_ CHAPTER XX. AUNT MARTHA
The room was clean. There was a rag carpet on the floor; a pine bureau neatly varnished; a half dozen plain but whole chairs; a bedstead, upon which the bedding was scrupulously neat; a pine table, upon which lay a much-thumbed leather-bound family Bible and a few religious books; and between the windows, over the bureau, hung a common engraving of Christ upon the Cross. The windows themselves looked upon the back of the stores on South Street. Upon the floor was a large basket full of work, with which the occupant of the room was evidently engaged. The whole room had an air of severity and cheerlessness, yet it was clear that every thing was most carefully arranged, and continually swept and washed and dusted.
The person who had opened the door was a woman of nearly forty. She was dressed entirely in black. She had not so much as a single spot of white any where about her. She had even a black silk handkerchief twisted about her head in the way that negro women twine gay cloths; and such was her expression that it seemed as if her face, and her heart, and her soul, and all that she felt, or hoped, or remembered, or imagined, were clad and steeped in the same mourning garments and utter gloom.
"Good-morning, Amy," said she, in a hard and dry, but not unkind voice. In fact, the rigidity of her aspect, the hardness of her voice, and the singular blackness of her costume, seemed to be too monotonously uniform and resolute not to indicate something willful or unhealthy in the woman's condition, as if the whole had been rather superinduced than naturally developed.
"Aunt Martha, I have brought you some things that I hope you will find comforting and agreeable."
The young woman glanced around the desolately regular and forbidding room, and sighed. The other took the basket and stepped to a closet, but paused as she opened it, and turning to Amy, said, in the same dry, hopeless manner,
"This bounty is too good for a sinner; and yet it would be the unpardonable sin for so great a sinner to end her own life willfully."
The solemn woman put the contents of the basket into the closet; but it seemed as if, in that gloom, the sugar must have already lost its sweetness and the tea its flavor.
Amy still glanced round the room, and her eyes filled with tears.
"Dear Aunt Martha, when may I tell?" she asked, with piteous earnestness.
"Amy, would you thwart God? He is too merciful already. I almost fear that to tolerate your sympathy and kindness is a sore offense in me. Think what a worm I am! How utterly foul and rank with sin!"
She spoke with clasped hands lying before her in her lap, in the same hard tone as if the words were cut in ebony; with the same fixed lips--the same pale, unsmiling severity of face; above which the abundant hair, streaked with early gray, was almost entirely lost in the black handkerchief.
"But surely God is good!" said Amy, tenderly and sadly. "If we sin, He only asks us to repent and be forgiven."
"But we must pay the penalty, Amy," said the other. "There is a price set upon every sin; and mine is so vast, so enormous--"
She paused a moment, as if overwhelmed by the contemplation of it; then, in the same tone, she continued: "You, Amy, can not even conceive how dreadful it is. You know what it is, but not how bad it is."
She was silent again, and her soul appeared to wrap itself in denser gloom. The air of the room seemed to Amy stifling. The next moment she felt as if she were pierced with sharp spears of ice. She sprang up:
"I shall smother!" said she; and opened the window.
"Aunt Martha, I begin to feel that this is really wicked! If you only knew Lawrence Newt--"
The older woman raised one thin finger, without lifting the hand from her lap. Implacable darkness seemed to Amy to be settling upon her too.
"At least, aunt, let me have you moved to some less horrid place."
"Foulness and filth are too sweet and fair for me," said the dark woman; "and I have been too long idle already."
She lifted the work and began to sew. Amy's heart ached as she looked at her, with sympathy for her suffering and a sense of inability to help her.
There came a violent knock at the door.
"Who's there?" asked Aunt Martha, calmly.
"Come, come; open this door, and let's see what's going on!" cried a loud, coarse voice.
"Who is it?"
"Who is it? Why, it's me--Joseph!" replied the voice.
Aunt Martha rose and unlocked the door. A man whose face was like his voice bustled noisily into the room, with a cigar in his mouth and his hat on.
"Come, come; where's that work? Time's up! Quick, quick! No time, no pay!"
"It is not quite done, Mr. Joseph."
The man stared at Aunt Martha for a moment; then laughed in a jeering way.
"Old lady Black, when you undertake to do a piece of work what d'ye mean by not having it done? Damn it, there's a little too much of the lady about you! Show me that work!" and he seated himself.
The woman brought the basket to him, in the bottom of which were several pieces completed and carefully folded. The man turned them over rapidly.
"And why, in the devil's name, haven't you done the rest? Give 'em here!"
He took the whole, finished and unfinished, and, bundling them up, made for the door. "No time, no pay, old lady; that's the rule. That's the only way to work such infernally jimmy old bodies as you!"
The sewing woman remained perfectly passive as Mr. Joseph was passing out; but Amy sprang forward from the window:
"Stop, Sir!" said she, firmly. The man involuntarily turned, and such was his overwhelming surprise at seeing a lady suddenly standing before him, and a lady who spoke with perfect authority, that, with the instinct of obsequiousness instinctive in every man who depends upon the favor of customers, he took off his hat.
"If you take that work without paying for it you shall be made to pay," said Amy, quietly, her eyes flashing, and her figure firm and erect.
The man hesitated for a moment.
"Oh yes, ma'am, oh certainly, ma'am! Pay for it, of course, ma'am! 'Twas only to frighten the woman, ma'am; oh certainly, certainly--oh! yes, ma'am, pay for it, of course."
"At once," said Amy, without moving.
"Certainly, ma'am; here's the money," and Mr. Joseph counted it out upon the pine table.
"And you'd better leave the rest to be done at once."
"I'll do so, ma'am," said the man, putting down the bundle.
"And remember that if you ever harm this woman by a word or look, even," added Amy, bending her head toward her aunt, "you will repent it bitterly."
The man stared at her and fumbled with his hat. The cigar had dropped upon the floor. Amy pointed to it, and said, "Now go."
Mr. Joseph stooped, picked up the stump, and departed. Amy felt weak. Her aunt stood by her, and said, calmly,
"It was only part of my punishment."
Amy's eyes flashed.
"Yes, aunt; and if any body should break into your room and steal every thing you have and throw you out of the window, or break your bones and leave you here to die of starvation, I suppose you would think it all part of your punishment."
"It would be no more than I deserve, Amy."
"Aunt Martha," replied Amy, "if you don't take care you will force me to break my promise to you."
"Amy, to do that would be to bring needless disgrace upon your mother and all her family and friends. They have considered me dead for nearly sixteen years. They have long ago shed the last tear of regret for one whom they believed to be as pure as you are now. Why should you take her to them from the tomb, living still, but a loathsome mass of sin? I am equal to my destiny. The curse is great, but I will bear it alone; and the curse of God will fall upon you if you betray me."
Amy was startled by the intensity with which these words were uttered. There was no movement of the hands or head upon the part of the older woman. She stood erect by the table, and, as her words grew stronger, the gloom of her appearance appeared to intensify itself, as a thunder-cloud grows imperceptibly blacker and blacker.
When she stopped, Amy made no reply; but, troubled and uneasy, she drew a chair to the window and sat down. The older woman took up her work again. Amy was lost in thought, wondering what she could do. She saw nothing as she looked down into the dirty yards of the houses; but after some time, forgetting, in the abstraction of her meditation, where she was, she was suddenly aware of the movement of some white object; and looking curiously to see what it was, discovered Lawrence Newt gazing up at her from the back window of his store, and waving his handkerchief to attract her attention.
As she saw the kindly face she smiled and shook her hand. There was a motion of inquiry: "Shall I come round?" And a very resolute telegraphing by the head back again: "No, no!" There was another question, in the language of shoulders, and handkerchief, and hands: "What on earth are you doing up there?" The answer was prompt and intelligible: "Nothing that I am ashamed of." Still there came another message of motion from below, which Amy, knowing Lawrence Newt, unconsciously interpreted to herself thus: "I know you, angel of mercy! You have brought some angelic soup to some poor woman." The only reply was a smile that shone down from the window into the heart of the merchant who stood below. The smile was followed by a wave of the hand from above that said farewell. Lawrence Newt looked up and kissed his own, but the smiling face was gone. _