She did not return to the front room where the great bed loomed so weirdly in the gloom, but sat by the one window in the little back room, half kitchen, half dining-room, looking out upon the river growing blacker and colder in the falling night as it flowed from out of the west where a rapidly diminishing, dull red streak marked the track of the vanished sun.
Twenty years since her mother died and her sister, selfish in her new life as a wife, had said that ‘Lizbeth’s duty lay in their father’s house. He might marry again or die in a few years. Surely it was not so hard for a young girl to wait. So she had waited, her lover fretting as lovers will, until one day she had awakened to the fact that a man’s patience is not like a woman’s. There had been one awful night which she remembered after all these years with a shudder. A night when, for the first and only time in her hard life, she had turned hotly upon the stern old man and told him of her love and of her wrecked girlhood, praying wildly for some help, for some sympathy. She caught her breath sharply now as she recalled her father’s bitter words. That same night her lover left. Fifteen years had come and gone since then. The great world had taken him, and whether he lived or had been claimed again by mother earth the woman who sat and dreamed of the past alone in the dusk knew naught of him. She had practised a woman’s faithfulness; she had reaped a woman’s hard reward. Afterwards her sister died and left to her care a blue-eyed babe. How she had poured out upon that baby boy the pent up mother-love within her. But the gods in their wisdom had taken him too. In this still night as she lived over again the years which were gone, she seemed to feel the clasp of those baby arms about her neck and to hear the crooning of that soft baby voice.
And then came the long years of her father’s illness when she knew no moment of rest or peace. It had been a long struggle between a loveless woman on one side and gaunt starvation upon the other without one word of gratitude to strengthen her. And they called her hard because she could not weep! She looked at her hands, holding them up close to her face. How misshapen and ugly from toil they were!
It was quite dark now and the river murmured strangely under the wind which was creeping down from the north. Her hands fell back into her lap and two great tears coursed slowly down her worn face—not for the man who lay under the stars in the little cemetery on the hill, but for her own vanished youth and love and hope.
“WHEN THE KING COMES IN”
By Anthony Leland
SHE slunk along in the shadows listlessly, staring with unheeding eyes at the shuffling crowds upon the sidewalks, at the fly-blown, tawdry splendors of the shop windows, and at the yellow gloom of the pawn-shop. The autumn wind swept sharply up from the river, and she drew her old plaid shawl about her tightly with one hand, while with the other she covered her swollen and discolored cheek. The sidewalks and roadway were covered with a thin, slippery coating of mingled filth and mud. An autumn mist, heavy with smoke, pressed itself tightly down upon the street, deadening the light of the electric lamps at the corners into mere splotches of a dully-luminous gray. Frowsy, palefaced girls hung about dark doorways where they bandied mirthless jests with lounging men and boys. In front of a bar-room, whence came the fangling notes of a piano and the scream of a high-pitched soprano voice, a man stood and urged the passers-by to go in and witness “the dizziest ‘vawdyville’ in the city.” The woman in the old plaid shawl passed him without heeding his blatant voice. She had heard his sing-song shout many times; the “dizzy vawdyville” was nothing new. There never was anything new in Myrtle Street; it was ever the same ugly, sordid, joyless place day and night, week in and week out. It was always crowded with people, but it was always strangely sullen and mirthless. You never heard any one laugh there. At times when some one slipped and fell upon the slime of the pavement, or when one of the white-faced girls hurled shrill defiance at a man or at her companions, a hoarse human bark rent the air, but it was not a laugh. Even the children, who scrambled in the gutters and crept in and out of the dark alleys, forgot to laugh.
The woman with swollen and discolored cheek, who was crawling along in the shadows, halted in front of a dram-shop on a corner, and gazed doubtfully, longingly, at its swinging door. She was wondering if perchance Red Mike would trust her for a drink. She felt keenly the chill air from the river. She was strangely weary and down-hearted, too.