"RebeccaHardingDavis-LifeInTheIronMills" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Rebecca Harding)

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