 | CHAPTER VIII.
MISS ASPHYXIA. Oldtown folks |  |
8. CHAPTER VIII.
MISS ASPHYXIA.
“THERE won't be no great profit in this 'ere these ten
year.”
The object denominated “this 'ere” was the golden-haired
child whom we have spoken of before, — the little girl whose
mother lay dying. That mother is dead now; and the thing to
be settled is, What is to be done with the children? The morning
after the scene we have described looked in at the window
and saw the woman, with a pale, placid face, sleeping as one who
has found eternal rest, and the two weeping children striving in
vain to make her hear.
Old Crab had been up early in his design of “carting the 'hull
lot over to the poor-house,” but made a solemn pause when his
wife drew him into the little chamber. Death has a strange dignity,
and whatsoever child of Adam he lays his hand on is for the
time ennobled, — removed from the region of the earthly and
commonplace to that of the spiritual and mysterious. And
when Crab found, by searching the little bundle of the deceased,
that there was actually money enough in it to buy a coffin and
pay 'Zekiel Stebbins for digging the grave, he began to look
on the woman as having made a respectable and edifying end,
and the whole affair as coming to a better issue than he had
feared.
And so the event was considered in the neighborhood, in a
melancholy way, rather an interesting and auspicious one. It
gave something to talk about in a region where exciting topics
were remarkably scarce. The Reverend Jabez Periwinkle
found in it a moving Providence which started him favorably on
a sermon, and the funeral had been quite a windfall to all the
gossips about; and now remained the question, What was to be
done with the children?
“Now that we are diggin' the 'taters,” said old Crab, “that 'ere
chap might be good for suthin', pickin' on 'em out o' the hills.
Poor folks like us can't afford to keep nobody jest to look at, and
so he 'll have to step spry and work smart to airn his keep.” And
so at early dawn, the day after the funeral, the little boy was
roused up and carried into the fields with the men.
But “this 'ere” — that is to say, a beautiful little girl of seven
years — had greatly puzzled the heads of the worthy gossips of
the neighborhood. Miss Asphyxia Smith, the elder sister of old
Crab, was at this moment turning the child round, and examining
her through a pair of large horn spectacles, with a view to “taking
her to raise,” as she phrased it.
Now all Miss Asphyxia's ideas of the purpose and aim of human
existence were comprised in one word, — work. She was
herself a working machine, always wound up and going, — up at
early cock-crowing, and busy till bedtime, with a rampant and
fatiguing industry that never paused for a moment. She conducted
a large farm by the aid of a hired man, and drove a flourishing
dairy, and was universally respected in the neighborhood
as a smart woman.
Latterly, as her young cousin, who had shared the toils of the
house with her, had married and left her, Miss Asphyxia had
talked of “takin' a child from the poor-house, and so raisin' her
own help”; and it was with the view of this “raisin' her help,”
that she was thus turning over and inspecting the little article
which we have spoken of.
Apparently she was somewhat puzzled, and rather scandalized,
that Nature should evidently have expended so much in a merely
ornamental way on an article which ought to have been made
simply for service. She brushed up a handful of the clustering
curls in her large, bony hand, and said, with a sniff, “These 'll
have to come right off to begin with; gracious me, what a tangle!”
“Mother always brushed them out every day,” said the child.
“And who do you suppose is going to spend an hour every day
brushing your hair, Miss Pert?” said Miss Asphyxia. “That
ain't what I take ye for, I tell you. You 've got to learn to work
show you how.”
The little girl did not appear particularly thankful. She bent
her soft, pencilled eyebrows in a dark frown, and her great hazel
eyes had gathering in them a cloud of sullen gloom. Miss Asphyxia
did not mind her frowning, — perhaps did not notice it.
She had it settled in her mind, as a first principle, that children
never liked anything that was good for them, and that, of course,
if she took a child, it would have to be made to come to her by
forcible proceedings promptly instituted. So she set her little
subject before her by seizing her by her two shoulders and squaring
her round and looking in her face, and opened direct conversation
with her in the following succinct manner.
“What 's your name?”
Then followed a resolved and gloomy silence, as the large
bright eyes surveyed, with a sort of defiant glance, the inquisitor.
“Don't you hear?” said Miss Asphyxia, giving her a shake.
“Don't be so ha'sh with her,” said the little old woman. “Say,
my little dear, tell Miss Asphyxia your name,” she added, taking
the child's hand.
“Eglantine Percival,” said the little girl, turning towards the
old woman, as if she disdained to answer the other party in the
conversation.
“Wh—a—t?” said Miss Asphyxia. “If there ain't the beatin'est
name ever I heard. Well, I tell you I ain't got time to
fix my mouth to say all that 'ere every time I want ye, now I
tell ye.”
“Mother and Harry called me Tina,” said the child.
“Teny! Well, I should think so,” said Miss Asphyxia.
“That showed she 'd got a grain o' sense left, anyhow. She 's
tol'able strong and well-limbed for her age,” added that lady,
feeling of the child's arms and limbs; “her flesh is solid. I
think she 'll make a strong woman, only put her to work early
and keep her at it. I could rub out clothes at the wash-tub afore
I was at her age.”
“O, she can do considerable many little chores,” said Old Crab's
wife.
“Yes,” said Miss Asphyxia; “there can a good deal be got out
of a child if you keep at 'em, hold 'em in tight, and never let 'em
have their head a minute; push right hard on behind 'em, and
you get considerable. That 's the way I was raised.”
“But I want to play,” said the little girl, bursting out in a sobbing
storm of mingled fear and grief.
“Want to play, do you? Well, you must get over that. Don't
you know that that 's as bad as stealing? You have n't got any
money, and if you eat folks's bread and butter, you 've got to work
to pay for it; and if folks buy your clothes, you 've got to work to
pay for them.”
“But I 've got some clothes of my own,” persisted the child,
determined not to give up her case entirely.
“Well, so you have; but there ain't no sort of wear in 'em,”
said Miss Asphyxia, turning to Mrs. Smith. “Them two dresses
o' hern might answer for Sundays and sich, but I 'll have to make
her up a regular linsey working dress this fall, and check aprons;
and she must set right about knitting every minute she is n't doing
anything else. Did you ever learn how to knit?”
“No,” said the child.
“Or to sew?” said Miss Asphyxia.
“Yes; mother taught me to sew,” said the child.
“No! Yes! Hain't you learned manners? Do you say yes
and no to people?”
The child stood a moment, swelling with suppressed feeling,
and at last she opened her great eyes full on Miss Asphyxia, and
said, “I don't like you. You ain't pretty, and I won't go with
you.”
“O now,” said Mrs. Smith, “little girls must n't talk so;
that 's naughty.”
“Don't like me? — ain't I pretty?” said Miss Asphyxia, with
a short, grim laugh. “May be I ain't; but I know what I 'm
about, and you 'd as goods know it first as last. I 'm going to
take ye right out with me in the waggin, and you 'd best not have
none of your cuttin's up. I keep a stick at home for naughty
girls. Why, where do you suppose you 're going to get your
livin' if I don't take you?”
“I want to live with Harry,” said the child, sobbing. “Where
is Harry?”
“Harry 's to work, — and there 's where he 's got to be,” said
Miss Asphyxia. “He 's got to work with the men in the fields,
and you 've got to come home and work with me.”
“I want to stay with Harry, — Harry takes care of me,” said
the child, in a piteous tone.
Old Mother Smith now toddled to her milk-room, and, with a
melting heart, brought out a doughnut. “There now, eat that,”
she said; “and mebbe, if you 're good, Miss Asphyxia will bring
you down here some time.”
“O laws, Polly, you allers was a fool!” said Miss Asphyxia.
“It 's all for the child's good, and what 's the use of fussin' on her
up? She 'll come to it when she knows she 's got to. 'T ain't
no more than I was put to at her age, only the child 's been
fooled with and babied.”
The little one refused the doughnut, and seemed to gather herself
up in silent gloom.
“Come, now, don't stand sulking; let me put your bonnet on,”
said Miss Asphyxia, in a brisk, metallic voice. “I can't be losin'
the best part of my day with this nonsense!” And forthwith
she clawed up the child in her bony grasp, as easily as an eagle
might truss a chick-sparrow.
“Be a good little girl, now,” said the little gray woman, who
felt a strange swelling and throbbing in her poor old breast. To
be sure, she knew she was a fool; her husband had told her so at
least three times every day for years; and Miss Asphyxia only
confirmed what she accepted familiarly as the truth. But yet
she could not help these unprofitable longings to coddle and comfort
something, — to do some of those little motherly tendernesses
for children which go to no particular result, only to make
them happy; so she ran out after the wagon with a tempting
seed-cake, and forced it into the child's hand.
“Take it, do take it,” she said; “eat it, and be a good girl, and
do just as she tells you to.”
“I 'll see to that,” said Miss Asphyxia, as she gathered up the
reins and gave a cut to her horse, which started that quadruped
creature in her service — horse, cow, and pig — knew at once
the touch of Miss Asphyxia, and the necessity of being up and
doing when she was behind them; and the horse, who under
other hands would have been the slowest and most reflective of
beasts, now made the little wagon spin and bounce over the
rough, stony road, so that the child's short legs flew up in the air
every few moments.
“You must hold on tight,” was Miss Asphyxia's only comment
on this circumstance. “If you fall out, you 'll break your neck!”
It was a glorious day of early autumn, the sun shining as only
an autumn sun knows how to shine. The blue fields of heaven
were full of fleecy flocks of clouds, drifting hither and thither
at their lazy will. The golden-rod and the aster hung their
plumage over the rough, rocky road; and now and then it wound
through a sombre piece of woods, where scarlet sumachs and
maples flashed out among the gloomy green hemlocks with a
solemn and gorgeous light. So very fair was the day, and so full
of life and beauty was the landscape, that the child, who came of
a beauty-loving lineage, felt her little heart drawn out from under
its burden of troubles, and springing and bounding with that
elastic habit of happiness which seems hard to kill in children.
Once she laughed out as a squirrel, with his little chops swelled
with a nut on each side, sat upon the fence and looked after
them, and then whisked away behind the stone wall; and once
she called out, “O, how pretty!” at a splendid clump of blue
fringed gentian, which stood holding up its hundred azure vases
by the wayside. “O, I do wish I could get some of that!” she
cried out, impulsively.
“Some of what?” said Miss Asphyxia.
“O, those beautiful flowers!” said the child, leaning far out
to look back.
“O, that 's nothing but gentian,” said Miss Asphyxia; “can't
stop for that. Them blows is good to dry for weakness,” she
added. “By and by, if you 're good, mebbe I 'll let you get
some on 'em.”
Miss Asphyxia had one word for all flowers. She called them
far more simple than any botanical system, into two classes;
namely, blows that were good to dry, and blows that were not.
Elder-blow, catnip, hoarhound, hardhack, gentian, ginseng, and
various other vegetable tribes, she knew well and had a great
respect for; but all the other little weeds that put on obtrusive
colors and flaunted in the summer breeze, without any pretensions
to further usefulness, Miss Asphyxia completely ignored.
It would not be describing her state to say she had a contempt
for them: she simply never saw or thought of them at all. The
idea of beauty as connected with any of them never entered her
mind, — it did not exist there.
The young cousin who shared her housework had, to be sure,
planted a few flowers in a corner of the garden; there were some
peonies and pinks and a rose-bush, which often occupied a spare
hour of the girl's morning or evening; but Miss Asphyxia
watched these operations with a sublime contempt, and only calculated
the loss of potatoes and carrots caused by this unproductive
beauty. Since the marriage of this girl, Miss Asphyxia had
often spoken to her man about “clearing out them things”; but
somehow he always managed to forget it, and the thirftless beauties
still remained.
It wanted but about an hour of noon when Miss Asphyxia set
down the little girl on the clean-scrubbed floor of a great kitchen,
where everything was even desolately orderly and neat. She
swung her at once into a chair. “Sit there,” she said, “till I 'm
ready to see to ye.” And then, marching up to her own room,
she laid aside her bonnet, and, coming down, plunged into active
preparations for the dinner.
An irrepressible feeling of desolation came over the child.
The elation produced by the ride died away; and, as she sat
dangling her heels from the chair, and watching the dry, grim form
of Miss Asphyxia, a sort of terror of her began slowly to usurp
the place of that courage which had at first inspired the child to
rise up against the assertion of so uncongenial a power.
All the strange, dreadful events of the last few days mingled
themselves, in her childish mind, in a weird mass of uncomprehended
stiff, lifeless, neither smiling nor speaking nor looking at her; the
people coming to the house, and talking and singing and praying,
and then putting her in a box in the ground, and saying
that she was dead; and then, right upon that, to be torn from
her brother, to whom she had always looked for protection and
counsel, — all this seemed a weird, inexplicable cloud coming
over her heart and darkening all her little life. Where was
Harry? Why did he let them take her? Or perhaps equally
dreadful people had taken him, and would never bring him back
again.
There was a tall black clock in a corner of the kitchen, that
kept its invariable monotone of tick-tack, tick-tack, with a persistence
that made her head swim; and she watched the quick,
decisive movements of Miss Asphyxia with somewhat of the
same respectful awe with which one watches the course of a locomotive
engine.
It was late for Miss Asphyxia's dinner preparations, but she
instituted prompt measures to make up for lost time. She flew
about the kitchen with such long-armed activity and fearful celerity,
that the child began instinctively to duck and bob her little
head when she went by, lest she should hit her and knock her off
her chair.
Miss Asphyxia raked open the fire in the great kitchen chimney,
and built it up with a liberal supply of wood; then she rattled
into the back room, and a sound was heard of a bucket
descending into a well with such frantic haste as only an oaken
bucket under Miss Asphyxia's hands could be frightened into.
Back she came with a stout black iron tea-kettle, which she
hung over the fire; and then, flopping down a ham on the table,
she cut off slices with a martial and determined air, as if she
would like to see the ham try to help itself; and, before the child
could fairly see what she was doing, the slices of ham were in
the frying-pan over the coals, the ham hung up in its place, the
knife wiped and put out of sight, and the table drawn out into
the middle of the floor, and invested with a cloth for dinner.
During these operations the child followed every movement
feature of this wonderful woman.
Miss Asphyxia was tall and spare. Nature had made her, as
she often remarked of herself, entirely for use. She had allowed
for her muscles no cushioned repose of fat, no redundant smoothness
of outline. There was nothing to her but good, strong, solid
bone, and tough, wiry, well-strung muscle. She was past fifty,
and her hair was already well streaked with gray, and so thin
that, when tightly combed and tied, it still showed bald cracks,
not very sightly to the eye. The only thought that Miss Asphyxia
ever had had in relation to the coiffure of her hair was
that it was to be got out of her way. Hair she considered principally
as something that might get into people's eyes, if not
properly attended to; and accordingly, at a very early hour every
morning, she tied all hers in a very tight knot, and then secured
it by a horn comb on the top of her head. To tie this knot so
tightly that, once done, it should last all day, was Miss Asphyxia's
only art of the toilet, and she tried her work every morning by
giving her head a shake, before she left her looking-glass, not unlike
that of an unruly cow. If this process did not start the
horn comb from its moorings, Miss Asphyxia was well pleased.
For the rest, her face was dusky and wilted, — guarded by gaunt,
high cheek-bones, and watched over by a pair of small gray eyes
of unsleeping vigilance. The shaggy eyebrows that overhung
them were grizzled, like her hair.
It would not be proper to say that Miss Asphyxia looked ill-tempered;
but her features could never, by any stretch of imagination,
be supposed to wear an expression of tenderness. They
were set in an austere, grim gravity, whose lines had become more
deeply channelled by every year of her life. As related to her
fellow-creatures, she was neither passionate nor cruel. We have
before described her as a working machine, forever wound up to
high-pressure working-point; and this being her nature, she trod
down and crushed whatever stood in the way of her work, with
as little compunction as if she had been a steam-engine or a
power-loom.
Miss Asphyxia had a full conviction of what a recent pleasant
not given to many words, but it might often be gathered from
her brief discourses that she had always felt herself, so to speak,
sword in hand against a universe where everything was running
to disorder, — everything was tending to slackness, shiftlessness,
unthrift, and she alone was left on the earth to keep things in
their places. Her hired men were always too late up in the
morning, — always shirking, — always taking too long a nap at
noon; everybody was watching to cheat her in every bargain;
her horse, cow, pigs, — all her possessions, — were ready at the
slightest winking of her eye, or relaxing of her watch, to fall
into all sorts of untoward ways and gyrations; and therefore
she slept, as it were, in her armor, and spent her life as a sentinel
on duty.
In taking a child, she had had her eyes open only to one patent
fact, — that a child was an animal who would always be
wanting to play, and that she must make all her plans and calculations
to keep her from playing. To this end she had beforehand
given out word to her brother, that, if she took the girl, the
boy must be kept away. “Got enough on my hands now, without
havin' a boy trainin' round my house, and upsettin' all creation,”
said the grim virgin.
“Wal, wal,” said Old Crab, “'t ain't best; they 'll be a consultin'
together, and cuttin' up didos. I 'll keep the boy tight
enough, I tell you.”
Little enough was the dinner that the child ate that day.
There were two hulking, square-shouldered men at the table,
who stared at her with great round eyes like oxen; and so,
though Miss Asphyxia dumped down Indian pudding, ham, and
fried potatoes before her, the child's eating was scarcely that of
a blackbird.
Marvellous to the little girl was the celerity with which Miss
Asphyxia washed and cleared up the dinner-dishes. How the
dishes rattled, the knives and forks clinked, as she scraped and
piled and washed and wiped and put everything in a trice back
into such perfect place, that it looked as if nothing had ever been
done on the premises!
After this Miss Asphyxia produced thimble, thread, needle,
and scissors, and, drawing out of a closet a bale of coarse blue
home-made cloth, proceeded to measure the little girl for a petticoat
and short gown of the same. This being done to her mind,
she dumped her into a chair beside her, and, putting a brown
towel into her hands to be hemmed, she briefly said, “There,
keep to work”; while she, with great despatch and resolution,
set to work on the little garments aforesaid.
The child once or twice laid down her work to watch the
chickens who came up round the door, or to note a bird which
flew by with a little ripple of song. The first time, Miss Asphyxia
only frowned, and said, “Tut, tut.” The second time,
there came three thumps of Miss Asphyxia's thimble down on
the little head, with the admonition, “Mind your work.” The
child now began to cry, but Miss Asphyxia soon put an end to
that by displaying a long birch rod, with a threatening movement,
and saying succinctly, “Stop that, this minute, or I 'll whip
you.” And the child was so certain of this that she swallowed
her grief and stitched away as fast as her little fingers could go.
As soon as supper was over that night, Miss Asphyxia seized
upon the child, and, taking her to a tub in the sink-room, proceeded
to divest her of her garments and subject her to a most
thorough ablution.
“I 'm goin' to give you one good scrubbin' to start with,” said
Miss Asphyxia; and, truth to say, no word could more thoroughly
express the character of the ablution than the term “scrubbing.”
The poor child was deluged with soap and water, in mouth, nose,
ears, and eyes, while the great bony hands rubbed and splashed,
twisted her arms, turned her ears wrong side out, and dashed on
the water with unsparing vigor. Nobody can tell the torture
which can be inflicted on a child in one of these vigorous old
New England washings, which used to make Saturday night a
terror in good families. But whatever they were, the little martyr
was by this time so thoroughly impressed with the awful
reality of Miss Asphyxia's power over her, that she endured all
with only a few long-drawn and convulsed sighs, and an inaudible
“O dear!”
When well scrubbed and wiped, Miss Asphyxia put on a coarse
homespun nightgown, and, pinning a cloth round the child's neck,
began with her scissors the work of cutting off her hair. Snip,
snip, went the fatal shears, and down into the towel fell bright
curls, once the pride of a mother's heart, till finally the small
head was despoiled completely. Then Miss Asphyxia, shaking
up a bottle of camphor, proceeded to rub some vigorously upon
the child's head. “There,” she said, “that 's to keep ye from
catchin' cold.”
She then proceeded to the kitchen, raked open the fire, and
shook the golden curls into the bed of embers, and stood grimly
over them while they seethed and twisted and writhed, as if they
had been living things suffering a fiery torture, meanwhile picking
diligently at the cloth that had contained them, that no stray
hair might escape.
“I wonder now,” she said to herself, “if any of this will rise
and get into the next pudding?” She spoke with a spice of
bitterness, poor woman, as if it would be just the way things
usually went on, if it did.
She buried the fire carefully, and then, opening the door of a
small bedroom adjoining, which displayed a single bed, she said,
“Now get into bed.”
The child immediately obeyed, thankful to hide herself under
the protecting folds of a blue checked coverlet, and feeling that
at last the dreadful Miss Asphyxia would leave her to herself.
Miss Asphyxia clapped to the door, and the child drew a
long breath. In a moment, however, the door flew open. Miss
Asphyxia had forgotten something. “Can you say your prayers?”
she demanded.
“Yes, ma'am,” said the child.
“Say 'em, then,” said Miss Asphyxia; and bang went the
door again.
“There, now, if I hain't done up my duty to that child, then
I don't know,” said Miss Asphyxia.
| CHAPTER VIII.
MISS ASPHYXIA. Oldtown folks | |