 | "The Scrubwoman" |  |
5. V
THE scrubwoman darted to her mistress and knelt by her in a passion of anxiety. When Smithers put her roughly on one side and gathered his wife's body into his arms she scratched and struck at him like a cat, with an incoherent burst of objurgation. The man paid no attention to her, carrying his wife down the long hall with an easy strength and disappearing for a moment into a side room.
Belle was still on her knees, a squat figure of hatred, when he emerged again, closed the door after him, and came back down the hall whistling "The Campbells Are Coming." At the entrance to the parlor he looked at her in complete silence till she cringed abjectly. At this he smiled, and said in a tone of finality: "That will be enough from you, Belle. One more such incident and I'll have you dismissed from the apartment and the building. Do you understand?"
She nodded faintly, and started up in a servile haste to answer the door-bell, bringing back a letter which she placed on Mrs. Smithers's desk, saying significantly: "It's for your wife, Mr. Smithers."
He cast her a sidelong look of contemptuous warning and opened the letter with a swift deftness, reading it aloud in an inarticulate mumble, which at times rose into a clear note of scornful emphasis.
"Dear little sister — unexpectedly find we're ordered for — stopping a day in New York — hope you can get down to the vessel — you'll need to start as soon as you get this, for we are to — hope you can manage it, for it will be the last chance in two years!"
The last sentence he read quite distinctly,
At the sound, the scrubwoman sprang toward him, her face convulsed. "Don't you dare tear up that letter from her brother! I'll — I'll —" She struggled to wrest it away in an animal-like frenzy. He struck her from him with a blow so powerful that she reeled to the other side of the room, but, although the action was violent, he did not lose his uncanny smoothness, and held her distant from him and impotently speechless by his cold eye.
"I said, Belle, that another time I would lose my patience with you. That has happened. When you finish your work in this room you will leave the apartment, and you will not come back — either here or to the building." He cut short her paroxysm of horror with a gesture so fierce that she cowered like a whipped dog. "Not a word from you," he said; "I've heard enough. I'm going into the study now, and when I come out I expect you to be gone. And don't dare go near your mistress."
He crossed the room with his graceful, vigorous step, paused at the door, said in his ordinary tone, "Bring me in the rest of that beer, will you," opened the door, and closed it with a resolute jerk back of him.
The movement jarred a picture standing on the floor near the door, and it fell down with a splintering crash of broken glass, which turned the scrubwoman's eye in that direction. There was a moment's silence, and then, without rising from her crouching position, she crept across the floor to where it lay and looked at it dully, making no movement to set it up.
And then suddenly she rose staggering to her feet, rushed heavily to the mantel, and seized the bottle which stood there. With a sort of insane and extravagant haste she emptied its contents and the beer into a glass at the same moment, and reeled across the room to the study, knocking on the door with a hand hysterically shaking. Smithers's hand appeared, took the glass, and the door was again shut. The scrubwoman leaned against the wall with her eyes closed until the sound of a heavy fall was heard from the other room. She recoiled from the wall at this and walked blindly and aimlessly about the room.
A sound of deep groans came through the closed door. The scrubwoman hastened to the entrance into the hall and drew over it a heavy portière.
"Help! Help!" called Smithers's voice faintly. "Help! — I'm poisoned!"
The scrubwoman began taking the scraps of the torn letter out of the waste-paper basket and laying them carefully on Mrs. Smithers's desk.
There was a confused sound of struggle and the crash of an overturned chair. The scrubwoman lifted up the broken picture and put it on the table, standing by it and absently smoothing out a place in the paper torn by the splintered glass.
"Oh, help!" came in a choking gasp from beyond the closed door, and then in a supreme effort, "Alice!"
At the sound of the name the scrubwoman smiled for the first time and stood listening intently.
There was a profound silence. She waited, and then walked softly across the floor to where Mrs. Smithers's shawl was lying across a chair. Still smiling, she held this to her face in a passion of tenderness. "Oh, the poor, dear, good-for-nothing lady!" she said.
| "The Scrubwoman" | |