Life in the Iron-Mills | Page 6

below the city-limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from
standing twelve hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk
to take this man his supper, though at every square she sat down to rest,
and she knew she should receive small word of thanks.
Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist's eye, the picturesque oddity of
the scene might have made her step stagger less, and the path seem
shorter; but to her the mills were only "summat deilish to look at by

night."
The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock,
which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder- covered road,
while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills
for rolling iron are simply immense tent- like roofs, covering acres of
ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on
a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every
horrible form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames
writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons filled with
boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches stirring the strange
brewing; and through all, crowds of half- clad men, looking like
revengeful ghosts in the red light, hurried, throwing masses of glittering
fire. It was like a street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept
through, "looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,--in more ways than one.
She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on a
furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went behind the
furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him, and they noticed
her only by a "Hyur comes t'hunchback, Wolfe."
Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and her
teeth chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her clothes and
dripped from her at every step. She stood, however, patiently holding
the pail, and waiting.
"Hout, woman! ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the
fire,"--said one of the men, approaching to scrape away the ashes.
She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned, hearing the
man, and came closer.
"I did no' think; gi' me my supper, woman.
She watched him eat with a painful eagerness. With a woman's quick
instinct, she saw that he was not hungry,--was eating to please her. Her
pale, watery eyes began to gather a strange light.
"Is't good, Hugh? T' ale was a bit sour, I feared."
"No, good enough." He hesitated a moment. "Ye're tired, poor lass!
Bide here till I go. Lay down there on that heap of ash, and go to
sleep."
He threw her an old coat for a pillow, and turned to his work. The heap
was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard bed; the
half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs, dulling their pain

and cold shiver.
Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty
rag,--yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless
discomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one looked deeper into the
heart of things, at her thwarted woman's form, her colorless life, her
waking stupor that smothered pain and hunger,--even more fit to be a
type of her class. Deeper yet if one could look, was there nothing worth
reading in this wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a
soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce
jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one human being whom
she loved, to gain one look of real heart- kindness from him? If
anything like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull,
washed-out-looking face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its
faint signs: not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he
was kind to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that
swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way. She knew that.
And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy
and vacancy more than her low, torpid life. One sees that dead, vacant
look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women's faces,--in the
very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer's day; and then one can
guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the
delicate laces and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy,
no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to
gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no one
guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.
She lay quiet in the dark corner,