However, the answer to the letter was all that the most ardent lover could desire.
[COUNTING THE COST]
I
ANNIE GRAHAM, the young woman with whom this story concerns itself, lived in a Western manufacturing town. Her home was, both inside and outside, like hundreds and thousands of other American homes, a cheap frame house, in a cheap, respectable suburb; a house without any other beauty or refinement than cleanliness and a certain amount of rather coarse comfort. Her father was a workingman, as his father had been before him. He was a gasfitter, and went to his work every morning with a greasy leather bundle under his arm, and a cheerful heart in his breast. First, because he had plenty of work and, having no imagination, never worried about the future. But mostly because of a comfortable fact to which, when not occupied with the practical details of his trade, he devoted his thoughts; the fact being that there was a certain tidy bit of money in the bank for his Annie,—money which he had hoarded up, little by little, saved out of car-fares, and tobacco, and clothes; money which meant privation and courage, and slow, persistent, heavy toil. It amounted to a little over fifteen hundred dollars, and he hoped it would be twenty-five hundred before he died. What Annie would do with it when he was gone was the only direction in which Johnny Graham’s fancy worked. Would she rent a better house, maybe, than this little one they had lived in since she was twelve; or would she get herself fine clothes or a piano or books? He thought that she would probably get books. Annie was so fond of reading! He was very proud of this fondness for reading, and used to tell his fellow-workmen about it, and say he had seen her turn over so many pages, in fifteen minutes by his watch. He timed her, he said, and my! but she was the fast reader! He had no idea of placing any restrictions upon the way in which she should spend her inheritance when she got it; he had no feeling about the money as anything but a means of future pleasure to Annie.
“When I’m dead and gone, the afternoon, maybe, of the funeral, they’ll tell her. ‘Annie Graham,’ the lawyer’ll say, ‘your father’s left you a tidy bit of money. It’s twenty-five hundred dollars,’ he’ll say; well, maybe it’ll be twenty-six hundred,—well, say three thousand. ‘Miss Graham,’ he’ll say, ‘here’s three thousand dollars.’ Well, Annie’ll jump. An’ it’ll comfort her,” Annie’s father would think many times a day, smiling, and screwing in his gas-fixtures with his blackened fingers, or scratching a match on his trousers, and hunting for leaks.
He had been father and mother to his little girl ever since his wife died, when Annie was five. He had baked and scrubbed and cleaned for them both when she was a child, and in his clumsy way he had sewed on buttons and darned rents and washed her little face and hands as tenderly as a woman could have done. And when she grew into a big girl and went to the grammar school, he still knew all about her hats and clothes; and he still tried to save her pretty hands, and sifted the ashes, and waited on her, and was proud of her just as he always had been. There was more than one hard-working woman neighbor who would have been willing to “make a good stepmother” to Annie, and who felt, in all honesty, that the gasfitter was spoiling his girl, and that she just only hoped nothing bad would come of it.
“Them girls that’s taken such care of,—well, the dear only knows what happens to them!” the neighbors said, with mysterious pursings of the lips. But so far nothing out of the way had happened to Annie. Nothing “bad” had come of the simple, faithful loving that the child had had.