University of Virginia Library

Whatever there is to tell you this time
is the quiet close of a stormy epoch in our
family history, — rich in wrecks, like all stormy
things.

I believe it is a month to-day since the poor
unwelcome baby, for whom we have all suffered,
and through whom we have all learned so much,
was buried.

He had been with us just a year. I see, now
that we are out of it, better than I did while we
were in it, what a trying year it was to his
mother, and to us for his mother's sake. So
alarming perils grow when they are over!

Eunice, I think, was in considerable peril, not
only of direct social degradation, but of that
exceeding bitterness of spirit which only social
degradation can incite, and which, in a life so

young as Eunice's, is a sadder thing than death.
How she stands related to the first of these
dangers is a problem as yet in process of solution,
perhaps. The second has passed her by,
and left her the serenity of a statue in inclement
weather.

As you know, she remained, by my decided
advice, at her desk in school. Christina and I
between us managed to keep the boy at home,
and happy, while she was gone.

With a courage which nothing but conscious
whiteness could have given her, the poor girl
braved for weeks the unhinged tongues of every
gossip, every anxious parent, every responsible
trustee in Gower. The retention of her position
raised a furious storm. Twice she wrote and
signed her resignation; twice and again Mr.
Hobbs (the queer little grocer, — do you remember
him?) — Mr. Hobbs and the doctor between
them over-urged, over-argued, overawed, — I do
not know which or how; but the resignation
never went in; the committee never asked for it.

The school thinned, dwindled. Gower grumbled,
growled. The poor little teacher paled and
trembled, but tied up her white face in her

veil every day, and marched off bravely to her
post.

So far she has held it like a sentinel. At the
time of her child's death her desks were full
again, and the public knew it, and the public
went about its business, and let her alone. It
is some time since I have heard anything about
the safety of the public morals, or the future of
the infant mind. Alarmed parents have been
thrown off their guard, trustees and committees
have grown serene.

This change has been brought about on simple
business grounds.

“If you don't give it up,” said Mr. Hobbs,
“Gower will stand upon its own feet, and look
out for its p's and q's. It 's for Gower's advantage
to keep you in that grammar school, and
Gower will find it out.”

Apparently Gower found out, in Gower's own
convenient season, that, in spite of itself, the grammar-school
prospered. This seemed to be owing
primarily to Miss Trent's personal influence over
the children; and I must say this, now and
here, for Eunice, — her influence over children is
a remarkable one. This has surprised me, because

she has exhibited so little instinctive maternal
fondness for her own child. I have sometimes
fancied that it was the conscious want of
this which has made her so studiously tender of
all children.

It is certain that her scholars have evinced,
both before and since her acknowledgment of
little Kent, an affection for her, and belief in
her, unusual both in amount and kind. She has
a rare moulding power, as nearly as I can judge,
and a patience in finish, not common to the trade;
has contrived to make herself interested in the
children from their souls to their stockings; has
become their confidante, friend; and —

“Has raised the standard of scholarship,” Dr.
Burtis adds, “forty per cent within a year.”

I have been told one other thing of Eunice,
which has not in the least surprised me, but has
given me a genuine unsanctified sense of individual
triumph over public opinion. Certain true-hearted,
clear-eyed mothers — relenting and respecting
— are whispering to each other that
the outcast girl, whom they virtuously passed
by upon the other side, has been diligent in
effecting that most intricate and delicate of

educational “objects,” — the purity of a school
of little children.

“Beb has gone back, — yes,” said little Beb
White's mother yesterday to me. “And I
begged her teacher's pardon when I sent her,
— yes, I did. Folks may say what folks like!
I 've heard that as makes me ready — and not
ashamed of it neither — to trust my child to
Eunice Trent quick as I would to her own
mother, God bless her!”

Excitement and care together have worn upon
Eunice through the year. Her blind headaches
have increased, and she has a curious
pulse, which puzzles the doctor. Her child's
sickness found her weak, and left her weaker.
Just now she is unfit for work, and at home.

The relations between Eunice and her child
were singular; death has softened quite as much
as it has saddened them.

In every maternal duty she was faithful to
punctiliousness. Whether she blacked his shoes
or heard his prayers, she did it with an eye
single to little Kent. She taught him, caressed
him, watched him. She took extreme pains that
he should never be permitted to feel that she was

ashamed of him; sometimes, I fancied, took him
to walk when the streets were crowded for no
other reason.

“The boy shall be as happy as he can,” she
sadly said.

The boy was, I think, happy enough; grew
just as fond of her as if he had been better loved,
poor little fellow! fondled her, trotted after her,
cried for her. Eunice never repelled, never neglected
him. Yet sometimes when he climbed up
into her lap and laid his little face against her
cheek, “to love mamma,” it made my heart ache
to see how patient, smiling, and still “mamma”
would sit; to notice the absence of all the little
silly, motherly ways and words that happy mothers
kiss into a baby's opening life.

Sometimes, when the child was asleep, she used
to sit and watch him with a certain brooding,
unloving, yet very anxious look, inexpressibly
mournful to me.

“Eunice,” I said one day, “can't we manage
to love the little fellow?”

“He shall not know it if I cannot,” she answered,
huskily. I did not know which to pity
more, the child or mother.

He never did know it, poor baby! To the
last he clung to her, and cried for her; to the last
she watched and caressed him. When scarlet
fever of the worst type (it is supposed that
Eunice brought the infection from little Beb
White's sister, with whom she had watched)
struck the child down, his mother was all that
any mother could have been.

“Should have thought she was fond of him, if
I did n't know better,” said the doctor.

The disease was of the short, sure, malignant
kind. Dr. Burtis told us from the first that the
child would die, though he treated him with
great skill and kindness. Eunice, I think, never
believed this; expected him to live with that
dogged persistency which may indicate either
hope or fear with equal aptness. Once I found
her by his bedside upon her knees.

“For what are you praying, Eunice?” She
raised a perplexed face.

“I do not want him to die! I do not want
him to die! I was praying — I believe I was
praying that I might be able to pray for my
child's life.”

Did she? Who can say? It would be pleasant

to think that the child took with him the
sweetness of one genuine, hearty, mother's longing
for his stay. I noticed, that, as he grew
sicker, Eunice's tenderness deepened in manifold
little ways; grew into a thing so like love that
the counterfeit, if counterfeit it were, rang like
coin.

The change — that awful thing which old
nurses call “the gray change” — struck the child
at midnight of the 21st. Eunice, exhausted with
watching, had fallen asleep upon my lounge.
I was reluctant to wake her, as she had not
slept for days and nights before; but the doctor
was imperative about it, and Christina, at his
direction, called and brought her in.

It was a bitter night, with a storm of wind that
had raged since morning, — one of those dry,
savage gales, which, as Mrs. Myrtle would say,
are “so depressing,” — just such a gale as that we
had — perhaps you remember — on the night
when Christina's father died. There has never
been a death in my house which did not occur
in a storm of wind.

I noticed that Eunice noticed it, as she came
in and looked at the child's face. She shivered

a little, looking toward the window, drew her
shawl about her, pushed us all away, and managed
to lift the little boy upon her arm.

Upon her arm, without word, or sign, or struggle,
he died. She had pulled her loose hair down,
or it had fallen, so that it hid both the child's face
and her own.

For some moments after the doctor withdrew
his finger from the pulse, and signed to us that it
was all over, she sat motionless, hiding both
faces in her hair.

It may have come, as Nixy once said, “all
along of the grayness of the room,” or because
of the peculiar effect which that great white
cross, near which I sat, always has upon me;
but all that I could think, as we sat, the doctor,
Christina, and I, waiting for Eunice to move,
was of the tear-washed Feet which once were
wiped with a woman's hair. A Presence stronger
than death stepped in, or so I thought, between
Eunice and the little changed face upon her arm.
And I could see that she wept upon it, kissed it,
before she laid her dead child down before it, and
rose, — for her faith had saved her, — and went
her way in peace.

She placed the little body with great gentleness
upon the pillow, and, with a mournful waste
of tenderness, covered it carefully, and tucked it
up, as if the boy had been going to sleep for the
night.

She looked round upon us all, — a little surprised
and frightened, it seemed, — went to the
window and listened for a moment to the long,
heavy, regular waves of wind that beat upon the
house. It sounded as if the tide of a mighty sea
were up about us; in the distance, where the
thick of the village broke it, there was a noise
like surf.

“It seems a dreadful night — for a baby — to
go out in,” said Eunice, under her breath.

She said nothing more. We led her away to
bed, and she slept till morning.

The wind, with daylight, went down; the
mighty tides ebbed away; the surf changed into
a little sweet sobbing, like that of a child who
cried for joy.

In the calm of the sunrise I went into little
Kent's room to see if all were well.

In some way, when we did not know it, his
mother had got in before me, and sat still and

straight in a chair by the bed, looking the dead
child full in the face.

There was frost upon the windows, and a pink
light in the room, and the great cross, as white
as one, relieved against the other, shone out behind
her. I noticed that, by some chance, one
of Kent's little dressed had been hung upon its
arm, and that a tiny tin horse on wheels stood
upon the base of the solemn thing.

“He looks like me,” said Eunice, suddenly,
without turning her head. “Do you not think
so?”

The little still face, fine and fair with the fineness
and fairness of death, had indeed caught
something, especially about its dubious mouth,
of Eunice's delicate beauty.

“I wonder,” she went on, without waiting for
my answer, “if he will look like me in heaven.
I hope I shall be glad to see him!”

She got up and moved restlessly about the
room, went to the frosty window that the pink
light was melting, and remarked how the wind
had fallen. Coming back, she noticed the dress
and little horse, and where they were. She
stooped to remove them — her hand trembled

— she put them back, and came and sat down
upon the bed, with quivering lips.

“My poor little baby! I might have loved it
— might have —”

There I heard her sob, and there I left her.

Jane Briggs! There is nothing in the world
to cry about; but that is no reason why one
should not cry if one wants to, I suppose?
though it is reason sufficient for not spoiling
several reams of one's best gilt-edged note-paper.
Therefore I am