Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few minutes later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last glance at the shop, she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling haste.
The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds that would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an occasional snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its meanest and most neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly troubled by any untidiness for which she was not responsible, it seemed to wear a singularly friendly aspect.
A few minutes’ walk brought her to the market where Evelina made her purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical fitness, Mr. Ramy must also deal.
Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato-barrels and flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-aproned butcher who stood in the background cutting chops.
As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales, blood and sawdust, he laid aside his cleaver and not unsympathetically asked: “Sister sick?”
“Oh, not very—jest a cold,” she answered, as guiltily as if Evelina’s illness had been feigned. “We want a steak as usual, please—and my sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as good a cut as if it was her,” she added with childlike candour.
“Oh, that’s all right.” The butcher picked up his weapon with a grin. “Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us,” he remarked.
In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut and wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed steps toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by such conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a deaf old lady in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her opportunity.
“Wait on her first, please,” Ann Eliza whispered. “I ain’t in any hurry.”
The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza, palpitating in the back of the shop, saw that the old lady’s hesitations between liver and pork chops were likely to be indefinitely prolonged. They were still unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy Irish girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently as intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on returning to the beginning of her complicated order, and weighing anew, with an anxious appeal to the butcher’s arbitration, the relative advantages of pork and liver. But even her hesitations, and the intrusion on them of two or three other customers, were of no avail, for Mr. Ramy was not among those who entered the shop; and at last Ann Eliza, ashamed of staying longer, reluctantly claimed her steak, and walked home through the thickening snow.
Even to her simple judgment the vanity of her hopes was plain, and in the clear light that disappointment turns upon our actions she wondered how she could have been foolish enough to suppose that, even if Mr. Ramy DID go to that particular market, he would hit on the same day and hour as herself.
There followed a colourless week unmarked by farther incident. The old stocking cured Evelina’s throat, and Mrs. Hawkins dropped in once or twice to talk of her baby’s teeth; some new orders for pinking were received, and Evelina sold a bonnet to the lady with puffed sleeves. The lady with puffed sleeves—a resident of “the Square,” whose name they had never learned, because she always carried her own parcels home—was the most distinguished and interesting figure on their horizon. She was youngish, she was elegant (as the title they had given her implied), and she had a sweet sad smile about which they had woven many histories; but even the news of her return to town—it was her first apparition that year—failed to arouse Ann Eliza’s interest. All the small daily happenings which had once sufficed to fill the hours now appeared to her in their deadly insignificance; and for the first time in her long years of drudgery she rebelled at the dullness of her life. With Evelina such fits of discontent were habitual and openly proclaimed, and Ann Eliza still excused them as one of the prerogatives of youth. Besides, Evelina had not been intended by Providence to pine in such a narrow life: in the original plan of things, she had been meant to marry and have a baby, to wear silk on Sundays, and take a leading part in a Church circle. Hitherto opportunity had played her false; and for all her superior aspirations and carefully crimped hair she had remained as obscure and unsought as Ann Eliza. But the elder sister, who had long since accepted her own fate, had never accepted Evelina’s. Once a pleasant young man who taught in Sunday-school had paid the younger Miss Bunner a few shy visits. That was years since, and he had speedily vanished from their view. Whether he had carried with him any of Evelina’s illusions, Ann Eliza had never discovered; but his attentions had clad her sister in a halo of exquisite possibilities.
Ann Eliza, in those days, had never dreamed of allowing herself the luxury of self-pity: it seemed as much a personal right of Evelina’s as her elaborately crinkled hair. But now she began to transfer to herself a portion of the sympathy she had so long bestowed on Evelina. She had at last recognized her right to set up some lost opportunities of her own; and once that dangerous precedent established, they began to crowd upon her memory.
It was at this stage of Ann Eliza’s transformation that Evelina, looking up one evening from her work, said suddenly: “My! She’s stopped.”
Ann Eliza, raising her eyes from a brown merino seam, followed her sister’s glance across the room. It was a Monday, and they always wound the clock on Sundays.
“Are you sure you wound her yesterday, Evelina?”
“Jest as sure as I live. She must be broke. I’ll go and see.”
Evelina laid down the hat she was trimming, and took the clock from its shelf.
“There—I knew it! She’s wound jest as TIGHT—what you suppose’s happened to her, Ann Eliza?”
“I dunno, I’m sure,” said the elder sister, wiping her spectacles before proceeding to a close examination of the clock.
With anxiously bent heads the two women shook and turned it, as though they were trying to revive a living thing; but it remained unresponsive to their touch, and at length Evelina laid it down with a sigh.
“Seems like somethin’ DEAD, don’t it, Ann Eliza? How still the room is!”
“Yes, ain’t it?”
“Well, I’ll put her back where she belongs,” Evelina continued, in the tone of one about to perform the last offices for the departed. “And I guess,” she added, “you’ll have to step round to Mr. Ramy’s tomorrow, and see if he can fix her.”
Ann Eliza’s face burned. “I—yes, I guess I’ll have to,” she stammered, stooping to pick up a spool of cotton which had rolled to the floor. A sudden heart-throb stretched the seams of her flat alpaca bosom, and a pulse leapt to life in each of her temples.
That night, long after Evelina slept, Ann Eliza lay awake in the unfamiliar silence, more acutely conscious of the nearness of the crippled clock than when it had volubly told out the minutes. The next morning she woke from a troubled dream of having carried it to Mr. Ramy’s, and found that he and his shop had vanished; and all through the day’s occupations the memory of this dream oppressed her.
It had been agreed that Ann Eliza should take the clock to be repaired as soon as they had dined; but while they were still at table a weak-eyed little girl in a black apron stabbed with innumerable pins burst in on them with the cry: “Oh, Miss Bunner, for mercy’s sake! Miss Mellins has been took again.”
Miss Mellins was the dressmaker upstairs, and the weak-eyed child one of her youthful apprentices.
Ann Eliza started from her seat. “I’ll come at once. Quick, Evelina, the cordial!”
By this euphemistic name the sisters designated a bottle of cherry brandy, the last of a dozen inherited from their grandmother, which they kept locked in their cupboard against such emergencies. A moment later, cordial in hand, Ann Eliza was hurrying upstairs behind the weak-eyed child.