_ CHAPTER XIII. THE BOUGH BREAKS
By some trivial chance, she hardly knew what, Mary found herself one day conversing at her own door with the woman whom she and her husband had once smiled at for walking the moonlit street with her hand in willing and undisguised captivity. She was a large and strong, but extremely neat, well-spoken, and good-looking Irish woman, who might have seemed at ease but for a faintly betrayed ambition.
She praised with rather ornate English the good appearance and convenient smallness of Mary's house; said her own was the same size. That person with whom she sometimes passed "of a Sundeh"--yes, and moonlight evenings--that was her husband. He was "ferst ingineeur" on a steam-boat. There was a little, just discernible waggle in her head as she stated things. It gave her decided character.
"Ah! engineer," said Mary.
"_Ferst_ ingineeur," repeated the woman; "you know there bees ferst ingineeurs, an' secon' ingineeurs, an' therd ingineeurs. Yes." She unconsciously fanned herself with a dust-pan that she had just bought from a tin peddler.
She lived only some two or three hundred yards away, around the corner, in a tidy little cottage snuggled in among larger houses in Coliseum street. She had had children, but she had lost them; and Mary's sympathy when she told her of them--the girl and two boys--won the woman as much as the little lady's pretty manners had dazed her. It was not long before she began to drop in upon Mary in the hour of twilight, and sit through it without speaking often, or making herself especially interesting in any way, but finding it pleasant, notwithstanding.
"John," said Mary,--her husband had come in unexpectedly,--"our neighbor, Mrs. Riley."
John's bow was rather formal, and Mrs. Riley soon rose and said good-evening.
"John," said the wife again, laying her hands on his shoulders as she tiptoed to kiss him, "what troubles you?" Then she attempted a rallying manner: "Don't my friends suit you?"
He hesitated only an instant, and said:--
"Oh, yes, that's all right!"
"Well, then, I don't see why you look so."
"I've finished the task I was to do."
"What! you haven't"--
"I'm out of employment."
They went and sat down on the little hair-cloth sofa that Mrs. Riley had just left.
"I thought they said they would have other work for you."
"They said they might have; but it seems they haven't."
"And it's just in the opening of summer, too," said Mary; "why, what right"--
"Oh!"--a despairing gesture and averted gaze--"they've a perfect right if they think best. I asked them that myself at first--not too politely, either; but I soon saw I was wrong."
They sat without speaking until it had grown quite dark. Then John said, with a long breath, as he rose:--
"It passes my comprehension."
"What passes it?" asked Mary, detaining him by one hand.
"The reason why we are so pursued by misfortunes."
"But, John," she said, still holding him, "_is_ it misfortune? When I know so well that you deserve to succeed, I think maybe it's good fortune in disguise, after all. Don't you think it's possible? You remember how it was last time, when A., B., & Co. failed. Maybe the best of all is to come now!" She beamed with courage. "Why, John, it seems to me I'd just go in the very best of spirits, the first thing to-morrow, and tell Dr. Sevier you are looking for work. Don't you think it might"--
"I've been there."
"Have you? What did he say?"
"He wasn't in."
* * *
There was another neighbor, with whom John and Mary did not get acquainted. Not that it was more his fault than theirs; it may have been less. Unfortunately for the Richlings there was in their dwelling no toddling, self-appointed child commissioner to find his way in unwatched moments to the play-ground of some other toddler, and so plant the good seed of neighbor acquaintanceship.
This neighbor passed four times a day. A man of fortune, aged a hale sixty or so, who came and stood on the corner, and sometimes even rested a foot on Mary's door-step, waiting for the Prytania omnibus, and who, on his returns, got down from the omnibus step a little gingerly, went by Mary's house, and presently shut himself inside a very ornamental iron gate, a short way up St. Mary street. A child would have made him acquainted. Even as it was, they did not escape his silent notice. It was pleasant for him, from whose life the early dew had been dried away by a well-risen sun, to recall its former freshness by glimpses of this pair of young beginners. It was like having a bird's nest under his window.
John, stepping backward from his door one day, saying a last word to his wife, who stood on the threshold, pushed against this neighbor as he was moving with somewhat cumbersome haste to catch the stage, turned quickly, and raised his hat.
"Pardon!"
The other uncovered his bald head and circlet of white, silken locks, and hurried on to the conveyance.
"President of one of the banks down-town," whispered John.
That is the nearest they ever came to being acquainted. And even this accident might not have occurred had not the man of snowy locks been glancing at Mary as he passed instead of at his omnibus.
As he sat at home that evening he remarked:--
"Very pretty little woman that, my dear, that lives in the little house at the corner; who is she?"
The lady responded, without lifting her eyes from the newspaper in which she was interested; she did not know. The husband mused and twirled his penknife between a finger and thumb.
"They seem to be starting at the bottom," he observed.
"Yes?"
"Yes; much the same as we did."
"I haven't noticed them particularly."
"They're worth noticing," said the banker.
He threw one fat knee over the other, and laid his head on the back of his easy-chair.
The lady's eyes were still on her paper, but she asked:--
"Would you like me to go and see them?"
"No, no--unless you wish."
She dropped the paper into her lap with a smile and a sigh.
"Don't propose it. I have so much going to do"-- She paused, removed her glasses, and fell to straightening the fringe of the lamp-mat. "Of course, if you think they're in need of a friend; but from your description"--
"No," he answered, quickly, "not at all. They've friends, no doubt. Everything about them has a neat, happy look. That's what attracted my notice. They've got friends, you may depend." He ceased, took up a pamphlet, and adjusted his glasses. "I think I saw a sofa going in there to-day as I came to dinner. A little expansion, I suppose."
"It was going out," said the only son, looking up from a story-book.
But the banker was reading. He heard nothing, and the word was not repeated. He did not divine that a little becalmed and befogged bark, with only two lovers in her, too proud to cry "Help!" had drifted just yonder upon the rocks, and, spar by spar and plank by plank, was dropping into the smooth, unmerciful sea.
Before the sofa went there had gone, little by little, some smaller valuables.
"You see," said Mary to her husband, with the bright hurry of a wife bent upon something high-handed, "we both have to have furniture; we must have it; and I don't have to have jewelry. Don't you see?"
"No, I"--
"Now, John!" There could be but one end to the debate; she had determined that. The first piece was a bracelet. "No, I wouldn't pawn it," she said. "Better sell it outright at once."
But Richling could not but cling to hope and to the adornments that had so often clasped her wrists and throat or pinned the folds upon her bosom. Piece by piece he pawned them, always looking out ahead with strained vision for the improbable, the incredible, to rise to his relief.
"Is _nothing_ going to happen, Mary?"
Yes; nothing happened--except in the pawn-shop.
So, all the sooner, the sofa had to go.
"It's no use talking about borrowing," they both said. Then the bureau went. Then the table. Then, one by one, the chairs. Very slyly it was all done, too. Neighbors mustn't know. "Who lives there?" is a question not asked concerning houses as small as theirs; and a young man, in a well-fitting suit of only too heavy goods, removing his winter hat to wipe the standing drops from his forehead; and a little blush-rose woman at his side, in a mist of cool muslin and the cunningest of millinery,--these, who always paused a moment, with a lost look, in the vestibule of the sepulchral-looking little church on the corner of Prytania and Josephine streets, till the sexton ushered them in, and who as often contrived, with no end of ingenuity, despite the little woman's fresh beauty, to get away after service unaccosted by the elders,--who could imagine that _these_ were from so deep a nook in poverty's vale?
There was one person who guessed it: Mrs. Riley, who was not asked to walk in any more when she called at the twilight hour. She partly saw and partly guessed the truth, and offered what each one of the pair had been secretly hoping somebody, anybody, would offer--a loan. But when it actually confronted them it was sweetly declined.
"Wasn't it kind?" said Mary; and John said emphatically, "Yes." Very soon it was their turn to be kind to Mrs. Riley. They attended her husband's funeral. He had been killed by an explosion. Mrs. Riley beat upon the bier with her fists, and wailed in a far-reaching voice:--
"O Mike, Mike! Me jew'l, me jew'l! Why didn't ye wait to see the babe that's unborn?"
And Mary wept. And when she and John reentered their denuded house she fell upon his neck with fresh tears, and kissed him again and again, and could utter no word, but knew he understood. Poverty was so much better than sorrow! She held him fast, and he her, while he tenderly hushed her, lest a grief, the very opposite of Mrs. Riley's, should overtake her. _