Faith Gartney's GirlhoodWhitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
General
Faith Gartney's Girlhood
Whitney, A. D. T. (Adeline Dutton Train)
Teenage girls -- Juvenile fiction
She shut the window, softly, afraid of the sounds herself might make.
She opened the double doors from the countingroom, and stood on the
outer threshold, and looked into the mill. The heavy looms were still.
They stood like great, dead creatures, smitten in the midst of busy
motion. There was an awfulness in being here, the only breathing, moving
thing--in darkness--where so lately had been the deafening hum of
rolling wheels, and clanking shafts, and flying shuttles, and busy,
moving human figures. It was as if the world itself were stopped, and
she forgotten on its mighty, silent course.
Should she find her way to the great bell, ring it, and make an alarm?
She thought of this; and then she reasoned with herself that she was
hardly so badly off, as to justify her, quite, in doing that. It would
rouse the village, it would bring Mr. Rushleigh down, perhaps--it would
cause a terrible alarm. And all that she might be spared a few hours
longer of loneliness and discomfort. She was safe. It would soon be
morning.
The mill would be opened early. She would go back to the sofa, and try
to sleep again. Nobody could be anxious about her. The Rushleighs
supposed her to be at Cross Corners. Her aunt would think her detained
at Lakeside. It was really no great matter. She would be brave, and
quiet.
So she shut the double doors again, and found a coat of Paul's, or Mr.
Rushleigh's, in the closet of the countingroom, and lay down upon the
sofa, covering herself with that.
For an hour or more, her heart throbbed, her nerves were excited, she
could not sleep. But at last she grew calmer, her thought wandered from
her actual situation--became indistinct--and slumber held her again,
dreamily.
There was another sleeper, also, in the mill whom Faith knew nothing of.
Michael Garvin, the night watchman--the same whose child had been ill
the night before--when Faith came out into the loom chamber, had left it
but a few minutes, going his silent round within the building, and
recording his faithfulness by the half-hour pin upon the watch clock.
Six times he had done this, already. It was half past ten.
He had gone up, now, by the stairs from the weaving room, into the third
story. These stairs ascended at the front, from within the chamber.
Michael Garvin went on nearly to the end of the room above--stopped, and
looked out at a window. All still, all safe apparently.
He was very tired. What harm in lying down somewhere in a corner, for
five minutes? He need not shut his eyes. He rolled his coat up for a
pillow, and threw it against the wall beneath the window. The next
instant he had stretched his stalwart limbs along the floor, and before
ten minutes of his seventh half hour were spent--long before Faith, who
thought herself all alone in the great building, had lost consciousness
of her strange position--he was fast asleep.
Fast asleep, here, in the third story!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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