Two years and more had pa.s.sed since the New Year"s dance at the Rushleighs".
The crisis of "57 and "58 was approaching its culmination. The great earthquake that for months had been making itself heard afar off by its portentous rumbling was heaving to the final crash. Already the weaker houses had fallen and were forgotten.
When a great financial trouble sweeps down upon a people, there are three general cla.s.ses who receive and feel it, each in its own peculiar way.
There are the great capitalists--the enormously rich--who, unless a tremendous combination of adversities shall utterly ruin here and there one, grow the richer yet for the calamities of their neighbors. There are also the very poor, who have nothing to lose but their daily labor and their daily bread--who may suffer and starve; but who, if by any little saving of a better time they can manage just to buy bread, shall be precisely where they were, practically, when the storm shall have blown over. Between these lies the great middle cla.s.s--among whom, as on the middle ground, the world"s great battle is continually waging--of persons who are neither rich nor poor; who have neither secured fortunes to fall back upon, nor yet the independence of their hands to turn to, when business and its income fail. This is the cla.s.s that suffers most. Most keenly in apprehension, in mortification, in after privation.
Of this cla.s.s was the Gartney family.
Mr. Gartney was growing pale and thin. No wonder; with sleepless nights, and hara.s.sed days, and forgotten, or unrelished meals. His wife watched him and waited for him, and contrived special comforts for him, and listened to his confidences.
Faith felt that there was a cloud upon the house, and knew that it had to do with money. So she hid her own little wants as long as she could, wore her old ribbons, mended last year"s discarded gloves, and yearned vaguely and helplessly to do something--some great thing if she only could, that might remedy or help.
Once, she thought she would learn Stenography. She had heard somebody speak one day of the great pay a lady shorthand writer had received at Washington, for some Congressional reports. Why shouldn"t she learn how to do it, and if the terrible worst should ever come to the worst, make known her secret resource, and earn enough for all the family?
Something like this--some "high and holy work of love"--she longed to do. Longed almost--if she were once prepared and certain of herself--for even misfortune that should justify and make practicable her generous purpose.
She got an elementary book, and set to work, by herself. She toiled wearily, every day, for nearly a month; despairing at every step, yet persevering; for, beside the grand dream for the future, there was a present fascination in the queer little scrawls and dots.
It cannot be known how long she might have gone on with the attempt, if her mother had not come to her one day with some parcels of cut-out cotton cloth.
"Faithie, dear," said she, deprecatingly, "I don"t like to put such work upon you while you go to school; but I ought not to afford to have Miss McElroy this spring. Can"t you make up some of these with me?"
There were articles of clothing for Faith, herself. She felt the present duty upon her; and how could she rebel? Yet what was to become of the great scheme?
By and by would come vacation, and in the following spring, at farthest, she would leave school, and then--she would see. She would write a book, maybe. Why not? And secretly dispose of it, for a large sum, to some self-regardless publisher. Should there never be another f.a.n.n.y Burney?
Not a novel, though, or any grown-up book, at first; but a juvenile, at least, she could surely venture on. Look at all the Cousin Maries, and Aunt Fannies, and Sister Alices, whose productions piled the booksellers" counters during the holiday sales, and found their way, sooner or later, into all the nurseries, and children"s bookcases! And think of all the stories she had invented to amuse Hendie with! Better than some of these printed ones, she was quite sure, if only she could set them down just as she had spoken them under the inspiration of Hendie"s eager eyes and ready glee.
She made two or three beginnings, during the summer holidays, but always came to some sort of a "sticking place," which couldn"t be hobbled over in print as in verbal relation. All the links must be apparent, and everything be made to hold well together. She wouldn"t have known what they were, if you had asked her--but the "unities" troubled her. And then the labor loomed up so large before her! She counted the lines in a page of a book of the ordinary juvenile size, and the number of letters in a line, and found out the wonderful compression of which ma.n.u.script is capable. And there must be two hundred pages, at least, to make a book of tolerable size.
There seemed to be nothing in the world that she could do. She could not give her time to charity, and go about among the poor. She had nothing to help them with. Her father gave, already, to ceaseless applications, more than he could positively spare. So every now and then she relinquished in discouragement her aspirations, and lived on, from day to day, as other girls did, getting what pleasure she could; hampered continually, however, with the old, inevitable tether, of "can"t afford."
"If something only would happen!" If some new circ.u.mstance would creep into her life, and open the way for a more real living!
Do you think girls of seventeen don"t have thoughts and longings like these? I tell you they do; and it isn"t that they want to have anybody else meet with misfortune, or die, that romantic combinations may thereby result to them; or that they are in haste to enact the everyday romance--to secure a lover--get married--and set up a life of their own; it is that the ordinary marked-out bound of civilized young-lady existence is so utterly inadequate to the fresh, vigorous, expanding nature, with its n.o.ble hopes, and its apprehension of limitless possibilities.
Something did happen.
Winter came on again. After a twelvemonth of struggle and pain such as none but a hara.s.sed man of business can ever know or imagine, Mr.
Gartney found himself "out of the wood."
He had survived the shock--his last mote was taken up--he had labored through--and that was all. He was like a man from off a wreck, who has brought away nothing but his life.
He came home one morning from New York, whither he had been to attend a meeting of creditors of a failed firm, and went straight to his chamber with a raging headache.
The next day, the physician"s chaise was at the door, and on the landing, where Mrs. Gartney stood, pale and anxious, gazing into his face for a word, after the visit to the sick room was over, Dr. Gracie drew on his gloves, and said to her, with one foot on the stair: "Symptoms of typhoid. Keep him absolutely quiet."
CHAPTER VIII.
A NICHE IN LIFE, AND A WOMAN TO FILL IT.
"A Traveller between Life and Death."
WORDSWORTH.
Miss Sampson was at home this evening. It was not what one would have pictured to oneself as a scene of home comfort or enjoyment; but Miss Sampson was at home. In her little room of fourteen feet square, up a dismal flight of stairs, sitting, in the light of a single lamp, by her air-tight stove, whereon a cup of tea was keeping warm; that, and the open newspaper on the little table in the corner, being the only things in any way cheery about her.
Not even a cat or a canary bird had she for companionship. There was no cozy arrangement for daily feminine employment; no workbasket, or litter of spools and tapes; nothing to indicate what might be her daily way of going on. On the broad ledges of the windows, where any other woman would have had a plant or two, there was no array of geraniums or verbenas--not even a seedling orange tree or a monthly rose. But in one of them lay a plaid shawl and a carpet bag, and in the other that peculiar and nearly obsolete piece of feminine property, a paper bandbox, tied about with tape.
Packed up for a journey?
Reader, Miss Sampson was _always_ packed up. She was that much-enduring, all-foregoing creature, a professional nurse.
There would have been no one to feed a cat, or a canary bird, or to water a rose bush, if she had had one. Her home was no more to her than his station at the corner of the street is to the handcart man or the hackney coachman. It was only the place where she might receive orders; whence she might go forth to the toilsomeness and gloom of one sick room after another, returning between each sally and the next to her cheerless post of waiting--keeping her strength for others, and living no life of her own.
There was nothing in Miss Sampson"s outer woman that would give you, at first glance, an idea of her real energy and peculiar force of character. She was a tall and slender figure, with no superfluous weight of flesh; and her long, thin arms seemed to have grown long and wiry with lifting, and easing, and winding about the poor wrecks of mortality that had lost their own vigor, and were fain to beg a portion of hers.
Her face was thin and rigid, too--molded to no mere graces of expression--but with a strong outline, and a habitual compression about the mouth that told you, when you had once learned somewhat of its meaning, of the firm will that would go straight forward to its object, and do, without parade or delay, whatever there might be to be done.
Decision, determination, judgment, and readiness were all in that habitual look of a face on which little else had been called out for years. But you would not so have read it at first sight. You would almost inevitably have called her a "scrawny, sour-looking old maid."
A creaking step was heard upon the stair, and then a knock of decision at Miss Sampson"s door.
"Come in!"
And as she spoke, Miss Sampson took her cup and saucer in her hand. That was to be kept waiting no longer for whatever visitor it might chance to be. She was taking her first sip as Dr. Gracier entered.
"Don"t move, Miss Sampson; don"t let me interrupt."
"I don"t mean to! What sends you here?"
"A new patient."
"Humph! Not one of the last sort, I hope. You know my kind, and "tain"t any use talking up about any others. Any old woman can make gruel, and feed a baby with catnip tea. Don"t offer me any more such work as that!
If it"s work that _is_ work, speak out!"
"It"s work that n.o.body else can do for me. A critical case of typhoid, and n.o.body in the house that understands such illness. I"ve promised to bring you."
"You knew I was back, then?"
"I knew you would be. I only sent you at the pinch. I warned them you"d go as soon as things were tolerably comfortable."
"Of course I would. What business should I have where there was nothing wanted of me but to go to bed at nine o"clock, and sleep till daylight?
That ain"t the sort of corner I was cut out to fill."
"Well, drink your tea, and put on your bonnet. There"s a carriage at the door."
"Man? or woman?" asked Miss Sampson.