Margret Howth: A Story of To-Day | Page 5

dusty
panes and cobwebs of the window, had a sleepy odour of copperas
latent in it. You smelt it when you stirred. The manager, Pike, who
brought her up, had laid the day-books and this ledger open on the desk
for her. As soon as he was gone, she shut the door, listening until his
heavy boots had thumped creaking down the rickety ladder leading to
the frame-rooms. Then she climbed up on the high office-stool
(climbed, I said, for she was a little, lithe thing) and went to work,
opening the books, and copying from one to the other as steadily,
monotonously, as if she had been used to it all her life. Here are the
first pages: see how sharp the angles are of the blue and black lines,
how even the long columns: one would not think, that, as the steel pen
traced them out, it seemed to be lining out her life, narrow and black. If
any such morbid fancy were in the girl's head, there was no tear to
betray it. The sordid, hard figures seemed to her types of the years
coming, but she wrote them down unflinchingly: perhaps life had
nothing better for her, so she did not care. She finished soon: they had
given her only an hour or two's work for the first day. She closed the
books, wiped the pens in a quaint, mechanical fashion, then got down
and examined her new home.
It was soon understood. There were the walls with their broken plaster,
showing the laths underneath, with here and there, over them, sketches
with burnt coal, showing that her predecessor had been an artist in his
way,--his name, P. Teagarden, emblazoned on the ceiling with the
smoke of a candle; heaps of hanks of yarn in the dusty corners; a
half-used broom; other heaps of yarn on the old toppling desk covered
with dust; a raisin-box, with P. Teagarden done on the lid in bas-relief,
half full of ends of cigars, a pack of cards, and a rotten apple. That was
all, except an impalpable sense of dust and worn-outness pervading the
whole. One thing more, odd enough there: a wire cage, hung on the

wall, and in it a miserable pecking chicken, peering dolefully with
suspicious eyes out at her, and then down at the mouldy bit of bread on
the floor of his cage,--left there, I suppose, by the departed Teagarden.
That was all, inside. She looked out of the window. In it, as if set in a
square black frame, was the dead brick wall, and the opposite roof, with
a cat sitting on the scuttle. Going closer, two or three feet of sky
appeared. It looked as if it smelt of copperas, and she drew suddenly
back.
She sat down, waiting until it was time to go; quietly taking the dull
picture into her slow, unrevealing eyes; a sluggish, hackneyed
weariness creeping into her brain; a curious feeling, that all her life
before had been a silly dream, and this dust, these desks and ledgers,
were real,--all that was real. It was her birthday; she was twenty. As she
happened to remember that, another fancy floated up before her, oddly
life-like: of the old seat she made under the currant-bushes at home
when she was a child, and the plans she laid for herself, when she
should be a woman, sitting there,--how she would dig down into the
middle of the world, and find the kingdom of the griffins, or would go
after Mercy and Christiana in their pilgrimage. It was only a little while
ago since these things were more alive to her than anything else in the
world. The seat was under the currant-bushes still. Very little time ago;
but she was a woman now,--and, look here! A chance ray of sunlight
slanted in, falling barely on the dust, the hot heaps of wool, waking a
stronger smell of copperas; the chicken saw it, and began to chirp a
weak, dismal joy, more sorrowful than tears. She went to the cage, and
put her finger in for it to peck at. Standing there, if the vacant life
coming rose up before her in that hard blare of sunlight, she looked at it
with the same still, waiting eyes, that told nothing.
The door opened at last, and a man came in,--Dr. Knowles, the
principal owner of the factory. He nodded shortly to her, and, going to
the desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at her work. An
old man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen mass of flesh, as
he stood erect, facing her.
"You can go now," he said, gruffly. "Tomorrow you must wait for the

bell to ring, and go--with the rest of the hands."
A curious smile flickered over