she had watched up in her cold room, why she had not sat down-stairs where it was warm, and let Jim ring the door-bell. Ellen liked Jim Tenny, but there was often that in her aunt's eyes regarding him which made Ellen look past him and above him to see if there was another man there. Ellen heard the fire crackling in the parlor-stove, and saw the light shining under the parlor threshold, and heard the soft hum of voices. Her mother, having finished washing up the supper dishes, came in presently and seated herself beside the lamp with her needle-work.
“You don't feel any wind comin' in the window?” she said, anxiously, to Ellen.
“No, ma'am,” replied Ellen.
Andrew looked up quickly. “You're sure you don't?” he said.
“No, sir.”
Ellen watched her mother sewing out in the snowy yard, then a dark shadow came between the reflection and the window, then another. Two men treading in the snow in even file, one in the other's foot-tracks, came into the yard.
“Somebody's comin',” said Ellen, as a knock, came on the side door.
“Did you see who 'twas?” Fanny asked, starting up.
“Two men.”
“It's somebody to see you, Andrew,” Fanny said, and Andrew tossed his paper on the table and went to the door.
When the door was opened Ellen heard a man cough.
“I should think anybody was crazy to come out such a night as this, coughin' that way,” murmured Fanny. “I do believe it's Joe Atkins; sounds like his cough.” Then Andrew entered with the two men stamping and shaking themselves.
“Here's Joseph Atkins and Nahum Beals,” Andrew said, in his melancholy voice, all unstirred by the usual warmth of greeting. The two men bowed stiffly.
“Good-evenin',” Fanny said, and rose and pushed forward the rocking-chair in which she had been seated to Joseph Atkins, who was a consumptive man with an invalid wife, and worked next Andrew in Lloyd's.
“Keep your settin', keep your settin',” he returned in his quick, nervous way, as if his very words were money for dire need, and sat himself down in a straight chair far from the fire. The other man, Nahum Beals, was very young. He seated himself next to Joseph, and the two side by side looked with gloomy significance at Andrew and Fanny. Then Joseph Atkins burst out suddenly in a rattling volley of coughs.
“You hadn't ought to come out such a night as this, I'm afraid, Mr. Atkins,” said Fanny.
“He's been out jest as bad weather as this all winter,” said the young man, Nahum Beals, in an unexpectedly deep voice. “The workers of this world can't afford to take no account of weather. It's for the rich folks to look out betwixt their lace curtains and see if it looks lowery, so they sha'n't git their gold harnesses and their shiny carriages, an' their silks an' velvets an' ostrich feathers wet. The poor folks that it's life and death to have to go out whether or no, no matter if they've got an extra suit of clothes or not. They've got to go out through the drenchin' rain and the snow-drifts, to earn money so that the rich folks can have them gold-plated harnesses and them silks and velvets. Joe's been out all winter in weather as bad as this, after he's been standin' all day in a shop as hot as hell, drenched with sweat. One more time won't make much difference.”
“It would be 'nough sight better for me if it did,” said Joseph Atkins, chokingly, and still with that same seeming of hurry.
Fanny had gone out to the dining-room, and now she returned stirring some whiskey and molasses in a cup.
“Here,” said she, “you take this, Mr. Atkins; it's real good for a cough. Andrew cured a cold with it last month.”
“Mine ain't a cold, and it can't be cured in this world, but it's better for me, I guess,” said Joe Atkins, chokingly, but he took the cup.
“Now, you hadn't ought to talk so,” Fanny said. “You had ought to think of your wife and children.”
“My life is insured,” said Joseph Atkins.
“We ain't got no money and no jewelry, and no silver to leave them we love—all we've got to leave 'em is the price of our own lives,” said Nahum Beals.
“I wish I had got my life insured,” Andrew said.
“Don't talk so, Andrew,” Fanny cried, with a shudder.
“My life is insured for two thousand dollars,” Joe Atkins said, with an odd sort of pride. “I had it done three years ago. My lungs was sound as anybody's then, but that very next summer I worked up under that tin roof, and came out as wet as if I'd been dipped in the river, into an east wind, and got a chill. It was the only time I ever struck luck—to get insured before that happened. Nobody'd look at me now, and I dunno what they'd do. I 'ain't laid up a cent, I've had so much sickness in my family.”
“If you hadn't worked that summer in the annex under that tin roof, you'd be as well as you ever was now,” said Nahum Beals.
“I worked there 'longside of you that summer,” said Andrew to Joe, with bitter reminiscence. “We used to strip like a gang of convicts, and we stood in pools of sweat. It was that awful hot summer, and the room had only that one row of windows facing the east, and the wind never that way.”
“Not till I came out of the shop that night I took the chill,” said Joe.
Suddenly the young man, Nahum Beals, hit his knees a sounding slap, which made Ellen, furtively and timidly attentive at her window, jump. “It seems sometimes as if the Almighty himself was in league with 'em,” he shouted out, “but I tell you it won't last, it won't last.”
“I don't see much sign of any change for the better,” Andrew said, gloomily.
“I tell you, sir, it won't last,” repeated Nahum Beals. “I tell you, the Lord only raises 'em up higher and higher that He may dash 'em lower when the time comes. The same earth is beneath the high places of this life, and the lowly ones, and the law that governs 'em is the same, and—the higher the place the longer the fall, and the longer the fall the sorer the hurt.” Nahum Beals sprang to his feet with a strange abandon of self-consciousness and a fiery impetus for one of his New England blood. He had a delicate, nervous face, like a woman's, his blue eyes gleamed like blue flames under his overhang of white forehead, he shook his head as if it were maned like a lion, and, though he wore his thin, fair hair short, one could seem to see it flung back in glistening lines. He spread his hands as if he were addressing an audience, and as he did so the parlor door opened and Jim Tenny and Eva stood there, listening.
“I tell you, sir,” shouted Nahum Beals, “the time will come when you will all thank God that you belong to the poor and down-trodden of this earth, and not to the rich and great—the time will come. There's knives to sharpen to-day, and wood for scaffolds as plenty as in the days of the French Revolution, and the hand that marks the time of day on the clock of men's patience with wrong and oppression has near gone round to the same hour and minute.”
Andrew Brewster looked at him, with a curious expression half of disgust, half of sympathy. His sense of dignity in the face of adversity inherited from his New England race was shocked; he was not one to be blindly swayed by another's fervor even when his own wrongs were in question. He would not have made a good follower in a revolution, nor a leader.
