a singular ingenuity in the invention of punishments by which the different vices of childhood should be repressed; and Miss Asphyxia’s housewifely confidence in soap and sand as a means of purification had suggested to her this expedient in her school teaching days. “You can break any child o’ lying, right off short,” she was wont to say. “Jest scour their mouths out with soap and sand. They never want to try it more ‘n once or twice, I tell you.”
The intervals which the child had for play were, in Miss Asphyxia’s calendar, few and far between. Sometimes, when she had some domestic responsibility on her mind which made the watching of the child a burden to her, she would say to her, “You may go and play till I call you,” or, “You may play for half an hour; but you must n’t go out of the yard.”
Then the child, alone, companionless, without playthings, sought to appropriate to herself some little treasures and possessions for the instituting of that fairy world of imagination which belongs to childhood. She sighed for a doll that had once belonged to her in the days when she had a mother, but which Miss Asphyxia had contemptuously tossed aside in making up her bundle.
Left thus to her own resources, the child yet showed the unquenchable love of beauty, and the power of creating and gilding an imaginary little world, which is the birthright of childhood. She had her small store of what she had been wont to call pretty things, – a broken teapot handle, a fragment of colored glass, part of a goblet that had once belonged to Miss Asphyxia’s treasures, one or two smooth pebbles, and some red berries from a wild rose-bush. These were the darlings, the dear delights of her heart, – hoarded in secret places, gazed on by stealth, taken out and arranged and re-arranged, during the brief half-hours, or hours when Miss Asphyxia allowed her to play. To these treasures the kindly Sol added another; for one day, when Miss Asphyxia was not looking, he drew from his vest-pocket a couple of milkweed pods, and said, “Them ‘s putty, – mebbe ye ‘d like ’em; hide ’em up, though, or she ‘ll sweep ’em into the fire.”
No gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls ever made bright eyes open wider than did the exploring the contents of these pods. It was silk and silver, fairy-spun glass, – something so bright and soft that it really seemed dear to her; and she took the shining silk fringes out and caressed them against her cheek, and wrapped them in a little bit of paper, and put them in her bosom. They felt so soft and downy, – they were so shining and bright, – and they were her own, – Sol had given them to her. She meditated upon them as possessions of mysterious beauty and unknown value. Unfortunately, one day Miss Asphyxia discovered her gazing upon this treasure by stealth during her working hours.
“What have you got there?” she said. “Bring it to me.”
The child reluctantly placed her treasure in the great bony claw.
“Why, that ‘s milkweed silk,” said Miss Asphyxia. “‘T ain’t good for nothin’ .What you doing with that?”
“I like it because it ‘s pretty.”
“Fiddlestick!” said Miss Asphyxia, giving it a contemptuous toss. “I can’t have you making litter with such stuff round the house. Throw it in the fire.”
To do Miss Asphyxia justice, she would never have issued this order if she had had the remotest conception how dear this apparent trash was to the hopeless little heart.
The child hesitated, and held her treasure firmly. Her breast heaved, and there was a desperate glare in her soft hazel eyes.
“Throw it in the fire,” said Miss Asphyxia, stamping her foot, as she thought she saw risings of insubordination.
The child threw it in, and saw her dear, beautiful treasure slowly consumed, with a swelling and indignant heart. She was now sure that Miss Asphyxia hated her, and only sought occasion to torment her.
Miss Asphyxia did not hate the child, nor did she love her. She regarded her exactly as she did her broom and her rolling-pin and her spinning-wheel, – as an implement or instrument which she was to fashion to her uses. She had a general idea, too, of certain duties to her as a human being, which she expressed by the phrase, “doing right by her,” – that is, to feed and clothe and teach her. In fact, Miss Asphyxia believed fully in the golden rule of doing as she would be done by; but if a lioness should do to a young lamb exactly as she would be done by, it might be all the worse for the lamb.