Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/77

Rh prehend the situation, sweetened the tea, and spread the bread for her mistress with her own hands, and then gave her a piece of her mind as to the sinfulness of playing with her health for the sake of a few coppers, and assuring her it was what she never expected from the likes of her! Elisabetta cried a little, but where was the use, when Nora was inexorable? So she lost no time in casting about her for some other method of effecting her designs; yet where was the use again? She never bought herself anything, so she could not save there, and Nora would not let her hurt her eyes sitting in the dark to spare candles. But Providence helps those that help themselves, and one day she sallied out to the shops when Nora was off guard, and came home with her arms full of split zephyr and crochet needles, and directions for shells and scallops, and busied herself, till hands and brain and back ached alike, over fancy articles in German wools, for which the shopmen paid her a pittance of a price. It cost her an effort to ask for the work, she had a world of pride, and felt that she brought some degradation to all the dead and gone dust, to her husband, to her child, in taking pay for handiwork. So, to make a just equipoise in the matter, she had soup in the old silver punch bowl at dinner, and lifted a cover chased with armorial bearings from the rye pudding which she ate off a china plate worth ten times its weight in gold. Nora could not gainsay this new arrangement, for she never knew exactly but that this work was a gift for some friend, nor could she exactly tell when one piece was finished and another was begun; she remonstrated, indeed, against the continued employment, but here Elisabetta was firm, and when Nora declared that if she made herself sick with her folderols she might get a nurse where she could, she put her work away, and rose after Nora was too deeply asleep to dream, that she might finish it. She worked as constantly as people work for bread; she was interrupted by illness, by rheumatic joints, by fingers too much drawn up to handle the needle; it took three years before she counted a hundred dollars for her wages—all was laid by in silver pieces that, to her eyes, seemed to cast a glory around the room. At length, when another year was numbered, she carried back the last bit to the shopman, put away her crochet needle, and took her bag of dollars to the bank herself that she might draw a cheque for their amount in form. Some weeks afterward, there hung upon the chief side of her parlor wall a proclamation engraved and illuminated with copper-plate and black letter and flourishes, a wonder of parchment, printing press, and penmanship, framed in an elaborate carving of thorns and thistles. This parchment had cost her the hundred silver dollars; the frame had cost her nearly half as much again; it was the certificate of a life membership for her son Sebastian, in the Foreign Missionary Society. A cartoon of Raphael's, filling