“You didn’t tell no lie,” said Bess in a sudden strong voice. “He never gev you no money. ’Twarn’t your money ’t all. Doncher know he put it in the bag the first time when you was feared to take it, an’ he jes’ dropped it down here in the side of the kerrige. He never gev you a penny. An’ it was my money.”
“O Bess! Ye’r such a bright, smart little thing! If you’d been well we’d just kept ahead of mother all the time;” and now the sunshine slanted over the brown quartz eyes that were swimming in tears. “I d’n’ know, but I should have hated norful to tell a lie ’bout him. He seems—well, I can’t somehow git the right words; but’s if you wanted to be all on the square when he liked you. I don’t b’leve he’d so much mind yer snivyin’ out a nickel when there was a good many babies, an’ puttin’ it back when there wasn’t, to save gettin’ yer head busted. But he wouldn’t tell no lie. He kem when he said he would an’ brought Christiana, an’ he’ll come in the spring, sure.”
“Yes, sure,” said Bess, with a faint smile. “But you better ast Mrs. Murphy to keep the book a few days, for mammy might go snoopin’ about—”
“I just will; but I don’t b’leve she’d dast to hustle you round and find the money. An’ now a week’s gone, an’ there’s only three left, en then it’ll be anuther month, an’ O Bess, spring! spring!”
There was an exultant gladness in Dil’s voice.
VII—MARTYRED CHRISTIANA.
Dil was always so tired, she went to sleep at once from exhaustion. But to-night every nerve seemed in a quiver. They had found some medicine that soothed Bess and kept her from coughing, so she slept better than in the summer. Dil tossed and tumbled. There had been given her a magnificent endowment of physical strength, and the dull apathy of poverty had kept her from a prodigal waste of nerve force. She was what people often called stolid, but she had never been roused. How many poor souls live and die with most of their energies dormant.
There had never been but one dream to Dil’s life, and that was Bess. Here her imagination had some play. When they took their outings through the more respectable streets for the cleanliness and quiet, or paused awhile in the green and flowery squares, she sometimes “made believe” that Bess was the lovely child in the elegant carriage, with wraps of eider down and lace, and she the nurse-maid in white apron and cap who trundled her along jauntily. Or else it was Bess, blue-eyed and golden-haired, sitting in a real “grown-up” carriage with her pretty mamma in silks and satins. The little nurse-maid was at home, putting everything in order, and waiting for the lovely princess to come back and tell her all she had seen. That and heaven had been the extent of her romancing.
But to-night a curious, separate life stirred within her. A consciousness of the great difference between such people as John Travis, even the lady in the hall who had so disdainfully gathered up her skirts and scattered a faint fragrance about. Why was such a great difference made? Why should she and Bess be Honor Quinn’s children? Would another mother be given them in heaven?
The mothers in the court seemed to love their little babies, yet afterward they beat and banged them about. But the children in that clean, beautiful world where there was no pain, the children in heaven—ah! ah! She was not crying with human passion; it was the deep anguish of the soul that cannot even find vent in tears, the throes of an awful inward pain, that seldom, thank God, comes to the young, that dense ignorance often keeps from the very poor.