Hope Mills by Amanda Minnie Douglas (lightweight ebook reader txt) 📕

no cheering: they were not gay enough for that. Some of the men wrung his hand silently; then the women pressed forward, and invoked a blessing upon him.

"We know better nor any of 'em what it was to have no fire, and childers cryin' for bread," said one woman, wiping her eyes with the end of her faded shawl. "And, thank the Lord, I've had bite, and sup, and fire, ever since the day Hope Mills was opened."

The men outside were working at the ruins,--among them some of the strikers of yesterday. They found poor Mrs. Rooney's little Johnny, burned to a crisp; and in the house next to Keppler's they exhumed the body of Biddy Brady, a good-natured, efficient washerwoman, whose greatest fault was her intemperance. She and her son had gone to bed very drunk, after having a good time through the evening. The boy had been roused in season, but she had perished. It was as vivid and fervent a temperance-lecture as ever was given in Yerbury.

About ten in the morning Jack Darcy returned home dead tired, as much with the excitement as the fatigue, took a bath, and went to bed.

The Yerbury authorities looked sharply about them that day. The strikers were orderly and quiet, but they had lost ground. "The Evening Transcript" deprecated all this sort of business, and for once had no fling about the "Utopian theory of co-operation." But "The Leader" of the morning came out strongly in praise of the good order, forbearance, and _esprit de corps_ of Hope Mills, and called Mr. Darcy "our young and enterprising citizen, whom, we doubt not, we shall hear of in higher positions in life, which he has proved himself eminently worthy to fill."

There was no great lament made about Boyd's Row or Keppler's saloon, except for the sad casualty it had caused; but the dastardly attack on Mrs. Connelly, and the fiendish attempt to burn Hope Mills, met with the severest condemnation.

Maverick came around to the Darcys that evening. "I fancy I have found your man, Jack," he began. "Mrs. Stixon called me in towards night, saying Jem had been on a spree, and was dreadfully beaten. I found one side of his face scratched and bruised, and bits of gravel still adhering to the flesh. The right arm, on the same side, has one bone broken, and his shoulder is dislocated. He said he fell off of a stoop, and is dreadfully sullen. I asked him what stoop, but he would not tell. Do you remember which way the man fell?"

Jack thought a moment. "On the right side, Maverick, away from me, or I should have seen his face. Just such a size man as Jem Stixon, too," with a satisfied nod.

"What will you do about it?"

Jack took two or three turns across the floor. "See here, Maverick, we will not do any thing. You cure the poor fellow, and I think he will never try to damage Hope Mills again. I can hardly forgive him Bruno, though."

"If I were Sylvie Barry,"--he never called her Mrs. Lawrence when speaking of her,--"I should say, 'Jack, you are an angel.'"

Jack flushed. "Masculine angels!" he laughed.

"Well, wasn't there Gabriel and a host of them? Why, Jack, they were _all_ masculine!"

There was no need for earthly justice to meddle with Jem Stixon. His arm inflamed: he had led a hard life late years, and his system was in bad order. He would not listen to amputation until it was too late, and in less than a month he was dead. It was better for his poor hard-working wife and family.

One other death grew out of the summer riots, though this was at a distance. Dennis Connelly had been working with a railroad-gang, and the strikers there had a desperate struggle with the civil authority. They were worsted in the end, and Connelly was one of the victims, or perhaps more truly speaking, a victim to bad whiskey, for when sober he was very peaceable. Kit sent for his body, and had him decently buried.


CHAPTER XXVII.

THE strikers at the hat-factory did not carry the day. The employers were very indignant, and tabooed the union men altogether. At Garafield's the men were called in council, the points discussed, and a small advance in wages allowed. The co-operatives went their way quietly. Perhaps the most convincing argument was a very jubilant letter from Winston, part of which Darcy put up in the hall. He had just succeeded in making an important contract for two years, on very fair terms. That would see them through safely unless the whole world came to grief again!

Jack wrote Miss McLeod a graphic account of the "labor troubles," and she replied with equally characteristic _verve_. "She could hardly decide," she declared, "whether to be glad, or sorry, that her young friend had grown so independent of her; but in any emergency she wished to be remembered."

There was now a certain respect paid to Hope Mills, among the community at Yerbury. Perhaps there are no people so exacting and difficult to satisfy as those friends and neighbors whose advice you have not taken, and prospered without it. They indulge in a righteous self-complacency if you are unfortunate, and pity you grandly; but to own themselves mistaken is the one bitter flavor in the cup. There seemed to be but one point now upon which they were doubtful,--the honesty of the managers at the last moment. Every workman knew or might know exactly how affairs stood, but _they_ did not have the capital. Just at the end of the five years _somebody_ might abscond with the money-bag under his arm. It seemed so every way certain that human nature could not withstand the temptation.

Yet there was growing up among the hands a curious neighborly sympathy, as if they were in some degree relatives; and they were made so, in fact, by some marriages of sons and daughters. They were more intelligent; they kept their houses cleaner, their little gardens prettier, not allowing them to go to weeds before the summer was half over. Those who could go to the industrial school learned a deal about sewing, and became seamstresses instead of mill-girls. Some made their own family dresses, some were very tasty milliners. It gave them a reliance upon what they could do themselves. The two daughters of one workman kept a little poultry-yard "scientifically," and dressed themselves from its proceeds. Industry became more general. Instead of dawdling away whole evenings in gossip, they had some light employment, and worked as they talked.

The September showing was very encouraging. There were still a great many bankruptcies and losses, but some of them could not be guarded against. Darcy and Winston regularly eschewed speculation, though the latter confessed his fingers sometimes burned to be in the pie.

"But, after all," he said frankly, "if the energy, ingenuity, ambition, and strength that are expended to make certain people buy and sell, over and over, a thing that can be no more valuable than the money it makes year by year, which often is not much,--if this were turned into industrial and commercial channels,--gad! what a country we would be! Our flag would float on every sea, our goods be in every port. And yet they go on, rich to-day because they have beggared their neighbor, poor to-morrow because their neighbor has beggared them. What idiotic business!"

But I must go back a little with my hero. There were many things to occupy his mind, the summer of the "strikes;" yet through it all, like one strain of heavenly harmony in a clash of discord, he came to know the diviner needs of his being. Another man might have been dismayed at the revelation. Like a flash when the horizon is opened, he saw the light; and he knew, from the depths of the darkness the next moment, what manner of storm it would be.

He had never weakened or frittered away his sweetest emotions on the various flirtations that fill the early years of so many men. He had liked and admired Sylvie Barry above all young women he had ever met; but this emotion, though pure and lasting, never stirred the ardor of his soul. Had it really lain untouched so long, or had some vague dream slipped into it the night he and Sylvie had planned the costume for Irene Lawrence, the time he first encountered her beauty in all its vivid splendor? To him she was a glorious young goddess.

The long-ago summer day he had met the two in the phaeton, he was more keenly pained for her sake than his own. To be sure, his first emotion was that of angry indignation, sending the outraged blood through every pulse; then, as it cooled, the act appeared so utterly unwomanly. If she had passed him by carelessly--but to designedly attract his glance, and stab it thus, was as if a giant had taken a club to kill a butterfly because it breathed the fragrance of the rose. He shut out that vision. You can tell what impression she had made upon him, when he always thought of her as he saw her in the glow of Sylvie's pretty parlor, that summer night. His healthy, active temperament never brooded over disagreeable things a moment longer than necessity kept him there.

She faded from his mind by degrees. Even when he took Fred back into the old regard, he thought of her as the possible wife of some millionnaire. When she returned to Yerbury, and shut herself up in stately despair, refusing even Sylvie's proffered sympathy, she puzzled him. How could she, so fond of admiration and gayety, live this nun's life, without the nun's spiritual exaltation? He passed her once or twice in the hall, as he was calling on Fred, but neither made any sign.

Then came that terrible night, when he had found her astray, her brain consumed by the smouldering fire of isolation, when you have only the black, choking smoke that never blazes up in purifying flames. There are thousands of women who have done this, weakly, sentimentally, through the period of adversity that has tried the metal of all souls; but she, being stronger, more self-reliant, could not drop into puerile whining.

At Depford Beach they had come in contact again. There was both attraction and repulsion in these two people, as there often is in strongly-marked, positive natures. She tolerated him because he was Sylvie's lover; despised him, believing that he meant to make a stepping-stone of this girl's wealth and position; and, in spite of herself, felt the current of his strength and buoyant energy. By slow degrees the unwilling truth was forced upon her, that God never created any human soul for its own self-destruction; that there was no absolute virtue in warping and twisting circumstances into chains and bonds, that were ordained for higher, nobler purposes. Her mental disease had run its course. Sylvie's sorrow was the final electric shock that broke the heavy soil of apathy.

Her utter surprise when she found that through all these years Jack Darcy had refrained from influencing Sylvie in his behalf, was something quite indescribable. She thought she had fathomed men's souls with her keen insight, but this man was a Saul amid his peers. Had there been some subtile, far-reaching foundation for Fred's regard in the boyhood days,--something that their eyes, being holden with golden bonds, could not see?

After the marriage there was a certain degree of association, not intimacy. And yet she set herself to watch him. Somewhere she would discern the print of the feet of clay