Margaret did not speak. Even this mill-girl could talk of him, pray for him; but she never must take his name on her lips!
"He got th' cart fur me, 'n' this blessed old donkey, 'n' my room. Did yoh ever see my room, Miss Marg'et?"
Her face lighted suddenly with its peculiar childlike smile.
"No? Yoh'll come some day, surely? It's a pore place, yoh'll think; but it's got th' air,--th' air."
She stopped to breathe the cold morning wind, as if she thought to find in its fierce freshness the life and brains she had lost.
"Ther' 's places in them alleys 'n' dark holes, Miss Marg'et, like th' openin's to hell, with th' thick smells 'n' th' sights yoh'd see."
She went back with a terrible clinging pity to the Gehenna from which she had escaped. The ill of life was real enough to her,--a hungry devil down in those alleys and dens. Margaret listened, waking to the sense of a different pain in the world from her own,--lower deeps from which women like herself draw delicately back, lifting their gauzy dresses.
"Openin's to hell, they're like. People as come down to preach in them think that, 'pears to me,--'n' think we've but a little way to go, bein' born so near. It's easy to tell they thinks it,--shows in their looks. Miss Marg'et!"
"Th' Master has His people 'mong them very lowest, that's not for such as yoh to speak to. He knows 'em: men 'n' women starved 'n' drunk into jails 'n' work-houses, that'd scorn to be cowardly or mean,--that shows God's kindness, through th' whiskey 'n' thievin', to th' orphints or--such as me. Ther 's things th' Master likes in them, 'n' it'll come right," she sobbed, "it'll come right at last; they'll have a chance--somewhere."
Margaret did not speak; let the poor girl sob herself into quiet. What had she to do with this gulf of pain and wrong? Her own higher life was starved, thwarted. Could it be that the blood of these her brothers called against _her_ from the ground? No wonder that the huckster-girl sobbed, she thought, or talked heresy. It was not an easy thing to see a mother drink herself into the grave. And yet--was she to blame? Her Virginian blood was cool, high-bred; she had learned conservatism in her cradle. Her life in the West had not yet quickened her pulse. So she put aside whatever social mystery or wrong faced her in this girl, just as you or I would have done. She had her own pain to bear. Was she her brother's keeper? It was true, there was wrong; this woman's soul lay shattered by it; it was the fault of her blood, of her birth, and Society had finished the work. Where was the help? She was free,--and liberty, Dr. Knowles said, was the cure for all the soul's diseases, and----
