Faith Gartneys Girlhood | Page 8

with a grand, unconscious patience. She scoured her knives; she
shuffled along the streets on hasty errands; she went up and down the
house in her small menial duties; she put on and off her coarse,
repulsive clothing; she uttered herself in her common, ignorant forms
of speech; she showed only as a poor, low, little Irish girl with red hair
and staring, wondering eyes, and awkward movements, and a
frightened fashion of getting into everybody's way; and yet, behind all
this, there was another life that went on in a hidden beauty that you and
I cannot fathom, save only as God gives the like, inwardly, to
ourselves.
When Glory's mistress cut her hair, there were always tears and
rebellion. It was her one, eager, passionate longing, in these childish
days, that these locks of hers should be let to grow. She thought she
could almost bear anything else, if only this stiff, unseemly crop might
lengthen out into waves and ringlets that should toss in the wind like
the carefully kempt tresses of children she met in the streets. She
imagined it would be a complete and utter happiness just once to feel it

falling in its wealth about her shoulders or dropping against her cheeks;
and to be able to look at it with her eyes, and twist her fingers in it at
the ends. And so, when it got to be its longest, and began to make itself
troublesome about her forehead, and to peep below her shabby bonnet
in her neck, she had a brief season of wonderful enjoyment in it. Then
she could "make believe" it had really grown out; and the comfort she
took in "going through the motions"--pretending to tuck behind her ears
what scarcely touched their tips, and tossing her head continually, to
throw back imaginary masses of curls, was truly indescribable, and
such as I could not begin to make you understand.
"Half-witted monkey!" Mrs. Grubbling would ejaculate,
contemptuously, seeing, with what she conceived marvelous
penetration, the half of her little servant's thought, and so pronouncing
from her own half wit. Then the great shears came out, and the instinct
of grace and beauty in the child was pitilessly outraged, and her soul
mutilated, as it were, in every clip of the inexorable shears.
She was always glad--poor Glory--when the springtime came. She took
Bubby and Baby down to the Common, of a May Day, to see the
processions and the paper-crowned queens; and stood there in her
stained and drabbled dress, with the big year-and-a-half-old baby in her
arms, and so quite at the mercy of Master Herbert Clarence, who
defiantly skipped oft down the avenues, and almost out of her
sight--she looking after him in helpless dismay, lest he should get a
splash or a tumble, or be altogether lost; and then what would the
mistress say? Standing there so--the troops of children in their holiday
trim passing close beside her--her young heart turned bitter for a
moment, as it sometimes would; and her one utterance of all that
swelled her martyr soul broke forth:
"Laws a me! Sech lots of good times in the world, and I ain't in 'em!"
Yet, that afternoon, when Mrs. Grubbling went out shopping, and left
her to her own devices with the children, how jubilantly she trained the
battered chairs in line, and put herself at the head, with Bubby's scarlet
tippet wreathed about her upstart locks, and made a May Day!

I say, she had the soul and essence of the very life she seemed to miss.
There were shabby children's books about the Grubbling domicile, that
had been the older child's--Cornelia's--and had descended to Master
Herbert, while yet his only pastime in them was to scrawl them full of
pencil marks, and tear them into tatters. These, one by one, Glory
rescued, and hid away, and fed upon, piecemeal, in secret. She could
read, at least--this poor, denied unfortunate. Peter McWhirk had taught
his child her letters in happy, humble Sundays and holidays long ago;
and Mrs. Grubbling had begun by sending her to a primary school for a
while, irregularly, when she could be spared; and when she hadn't just
torn her frock, or worn out her shoes, or it didn't rain, or she hadn't been
sent of an errand and come back too late--which reasons, with a
multitude of others, constantly recurring, reduced the school days in the
year to a number whose smallness Mrs. Grubbling would have
indignantly disputed, had it been calculated and set before her; she
being one of those not uncommon persons who regard a duty
continually evaded as one continually performed, it being necessarily
just as much on their minds; till, at last, Herbert had a winter's illness,
and in summer it wasn't worth