Lovey Mary
Copyright© 2024 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 12: Reaction
“Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.”
When the paint and powder had been washed off, and Tommy had with difficulty been extracted from his new trousers and put to bed, Lovey Mary sat before the little stove and thought it all over. It had been the very happiest time of her whole life. How nice it was to be praised and made much of! Mrs. Wiggs had started it by calling everybody’s attention to her good points; then Mrs. Redding had sought her out and shown her continued attention; to-night was the great climax. Her name had been on every tongue, her praises sung on every side, and Billy Wiggs had given her everything he got off the Christmas tree.
“I wisht I deserved it all,” she said, as she got up to pull the blanket closer about Tommy. “I’ve tried to be good. I guess I am better in some ways, but not in all—not in all.” She knelt by the bed and held Tommy’s hand to her cheek. “Sometimes he looks like Kate when he’s asleep like this. I wonder if she’s got well? I wonder if she ever misses him?”
For a long time she knelt there, holding the warm little hand in hers. The play, the success, the applause, were all forgotten, and in their place was a shame, a humiliation, that brought the hot tears to her eyes.
“I ain’t what they think I am,” she whispered brokenly. “I’m a mean, bad girl after all. The canker-worm’s there. Miss Viny said there never would be a sure-’nough beautiful flower till the canker-worm was killed. But I want to be good; I want to be what they think I am!”
Again and again the old thoughts of Kate rose to taunt and madden her. But a new power was at work; it brought new thoughts of Kate, of Kate sick and helpless, of Kate without friends and lonely, calling for her baby. Through the night the battle raged within her. When the first gray streaks showed through the shutters, Lovey Mary cleaned her room and put on her Sunday dress. “I’ll be a little late to the factory,” she explained to Miss Hazy at breakfast, “for I’ve got to go on a’ errand.”
It was an early hour for visitors at the city hospital, but when Lovey Mary stated her business she was shown to Kate’s ward. At the far end of the long room, with her bandaged head turned to the wall, lay Kate. When the nurse spoke to her she turned her head painfully, and looked at them listlessly with great black eyes that stared forth from a face wasted and wan from suffering.
“Kate!” said Lovey Mary, leaning across the bed and touching her hand.
“Kate, don’t you know me?”
The pale lips tightened over the prominent white teeth. “Well, I swan, Lovey Mary, where’d you come from?” Not waiting for an answer, she continued querulously: “Say, can’t you get me out of this hole someway? But even if I had the strength to crawl, I wouldn’t have no place to go. Can’t you take me away? Anywhere would do.”
Lovey Mary’s spirits fell; she had nerved herself for a great sacrifice, had decided to do her duty at any cost; but thinking of it beforehand in her little garret room, with Tommy’s hand in hers, and Kate Rider a mere abstraction, was very different from facing the real issue, with the old, selfish, heartless Kate in flesh and blood before her. She let go of Kate’s hand.
“Don’t you want to know about Tommy?” she asked. “I’ve come to say I was sorry I run off with him.”
“It was mighty nervy in you. I knew you’d take good care of him, though. But say! you can get me away from this, can’t you? I ain’t got a friend in the world nor a cent of money. But I ain’t going to stay here, where there ain’t nothing to do, and I get so lonesome I ‘most die. I’d rather set on a street corner and run a hand-organ. Where are you and Tommy at?”
“We are in the Cabbage Patch,” said Lovey Mary, with the old repulsion strong upon her.
“Where?”
“The Cabbage Patch. It ain’t your sort of a place, Kate. The folks are good and honest, but they are poor and plain. You’d laugh at ‘em.”
Kate turned her eyes to the window and was silent a moment before she said slowly:
“I ain’t got much right to laugh at nobody. I’d be sorter glad to get with good people again. The other sort’s all right when you’re out for fun, but when you’re down on your luck they ain’t there.”
Lovey Mary, perplexed and troubled, looked at her gravely.
“Haven’t you got any place you could go to?”
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