Faith Gartneys Girlhood | Page 8

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 while, and the winter after, baby came, so that of course she couldn't be spared at all; and it seemed little likely now that she ever again would be. But she kept her spelling book, and read over and over what she knew, and groped her way slowly into more, till she promoted herself from that to "Mother Goose"--from "Mother Goose" to "Fables for the Nursery"--and now, her ever fresh and unfailing feast was the "Child's Own Book of Fairy Tales," and an odd volume of the "Parents' Assistant." She picked out, slowly, the gist of these, with a lame and uncertain interpretation. She lived for weeks with Beauty and the Beast--with Cinderella--with the good girl who worked for the witch, and shook her feather bed every morning; till at last, given leave to go home and see her mother, the gold and silver shower came down about her, departing at the back door. Perhaps she should get her pay, some time, and go home and see her mother.
Meanwhile, she identified herself with--lost herself utterly in,--these imaginary lives. She was, for the time, Cinderella; she was Beauty; she was above all, the Fair One with Golden Locks; she was Simple Susan going to be May Queen; she dwelt in the old Castle of Rossmore, with the Irish Orphans. The little Grubbling house in Budd Street was peopled all through, in every corner, with her fancies. Don't tell me she had nothing but her niggardly outside living there.
And the wonder began to come up in her mind, as it did in Faith Gartney's, whether and