“Hold me up once more, do Mariar, I can't see nothin',” begged a piping, childish voice at Joe's knee.
“I can't, Cynthy; my arms is most broke now holdin' of ye; ef you don't stop teasin' I'll never take ye nowheres again,” replied a tall, handsome girl, to whom the child was clinging.
Joe bent without a word, and picking up the small, ill-shaped morsel of human longing and curiosity, swung her upon his broad shoulder, where she sat watching the tiny puppets and listening to their shrill cries, oblivious of all else in the world. Once she looked down into the man's face with her great, dark, fiery eyes and said softly, “Oh, how good you are!” A shiver ran through Joe's frame; these were the first words that had been addressed to him since he said good-bye to the warden in that dreary corridor, which for this one moment had been forgotten. The little girl, without turning her eyes from the dancing figures before her, put one arm about Joe's neck and nestled a little closer to him. Joe could have stood forever. The tall, dark girl, however, had missed Cynthy's tiresome pulling at her skirts and the whining voice. She looked anxiously about and called “Cynthy! Cynthy! where are you? I'll be thankful if ever I gets you back to your grandmother.” The fretful words aroused Joe from his happy reverie; he hurriedly placed the child on the pavement, and in an instant was lost in the crowd.
He set out upon his quest the following morning and had no difficulty in finding the old woman he was seeking. At one of a dozen doors marking as many divisions of a long, low tenement building near the river, he had knocked, and the door had opened into a small, clean kitchen, where a bright fire burned in a tiny stove, and a row of scarlet geraniums in pots ornamented the front window. The woman who admitted him he recognized at once as the mother of the man in that far-away prison, whose last hold-upon love and goodness was the remembrance of the aged, wrinkled face so wonderfully like his own. In a corner behind the door there stood an old-fashioned trundle-bed. As Joe stepped into the room a child, perhaps ten years old, started up from it, exclaiming “That's the man, Granny; the man who put me on his shoulder, when Mariar was cross. Come in! come in, man,” she urged.
“Be still, Cynthy,” retorted the grandmother, not unkindly, as she placed a chair for Joe, who was walking over to the little bed from which the child was evidently not able to rise alone. Two frail hands were outstretched to him, two great black eyes were raised to his full of unspoken gratitude. Joe took the soiled letter from its hiding-place and gave it to the woman without a word. She glanced at the scarcely legible characters, and went into an adjoining room, her impassive face working convulsively.
“What's the matter with Granny, was she crying? I never seen her cry before,” said Cynthy. “Granny's had heaps o' trouble. I'm all thet's left of ten children and a half-dozen grandchildren. She says I'm the poorest of the lot, too, with the big bone thet's grow'd out on my back; it aches orful nights, and makes my feet so tired and shaky mornin's. Granny's kind o' queer; some days she just sets and looks into the fire fer hours without speakin', and it's so still I kin a'most hear my heart beat; and I think, and think, and never speak, neither, till Granny comes back and leans over me and kisses me; then it's all right ag'in, an' Granny makes a cup o' tea an' a bite o' toast and the sun comes in the winder, and I forget 'bout the pain, an' go out with Mariar, when she'll take me, like I did last night.”
The child's white, pinched features flushed feverishly, her solemn, dusky eyes burned like coals. She had been resting her chin in her hands, and gazing up into Joe's face with a fascinated intensity. She fell back wearily upon the pillows as the door opened, and her grandmother returned and put her hand on Joe's shoulder, saying brokenly, “You've been very kind.” The little clock on the shelf over the kitchen table ticked merrily, and the tea-kettle hummed, as if it would drown the ticking, while Joe and Cynthy's grandmother discussed and planned for the future.
It was finally settled that Joe should look for work in Danvers, and if he found it, his home should be with the old woman and Cynthy. He did not try to express the joy that surged over and through his heart, that rushed up into his brain, until his head was one mad whirl; but with a firm, quick step and a brave, calm look on his strong face, he went out to take his place in the busy, struggling world—a man among men.
Two months passed; months of toil, of anxiety, sometimes of fear; but Joe was so gladdened and comforted by Cynthy's childish love and confidence, that, little by little, he came out of the shadow that had threatened to blacken his life, into the sunshine and peace of a homely, self-sacrificing existence in “Riverside Row.”
Cynthy's ideas of heaven were very vague, and not always satisfactory, even to herself, but she often wondered, since Joe came, if heaven ever began here and she was not tasting some of its minor delights. Of course, she did not put it in just this way; but Cynthy's heaven was a place where children walked and were never tired, where above all things they wore pretty clothes and had everything that was denied them on earth. Joe had realized so many of the child's wild dreams, had made possible so many longed-for or unattainable pleasures, had so brightened and changed her weary, painful life, that to Cynthy's eyes there was always about his head a halo as in the pictures of Granny's saints; goodness, kindness, generosity—love, were for her spelled with three letters, and read—Joe. Out of the hard-earned wages the man put into Granny's hand every Saturday night, there was always a little reserved for Cynthy. Her grandmother sometimes fretted or occasionally remonstrated; but Joe was firm. Alas! human life, like the never-resting earth, of which it is a part, swings out of the sunlight into the shadow, out of the daytime into the darkness through which the moon and the stars do not always shine.