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Mother Emeritus
by
“Tilly,” said she, “I’ve been in this block, Mrs. Carleton and me, ever since it was built; and, some way, between us we’ve managed to keep the run of all the folks in it; at least when they were in any trouble. We’ve worked together like sisters. She’s ‘Piscopal, and I guess I’m Unitarian; but never a word between us. We tended the Willardses through diphtheria and the Hopkinses through small-pox, and we steamed and fumigated the rooms together. It was her first found out the Dillses were letting that twelve-year-old child run the gasoline stove, and she threatened to tell Mr. Lossing, and they begged off; and when it exploded we put it out together, with flour out of her flour-barrel, for the poor, shiftless things hadn’t half a sack full of their own; and her and me, we took half the care of that little neglected Ellis baby that was always sitting down in the sticky fly-paper, poor innocent child. He’s took the valedictory at the High School, Tilly, now. No, Tilly, I couldn’t bring myself to leave this building, where I’ve married them, and buried them, and born them, you may say, being with so many of their mothers; I feel like they was all my children. Don’t ASK me.”
Tilly’s head went upward and backward with a little dilatation of the nostrils. “Now, mother,” said she in a voice of determined gentleness, “just listen to me. Would I ask you to do anything that wouldn’t be for your happiness? I have found a real pretty house up on Fifteenth Street; and we’ll keep house together, just as cosey; and have a woman come to wash and iron and scrub, so it won’t be a bit hard; and be right on the street-cars; and you won’t have to drudge helping Mrs. Carleton extra times with her restaurant.”
“But, Tilly,” eagerly interrupted Mrs. Louder, “you know I dearly love to cook, and she PAYS me. I couldn’t feel right to take any of the pension money, or the little property your father left me, away from the house expenses; but what I earn myself, it is SUCH a comfort to give away out of THAT.”
Tilly ran over and kissed the agitated face. “You dear, generous mother!” cried she, “I’LL give you all the money you want to spend or give. I got another rise in my salary of five a month. Don’t you worry.”
“You ain’t thinking of doing anything right away, Tilly?”
“Don’t you think it’s best done and over with, after we’ve decided, mother? You have worked so hard all your life I want to give you some ease and peace now.”
“But, Tilly, I love to work; I wouldn’t be happy to do nothing, and I’d get so fleshy!”
Tilly only laughed. She did not crave the show of authority. Let her but have her own way, she would never flaunt her victories. She was imperious, but she was not arrogant. For months she had been pondering how to give her mother an easier life; and she set the table for supper, in a filial glow of satisfaction, never dreaming that her mother, in the kitchen, was keeping her head turned from the stove lest she should cry into the fried ham and stewed potatoes. But, at a sudden thought, Jane Louder laid her big spoon down to wipe her eyes.
“Here you are, Jane Louder”–thus she addressed herself–“mourning and grieving to leave your friends and be laid aside for a useless old woman, and jist be taken care of, and you clean forgetting the chance the Lord gives you to help more’n you ever helped in your life! For shame!”
A smile of exaltation, of lofty resolution, erased the worry lines on her face. “Why, it might be to save twenty lives,” said she; but in the very speaking of the words a sharp pain wrenched her heart again, and she caught up the baby from the floor, where he sat in a wall of chairs, and sobbed over him: “Oh, how can I go away when I got to go for good so soon? I want every minnit!”