She went into the shop, her poor, little, shadowy child clung close to her mother. She had little knowledge of the place or the people, though she had many times been there, but she knew that after many tears, her mother went there, and then that for a brief space they had food.
The poor lady took from her pocket two miniature pictures—the golden setting had been removed sometime before. They were by a master’s hand, worth at least one hundred dollars each, and infinitely precious to her, being the likenesses of her father and mother.
“What will you give me for these?” said she, trembling in every nerve as she spoke.
The hard money-getting son of Israel, whose trade was pawn-broking, and whose business made him look on misery three hundred and thirteen days in the year, answered, “They are worth nothing to me, madam.”
The lady shrunk into herself as if she had been shriveled. Her face and lips became deadly pale. She supported herself against the side of the box in which she stood, to conceal herself from view; and her little girl held her hand and clung to her garments in great fear. Very soon she began to cough, and in a moment her thin, tattered, white handkerchief was saturated with the blood she raised.
The Jew looked at her with a mingling of kindness and fear. She must not bleed to death there. The pictures he knew were of much value, though there was a good deal of risk in taking them. He pitied the bleeding woman. Yet, pawn-broker and Jew as he was, he pitied her.
“I will give you four dollars on them,” said he, and he hastily ticketed them, and handed her the money, to her infinite relief. She felt that she and her child had now a reprieve from death. The Jew selected some bills that bore a discount of ten per cent., and yet he pitied the woman, and she was so grateful to him that she could have pressed his hand, and wept hot tears upon it. She hurried away to her attic in Frankfort street. It was dark, and she feared insult. New York was worse lighted and worse cared for then than now. We had no gas and no star police then, but we had plenty of Jews and pawn-broker’s shops.
As she passed along she raised the blood that pressed into her throat as fast as possible, but still it almost strangled her. Well-dressed people, men of business, returning home, and men and women hurrying to the theatre, the concert-room, or the prayer-meeting, or to the varied business or amusement of life, passed her without notice. She was their sister, but how were they to know that she was dying—that her scanty life-current was staining the pavement on which they stepped.
She reached the last landing-place, and thought that she could go no further, but it was not seemly to die there, and she made a last effort and entered her room. She was startled by a bright light in the room—light at night she had not had since she made the last dozen of shirts at ten cents a piece. Stranger still, there was a good, bright fire in the grate. Her husband stood before it, with his face toward the door, and his hands behind him, showily dressed as usual. She had not seen him for many days.
“O, Edward!” said she, “I am so glad you are come”—and she fainted, and would have fallen to the floor if he had not caught her in his arms. He laid her upon the meagre bed that had long since been robbed of every valuable article for the pawn-broker.