“She has nearly killed herself working for her child,” said mistress. “I remember the dreadful hunger in her eyes one day when you took me to the laundry. She stared at me in the kitchen; she slipped upstairs, and watched me from a doorway. She tore the child from her arms to give me to bring up—oh! poor soul, and cruel, cruel society to so wound a mother heart.”
“We pay her well,” said master.
“But the money has gone to her child. She has been boarding it somewhere. Oh! Rudolph, go buy her some teeth.”
Mistress laughed and cried in the same breath, and finally she had to go and lie down. She kept on chattering hysterically about the woman who went without teeth to buy clothes for her child, until master became quite anxious.
“You are making a mountain out of a molehill, Claudia,” he said. “I cannot think that your suspicions are correct.”
“They’re not suspicions,” she said excitedly, “they’re verities. Go to town—you’ll see.”
Master thought he was done with New York for the day, but after dinner he had to post off to the laundry, where he found that everything mistress had said was correct.
Poor old Jane was not half as old as she looked. She acknowledged that no one in the laundry knew that she had a child; that she had been boarding him ever since he was a baby; that she wanted him to be brought up a gentleman; that she had sneaked him out to Pleasant River, taking infinite precautions not to be discovered; and that she had actually spent nearly every cent of her wages on this beloved child.
I went to town with master, and I shall never forget the sight of that poor, thin woman as she sat in the matron’s office answering master’s questions. Her indifference, almost stupidity about her own welfare, her quick mother-wit and shrewdness about her child, excited my most intense admiration.