“You stop, John,” she cried. “I heard what she said, and I'm goin' to tell her. I'm goin' to tell everybody. Nobody shall stop me. There the minister spoke and spoke and spoke, and he never said a word as to any good he'd done. I'm goin' to tell. I wanted to stan' right up in the church an' tell everybody. He told me not to say a word about it, an' I never did whilst he was livin', but now I'm goin' to stan' up for the dead.” The woman pulled herself loose from her brother, who stood behind her, frightened, and continually thrusting out a black-gloved hand of remonstrance. People began to gather. The woman, who was quite old, had a face graven with hard lines of habitual restraint, which was now, from its utter abandon, at once pathetic and terrible. She made a motion as if she were thrusting her own self into the background.
“I'm goin' to speak,” she said, in a high voice. “I held my tongue for the livin', but I'm goin' to speak for the dead. My poor husband died twenty years ago, got his hand cut in a machine in Lloyd's, and had lockjaw, and I was left with my daughter that had spinal disease, and my little boy that died, and my own health none too good, and—and he—he—came to my house, one night after the funeral, and—and told me he was goin' to look out for me, and he has, he has. That blessed man gave me five dollars every week of my life, and he buried poor Annie when she died, and my little boy, and he made me promise never to say a word about it. Five dollars every week of my life—five dollars.”
The woman's voice ended in a long-drawn, hysterical wail. The other women who had been listening began to weep. Mrs. Pointdexter, when she and Mrs. Zelotes moved on, was sobbing softly, but Mrs. Zelotes's face, though moved, wore an expression of stern conjecture.
“I'd like to know how many things like that Norman Lloyd did,” said she. “I never supposed he was that kind of a man.”
She had a bewildered feeling, as if she had to reconstruct her own idea of the dead man as a monument to his memory, and reconstruction was never an easy task for the old woman.
Chapter XLV
A Short time after Norman Lloyd's death, Ellen, when she had reached the factory one morning, met a stream of returning workmen. They swung along, and on their faces were expressions of mingled solemnity and exultation, as of children let out to play because of sorrow in the house, which will not brook the jarring inconsequence of youth.
Mamie Brady, walking beside a young man as red-haired as herself, called out, with ill-repressed glee, “Turn round, Ellen Brewster; there ain't no shop to-day.”
The young man at her side, nervously meagre, looked at Ellen with a humorous contortion of this thin face, then he caught Mamie Brady by the arm, and swung her into a hopity-skip down the sidewalk. Just behind them came Granville Joy, with another man. Ellen stopped. “What is it?” she said to him. “Why is the shop closed?”
Granville stopped, and let the stream of workmen pass him and Ellen. They stood in the midst of it, separating it, as rock will separate a current. “Mrs. Lloyd is dead,” Granville replied, soberly.