 | CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHILD. A woman in armor |  |
8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHILD.
HELEN came home after dusk. The
parlor was dark. She opened the door
and saw a low fire smouldering in the
grate, and detected a foreign musky odor in the
air.
Rikka was pitching china at the supper-table
in the dining-room.
Miss Dimmock closed the door and went up-stairs
toward her own room, and tapped at
Nina's door as she passed to let her boy and
girl know that she had come.
Everything was still.
She tapped again, delicately, yet with a feeling
of apprehension. Nina was never out at
that time of the evening. The house was wont
to be full of wholesome, cheerful sounds when
Helen came home.
The bolts shot back, the door swung open,
and Nina, wasted and skeletonish, looking as if
she had been drowned, admitted Helen into the
gloom.
“What's the matter?” exclaimed the elder
sister, bringing her outdoor rush and freshness
across the place, shaking Nina's stupor off and
half rousing George, who turned and murmured
in his sleep to “T-l-o-o-la!”
“What is the matter?” repeated Helen
throwing her wraps from her, closing the blinds,
and turning up a jet of gas to enlighten the
situation.
Nina tried to speak. I do not know what
she had fought in circumstances and life during
the hours she was alone. If she had been hysterical
and stormy, that point was passed.
She had put on a long, softly draping wrapper.
It hung down her little shape and curled
in waves round her feet. She stood with folded
hands in the middle of the floor as quiet as her
boy in his crib. She tried to tell Helen in a few
words what had come to her. But the horror
of it was too new. She broke down midway,
reached for her comforter, and wrung her hands
over and over.
Helen got this little sister on her bosom
instantly. Few words sufficed to show her
what had happened. Her first feeling was intense
indignation. She rose against the man
as if he had been a housebreaker or an assassin.
She put Nina on the sofa, and cooled and
soothed her with every sweet name which
women know. Nina was the first love of her
heart. Nina had been the pet of her childhood.
ties and her family life. She loved with brother-like
devotion. She clenched her hand and
burned to strike that coward in the face who had
turned the close and chivalrous relation of husband
into the power to own, abuse, and torture.
She determined that Nina should not again
be exposed to him without a protector at hand;
and tramping down-stairs with martial foot-fall,
on Rikka's furry pig-tail she laid a hand, and on
Rikka's plastic mind she endeavored to impress
a command.
Rikka stood still, holding a cake-basket in
her hands. Miss Dimmock's touch was caressing,
but at the same time it was intended to be
a strong brake on Rikka's train of habits. Between
it and that distant hand of her father,
Gottleib Shuster, who would “gifs it to her so
as never vos” if she failed in any duty, she was
quite imbecile for several minutes. “Nopoddies,”
she repeated blandly, after Helen.
“Nobody at all,” said Miss Dimmock;
“you are to let nobody into this house while I
am gone. Mrs. Guest is sick. If the bell rings
while I am out do not answer it.”
“Ven die pell ring,” gasped Rikka.
“Yes, when the bell rings, let it ring. Don't
let any one into the house.”
“In das haus ven die pell ring.”
“Now do you understand, Rikka?”
“Yah!” with a victorious flash of teeth,
“ven die pell ring, let any one in das haus.”
“Frederika Shuster!”—putting the cake-basket
on the table, and standing before her
maiden in such an attitude that no other object
could attract the attention of the same. “Understand
what I say. You are not to let anybody
come into the house. Not to let”—pressing
each word into Rikka's forehead with the
tip of her finger—“anybody—come into—this
house—while—I—am—gone!”
“Not — to let — anyboddies—komm — into
dees haus—w'iles I been gone!”
Thus, after Helen went up-stairs, Rikka
chanted monotonously to herself; chanted over
the cheese while she cut it; chanted with the
tea-kettle; in the cupboard where she thrust
her head. Even at midnight, when she turned
upon her bed, she had not ceased droning faithfully
“dot anypoddies not let me komm into
das haus w'ile you been gone!”
Nina was on her knees beside Georgie's crib,
smoothing his fat hands, when Helen came up
with a waiter delicately spread. He looked
most beautiful, like some strong cherub who was
made without taint. The sister lifted her up
and put her food before her, bound up her loose
hair, and held her reassuringly upon a firm,
hopeful bosom.
“Try to eat,” begged Helen. “The darkest
days will pass away. And whatever comes,
darling,” continued Helen, on her knees feeding
her charge; “beef and buttered bread as well
as that morsel of jelly.”
Nina's heart rose up in her throat. She was
obedient. She smoothed Helen's cheeks with
her thin, trembling hands, trying, in her still,
intense fashion, to make Helen feel her love.
George turned in his sleep and tossed one
round leg over the crib rail. His mother
caught her breath with a dry sob.
“Oh, Helen, he said the child isn't mine!
He said the law gives a child to the father!”
“Never fret about the law,” faced Helen
stoutly. “I'll search all that out to-morrow
morning. Law protects, it doesn't rob!”
“Those men who make the law,” Nina went
on brokenly, half revealing, half hiding her
heart's secrets, “how could they separate a
child from his mother, even when she can obey
the child's father no longer? Ah, whose was
he when nobody but I knew that he was coming
from God to me? I loved him then and afterward;
when George was gone; before you
came; when the child was so little and I so ignorant;
and he fretted and woke me much of
nights. I kissed him for the very trouble he
gave, and loved him! Oh, my lamb! Oh,
Helen, can any one understand?”
“And yet, if I do not obey his father now—
take him away—oh, Helen! Helen! Helen!”
Her little figure shuddered unceasingly in
Helen's arms. Her low, strangled utterances
were more woful than loud lamentations.
They said very little more. They knew not
what to say to each other. Women of different
casts, in such circumstances, might have spouted
forth burning denunciations against G. Guest,
Esq., the social system, and mankind in general.
These two merely hung closer together, each
striving after her peculiar sort of self-control,
and the elder trying to engineer a mental track
through this trouble as she had engineered
through every other trouble she ever met. Both
recognized Nina's hard fate. When bad men
tangle their lives in other lives the innocent
suffer.
Helen put the two children to rest—Nina and
Nina's baby—turned the light low, and sat
down beside Nina's head to continue her engineering,
and occasionally to kiss the heavy
purple veins on the front of that head.
“Little love!” murmured Helen Dimmock,
brooding over her child-sister, “will the law let
this man, who has robbed you of everything else,
take your child, too?”
| CHAPTER VIII.
THE CHILD. A woman in armor | |