Hope Mills - Amanda Minnie Douglas (icecream ebook reader .txt) 📗

/> Jack was delighted. They could spare him now and then of an evening to stroll down to Maverick's office, where they discussed pretty nearly every thing under the sun. It was so in the beginning,--"the earth was without form, and void." Then the Barrys returned; Sylvie changed in some indescribable way as to a kind of delicate outside manner, but the same fresh, earnest girl in heart and soul, taking up her friendship with Jack just where she had laid it down. Yet they had both grown broader and richer in nature and experience, and there was something of the subtile flavor of new acquaintanceship.

Yerbury cleaned house, even to the tidying-up of streets and carting-away of rubbish. It was pitiful to see the attempts of some of the poor women, who washed their worn white curtains, scrubbed the shutters and hall-door, and set out a few ragged geraniums in the front yard, or made a little bed of lettuce and onions.

Yerbury Savings Bank was in the hands of a receiver. Some sold out their small accounts for a trifle: it was agreed there could not be much in the way of dividends. Here was a great mortgage on the Downer farm, that the Eastmans had partly cut into city lots. And, though Downer had received a large price, he was a poor man to-day, with no business, and several sons tramping the highways for work. Farms had not been profitable, but had the wealth and extravagance produced any better result? These places around would be sold presently for any sum they would bring.

"Speculation did look so tempting, though," said Jack with a humorous smile. "But for grandmother I might have been in the midst of it."

"There's just one thing that makes a man or a country rich," said Jane Morgan incisively; "and that's industry, good, honest labor. Marking up one's goods before breakfast, as the Frenchman did, realizes no absolute money. The speculators jingle their dollars from hand to hand, until some poor fool, attracted by the noise, gives them a hundred for their twenty. When a man makes money simply by another person's loss, he has not created any thing, or made any more of it; and the world's no better, that I can see."

"Cousin Jane, you are dipping into political economy;" and Jack nodded gayly. "I shall have to ask Maverick and some of the others up here; and maybe you can put in a straw, or a head of wheat, toward the regeneration of Yerbury."

"I dip into a little common sense now and then, and it seems to me that's what the world needs. There is no lack of the uncommon kind, and it's not to be altogether despised, since at times uncommon things are given to people to do. But, if all the bees in the hive thought they had a call to be queens, it runs in my mind there'd be a lack of honey presently."

"You are on the right foundation, cousin Jane. We must not only make the honey an honorable thing, but honor the bees, put labor on a better, truer foundation."

"I should just say, 'See here, my friends, it is not possible for us all to be rich, whether it is some fixed immutable law of fate, or the lack of necessary elements in one's character, or the meeting of the right person with the right circumstances; but the fact is there, true as judgment. You can be comfortable and clean if you have the energy; and it is better to scrub your own kitchen-floor, or raise a bushel of potatoes, than to sit and whine about luck or respectability. Now and then a ready-made fortune drops down upon one, and I don't know but it often brings a curse: anyhow, what you work for, you are pretty sure to enjoy.' It makes me mad when I see healthy, hearty young women sighing for servants and pianos and what not; when their grandmothers, who had as good blood, and as good sense, didn't despise honest work."

Sylvie Barry came in while Miss Morgan was in the midst of her "speech," as Jack declared it to be; and now she clapped her small white hands, with a "Bravo!"

"A new disciple, Jack," and she smiled. "Miss Morgan, we shall set you to reading our favorite authors, and solving the tremendous question. Where can we get work for these to do? For a great many stand idle in the market-place, because they have not been hired. What can we set them at?"

"Well, Miss Barry, I don't know much about the big, outside questions; but, going around Yerbury a little this winter, I shouldn't say the work was all done up; or, done in such a poor, thrown-together way, that it tumbles right to pieces again. There's skewy, ill-made beds with ragged counterpanes; there's shreds of old ingrain-carpets, that you fall over; there's broken chairs, and shabby clothes, and dirty corners,--work enough, I should say, to last some woman an hour or two. She might get out her pieces of calico, and, with the children's help, make a new spread, maybe a tidy apron, and she might braid a rag mat out of bits, and a hundred things that go toward comfort. No: all the work isn't done up yet, Miss Sylvie," and Jane Morgan stopped just then, to knit the seam-stitch in a stocking for a poor body.

Sylvie threw herself on the footstool, and leaned her arms on Miss Morgan's knee.

"I wasn't thinking so much of that when I spoke," she began earnestly; "but I do wonder if some of us couldn't take it up. There are art-schools, and music-schools, and cooking-schools, in the great cities; and why couldn't we start something of the kind here? Poor people--the real poor, I mean--are often wasteful and idle because they do not just know how to be any thing else. They buy cheap garments in stores, and they soon come apart. I had a sewing-school last summer, and I found some mothers didn't seem to care whether their children learned or not,--since there was so much sewing done by machines. But if the mothers could be taught a little"--

"That's about the upshot of what I said. You see, Miss Barry, people have been earning so much money of late years, that sewing has gone out of fashion. It didn't pay to do this or that, so they earned and spent. Now they sit listless in their dirt and rags, bemoaning hard times. It is good to know how to do more than one thing," and Miss Morgan nodded her head confidently, her strong face full of earnestness.

"Why can't you and Sylvie start a school--what shall we call it?--of useful and homely arts? You see, the girls do work in the mills and shops until they get married, and then they do not know how to make the best of their husbands' money. But don't crowd out all the beauty and the pleasure; there must be something to enlist the heart. Give a man an interest in a thing, and you awake a new feeling, an enthusiasm that makes every thing go as smoothly as oiling up machinery."

"I have often thought," said Mrs. Darcy in her soft, gentle voice, "that the poor did not get as much good of their money as the better classes, because they never have enough to buy advantageously, and store-keepers so often take the advantage of them. Now, yesterday I was over to Mrs. Hall's, and the poor thing was trying to make some bread, and she was not fit to stand up and knead it; so I thought I'd try. The flour was heavy and sticky and lumpy, and what I should call very unprofitable. No one could make good bread out of it. She said they traded at Kilburn's, because he would wait if they did not have the money. The flour was seven and a half a barrel; the eighth, ninety-five cents; and I do not believe the bread was fit to eat. So you must remember, when you blame people for poor cooking, that they may not always have decent materials to work with."

"Maverick was growling about Kilburn the other evening. It is a shame that he should sell such poor goods, when prices have come down a good deal."

"Can you not reform him a little?" and Mrs. Darcy smiled.

"Cousin Jane and Sylvie might go into business, as did the poor weavers of Toad Lane, with their sack of oatmeal, firkin of butter, a little sugar and flour," said Jack laughingly. "A fair division of labor. The men of Yerbury shall provide work, and the women shall train the inefficient how and where to spend money."

Sylvie glanced up with bright, inquiring eyes.

"Was it some more co-operation?" she asked.

Jack brought out his book, and read the story of the "Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale" and their wonderful success from a small beginning. The girl listened with wide-open eyes, and even Jane Morgan laid down her knitting.

"The queen-bee and the workers again," said she, as Jack closed the book. "It is not every man for himself, but every man for each other. And it comes back, always."


CHAPTER XII.

"WHERE is grandmother?" Jack asked one morning late in May, as he came in from the garden, and found her place at the table vacant.

"She does not feel very well this morning, and I told her there was no need of rising with the lark," answered cousin Jane; but, though her voice was cheerful, there was a new gravity in her face.

"It is something unusual"--

"She is getting to be an old lady, Jack. There, sit down to your breakfast while it is nice and hot. No fear but what I will attend to grandmother."

She had risen; but in the midst of her dressing her hands had lost their cunning, her limbs their strength. Jane came to look at her in alarm.

"It's a warning," she said, with her grand old smile. "But I have no pain, and so you can leave me here for a while. My strength may come back."

Mrs. Darcy was much frightened.

"Remember that ninety-four is a good old age, and she has hardly had a sick day in her life. After breakfast Jack might go over for Dr. Maverick. He is sensible, and will not torment her with experiments."

Jack rather hurried through his meal, and then ran up to grandmother's room. She put out her wrinkled hand, thin to be sure, but still slender and smooth, with no knobby joints. A proud sort of beauty illumined the old face, though the eyes were a little dull.

"Dear boy," and there was a curious quaver in her voice, "I've had to give in at last. The Lord knows best. He has given me many a happy year with you; yet I have never forgotten the folks over yonder. I shall be glad to see them again,--your father, Jack, and the rest. 'Then they came to the land of Beulah, where the sun shineth day and night, and betook themselves to rest'--you know. We used to read it together."

A sharp pang went to Jack's heart. He pressed the limp hand to his lips, and gazed into the face that had changed in some indescribable way. Then Jane came with a tempting breakfast, and fed her with wonderful gentleness, it seemed to him.

He went out, and brought Maverick back with him.

"It is a general breaking-up of nature," said the doctor with a tender gravity. "Nothing can be done, unless she should suffer; but