"Yes, ma"am," replied Grannie solemnly; "it is the hand that has brought me here. I was good at needlework in my day, ma"am, but "twas writing as did it."
"Writing! did you write much?" asked the matron.
"No, ma"am, only twice a year at the most, but even them two letters cost me sore; they brought on a disease in the hand; it is called writers" cramp. It is an awful complaint, and it has brought me here, ma"am."
The labor matron looked very hard at Grannie. She did not understand her words, nor the expression on her brave face. Grannie by no means wore the helpless air which characterizes most old women when they come to the workhouse.
"Well," she said, after a pause, "hurry with your bath; you needn"t have another for a fortnight; but once a fortnight you must wash here.
At your age, and with your hand so bad, you won"t be expected to do any manual work at all."
"I"d rayther, ef you please, ma"am," said Grannie. "I"m not accustomed to settin" idle."
"Well, I don"t see that you can do anything; that hand is quite past all use, but perhaps the doctor will take a look at it to-morrow. Now get through that bath, and I"ll take you to the room where the other old women are."
"Good Lord, keep me from thinkin" o" the past," said Grannie when the door closed behind her.
She got through the bath and put on her workhouse dress, and felt, with a chill all through her little frame, that she had pa.s.sed suddenly from life to death. The matron came presently to fetch her.
"This way, please," she said, in a tart voice. She had treated Grannie with just a shadow of respect as long as she wore her own nice and dainty clothes, but now that she was in the workhouse garb, she looked like any other bowed down little woman. She belonged, in short, to the failures of life. She was hurried down one or two long pa.s.sages, then through a big room, empty at present, which the matron briefly told her was the "Able-bodied Women"s Ward," and then into another very large room, where a bright fire burnt, and where several women, perhaps fifty or sixty, were seated on benches, doing some light jobs of needlework, or pretending to read, or openly dozing away their time. They were all dressed just like Grannie, and took little or no notice when she came in. She was only one more failure, to join the failures in the room.
These old women were all half dead, and another old woman was coming to share their living grave. The matron said something hastily, and shut the door behind her. Grannie looked round; an almost wild light lit up her blue eyes for a moment, then it died out, and she went softly and quietly across the room.
"Ef you are cold, ma"am, perhaps you"ll like to set by the fire," said an old body who must have been at least ten years Grannie"s senior.
"Thank you, ma"am, I"ll be much obleeged," said Grannie, and she sat down.
Her bath had, through some neglect, not been properly heated; it had chilled her, and all of a sudden she felt tired, old, and feeble, and a long shiver ran down her back. She held out her left hand to the blaze. A few of the most active of the women approached slowly, and either stood and looked at her, or sat down as near her as possible.
She had very lately come from life; they were most of them accustomed to death. Their hearts were feebly stirred with a kind of dim interest, but the life such as Grannie knew was dull and far off to them.
"This is a poor sort of place, ma"am," said one of them.
Grannie roused herself with a great effort.
"Ef I begin to grumble I am lost," she said stoutly to herself. "Well, now, it seems to me a fine airy room," she said. "It is all as it strikes a body, o" course," she added, very politely; "but the room seems to me lofty."
"You aint been here long, anybody can see that," said an old woman of the name of Peters, with a sniff. "Wait till you live here day after day, with nothin" to do, and nothin" to think of, and nothin" to hear, and nothin" to read, and, you may say, nothin" to eat."
"Dear me," said Grannie, "don"t they give us our meals?"
"Ef you like to _call_ "em such," said Mrs. Peters, with a sniff. And all the other women sniffed too. And when Mrs. Peters emphasized her condemnation of the food with a groan, all the other old women groaned in concert.
Grannie looked at them, and felt that she had crossed an impa.s.sable gulf. Never again could she be the Grannie she had been when she awoke that morning.
CHAPTER XIV.
It was bitterly cold weather when Grannie arrived at the workhouse.
Not that the workhouse itself was really cold. Its sanitary arrangements were as far as possible perfect; its heating arrangements were also fairly good. Notwithstanding the other old women"s groans, the food was pa.s.sable and even nourishing, and beyond the fact that there was an absence of hope over everything, there were no real hardships in the great Beverley workhouse. There were a good many old women in this workhouse--in fact, two large wards full--and these were perhaps the most melancholy parts of the establishment. They slept on clean little narrow beds in a huge ward upstairs. There was a part.i.tion about eight feet high down the middle of this room. Beds stood in rows, back to back, at each side of this part.i.tion; beds stood in rows along the walls; there were narrow pa.s.sages between the long rows of beds. The room was lighted with many windows high up in the walls, and there was a huge fireplace at either end. By a curious arrangement, which could scarcely be considered indulgent, the fires in very cold weather were lit at nine o"clock in the morning, after the paupers had gone downstairs, and put out again at five in the afternoon. Why the old creatures might not have had the comfort of the fires when they were in their ward, it was difficult to say, but such was the rule of the place.
Grannie"s bed was just under one of the windows, and when she went upstairs the first night, the chill, of which she had complained ever since she had taken her bath, kept her awake during the greater part of the hours of darkness. There were plenty of blankets on her little bed, but they did not seem to warm her. The fact is, there was a great chill at her heart itself. Her vitality was suddenly lowered; she was afraid of the long dreary future; afraid of all those hopeless old women; afraid of the severe cleanliness, the life hedged in with innumerable rules, the dinginess of the new existence. Her faith burned dim; her trust in G.o.d himself was even a little shaken. She wondered why such a severe punishment was sent to her; why she, who wrote so little, should get a disease brought on by writing. It seemed all incomprehensible, unfathomable, too dark for any ordinary words, or any ordinary consolation to reach.
For the first time in her life she forgot her grandchildren, and the invariable good luck of the family, and thought mostly about herself.
Toward morning she fell into a troubled doze, but she had scarcely seemed to drop asleep before a great bell sounded, which summoned her to rise. It was just six o"clock, and, at this time of the year, pitch dark. The long ward was now bitterly cold, and Grannie shivered as she got into her ugly workhouse dress. The other old women rose from their hard beds with many "ughs" and groans, and undercurrents of grumbling.
Grannie was much too proud to complain. They were all dressed by five-and-twenty past six, and then they went downstairs in melancholy procession, and entered the dining-hall, where their breakfast, consisting of tea, bread and margarine, was served to them. When breakfast was over they went upstairs to the ground floor, and Grannie found herself again in the ward into which she had been introduced the night before.
The women who could work got out their needlework, and began to perform their allotted tasks in a very perfunctory manner. Grannie"s fingers quite longed and ached for something to do. She was sent for presently to see the doctor, who examined her hand, said it would never be of any use again, ordered a simple liniment, and dismissed her. As Grannie was returning from this visit, she met the labor matron in one of the corridors.
"I wish you would give me something to do," she said suddenly.
"Well, what can you do?" asked the matron. "Has the doctor seen your hand?"
"Yes."
"And what does he say to it?"
"He says it will never be any better."
"Never be any better!" The labor matron fixed Grannie with two rather indignant eyes. "And what are you wasting my time for, asking for work, when you know you can"t do it?"
"Oh, yes; I think I can, ma"am--that is, with the left hand. I cannot do needlework, perhaps, but I could dust and tidy, and even polish a bit. I have always been very industrious, ma"am, and it goes sore agen the grain to do nothin"."
"Industrious indeed!" muttered the matron. "If you had been industrious and careful, you wouldn"t have found your way here. No, there is no work for you, as far as I can see. Some of the able-bodied women do out the old women"s ward; it would never do to trust it to an incapable like yourself. There, I can"t waste any more time with you."
The matron hurried away, and Grannie went back to her seat by the fire, in the company of the other old women. They were curious to know what the doctor had said to her, and when she told them they shook their heads and groaned, and said they all knew that would be the case.
"No one _h_advanced in life gets better here," said Mrs. Peters; "and you are _h_advanced in life, aint you, ma"am?"
"Not so very," replied Grannie indignantly. She felt quite young beside most of the other old paupers.
"Well now, I calc"late you"re close on eighty," said Mrs. Peters.
"Indeed, you are mistook," replied Grannie. "I aint seventy yet. I"m jest at the age when it is no expense at all to live, so to speak. I were sixty-eight last November, and no one can call that old. At least not to say very old."
"You look seventy-eight at the very least," said most of the women.
They nodded and gave Grannie some solemn, queer glances. They all saw a change in her which she did not know anything about herself. She had aged quite ten years since yesterday.
The one variety in the old women"s lives was their meals. Dinner came at half-past twelve, and supper at six. All the huge old family went up to bed sharp at eight. There could not possibly be a more dreary life than theirs. As the days pa.s.sed on, Grannie recovered from her first sense of chill and misery, and a certain portion of her brave spirit returned. It was one of the rules of the workhouse that the pauper women of over sixty might go out every Sunday from half-past twelve to six. They might also go out for the same number of hours on Thursday. Those who were in sufficiently good health always availed themselves of this outing, and Grannie herself looked forward quite eagerly to Sunday. She scarcely slept on Sat.u.r.day night for thinking of this time of freedom. She had obtained permission to wear her own neat dress, and she put it on with untold pride and satisfaction on this Sunday morning. Once again some of the spirit of the Simpsons and Phippses came into her. She left the workhouse quite gayly.
"I feel young again," she murmured to herself as she heard the ugly gates clang behind her.
She walked down the road briskly, took an omnibus, and by and by found herself at Bayswater. She had asked Alison to wait in for her, telling the girl that she might be able to pay her a little visit on Sunday.
When she rang, therefore, the servants" bell at Mrs. Faulkner"s beautiful house, Alison herself opened the door.
Alison looked handsomer than ever in her neat lady"s-maid costume.
"Oh, Grannie," she exclaimed. "It is good for sore eyes to see you.
Come in, come in. You can"t think how kind Mrs. Faulkner is. She says I"m to have you all to myself, and you are to stay to dinner, and David is here; and the housekeeper (I have been telling the housekeeper a lot about you, Grannie) has given us her little parlor to dine in, and Mrs.