Faith Gartneys Girlhood | Page 7

to do it, for the ould times, an' for you thinkin' of it! I'll ask
Peter, anyhow!"
And so Glory got her name; and Mattie Hyde, who gave her that, gave
her many another thing that was no less a giving to the mother also,
before she was two years old. Then Mrs. Hyde and the young lady,
having first let the corner house, went away to Europe to stay for years;
and when a box of tokens from the far, foreign lands came back to
Stonebury a while after, there was a grand shawl for Rosa, and a pretty
braided frock for the baby, and a rosary that Glory keeps to this hour,
that had been blessed by the Pope. That was the last. Mattie and her
mother sailed out upon the Mediterranean one day from the bright coast
of France for a far eastern port, to see the Holy Land. God's Holy Land
they did see, though they never touched those Syrian shores, or climbed
the hills about Jerusalem.
Glory remembered--for the most part dimly, for some special points
distinctly--her child life of three years in Stonebury poorhouse. How
her grandmother and an old countrywoman from the same county "at
home" sat knitting and crooning together in a sunny corner of the

common room in winter, or out under the stoop in summer; how she
rolled down the green bank behind the house; and, when she grew big
enough to be trusted with a knife, was sent out to dig dandelions in the
spring, and how an older girl went with her round the village, and sold
them from house to house. How, at last, her old grandmother died, and
was buried; and how a woman of the village, who had used to buy her
dandelions, found a place for her with a relative of her own, in the
ten-mile distant city, who took Glory to "bring up"--"seeing," as she
said, "there was nobody belonging to her to interfere."
Was there a day, after that, that did not leave its searing impress upon
heart and memory, of the life that was given, in its every young pulse
and breath, to sordid toil for others, and to which it seemed nobody on
earth owed aught of care or service in return?
It was a close little house--one of those houses where they have fried
dinners so often that the smell never gets out in Budd Street--a street of
a single side, wedged in between the back yards of more pretentious
mansions that stood on fair parallel avenues sloping down from a
hilltop to the waterside, that Mrs. Grubbling lived in.
Here Glory McWhirk, from eight years old to nearly fifteen, scoured
knives and brasses, tended doorbell, set tables, washed dishes, and
minded the baby; whom, at her peril, she must "keep pacified"--i. e.,
amused and content, while its mother was otherwise busy. For her, poor
child--baby that she still, almost, was herself--who amused, or
contented her? There are humans with whom amusement and content
have nothing to do. What will you? The world must go on.
Glory curled the baby's hair, and made him "look pretty." Mrs.
Grubbling cut her little handmaid's short to save trouble; so that the
very determined yellow locks which, under more favoring
circumstances of place and fortune, might have been trained into lovely
golden curls, stood up continually in their restless reaching after the
fairer destiny that had been meant for them, in the old fuzz-ball fashion;
and Glory grew more and more to justify her name.
Do you think she didn't know what beauty was--this child who never

had a new or pretty garment, but who wore frocks "fadged up" out of
old, faded breadths of her mistress's dresses, and bonnets with brims
cut off and topknots taken down, and coarse shoes, and stockings cut
out of the legs of those whereof Mrs. Grubbling had worn out the
extremities? Do you think she didn't feel the difference, and that it
wasn't this that made her shuffle along so with her toes in, when she
sped along the streets upon her manifold errands, and met
gentle-people's children laughing and skipping their hoops upon the
sidewalks?
Out of all lives, actual and possible, each one of us appropriates
continually into his own. This is a world of hints only, out of which
every soul seizes to itself what it needs.
This girl, uncherished, repressed in every natural longing to be and to
have, took in all the more of what was possible; for God had given her
this glorious insight, this imagination, wherewith we fill up life's scanty
outline, and grasp at all that might be, or that elsewhere, is. In her, as in
us all, it was often--nay, daily--a discontent; yet a noble discontent, and
curbed