Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 February 1894 — MARIA. [ARTICLE]

MARIA.

When Harris went up into the Pennsylvania anthracite mining regions, he was a strong, handsome young fellow of twenty-three, with rose-colored views of this life and sadly vague ones of the life to come. He came from a grassy New England village, where he had lived a frank, free, open-air life about as exciting as a pastoral. He had spent four years at Columbia College, which had opened his eyes a bit, and then he had gone up into big, black Luzerne County, teeming with two hundred thousand people, three-fourths of whom would better have been drowned at their birth like so many blind kittens, some pessimists thought. Words cannot describe the drear misery of a mining “patch” in Northeastern Pennsylvania, was an early conclusion of young Harris. You will come across group after group of black and dingy cabins, strung along like grimy huckleberries on a straw. Back of these looms the “breaker,” a gloomy mass of shadow, blackened by wind and storm that have ground the fine coal-dust Into the planking.' Culm-heaps, mountains of refuse coal and slate, hide tjie natural horizon, and present a sky-line that ig monotonous and uninspiring. Through the hollows, over trestles crossing the black swamp-land, out into the brighter world beyond the hills, crawl Jsytg trains of cars piled high with glistening coal.

It was at a cluster of huts in a valley like this that Harris was stat ioned. He had a room in an ungainly red frame structure where hum and eggs and raisin pie were the staple articles of diet, and which was endurable to him only because two-thirds of his time was spent beyond its pule. The name of this understudy for purgatory was the Mountain Glen Hotel, and it was presided over by one Mrs. Dwyer. Of he had no friends there. There was no one to interest him, and he had not yet learned to interest himself in common, everyday people, whom we often find to be uncommon and unique when we have once discovered the secret of really knowing. The whole world seemed dismally ordinary to Harris. Consequently, when he looked out of the window of his soapy, pine-floored boarding-house one evening, a few weeks after his arrival, and saw a slender female figure with a face t hat was moderately clean and immoderately pretty, he felt that he had made a discovery of some importance. In deference to the summer’s Columbian craze, he called that window for some time the lookout from the Pinta. The girl was Maria (Mah-ree-ah, if you please) di Manicor, and the brimming pail of water she was bringing from the well did not monopolize her attention. She saw Harris. At Columbia, Harris had learned how to look through a transit—if that is the proper expression—and, upon provocation, could talk about “backsights” and “vernier” with the air of a master. From this it will be gathered that Harris was a surveyor. He was more—he was a mining engineer and hod two letters tacked to his name to signify his prowess. Every morning he went into the mines, and, with the aid of a small Welsh boy and a big Hungarian laborer, he would perform prodigies of engineering skill which the layman will not attempt to detail. In the evening ho would stroll afiiong the culm-heaps and along the banks of the black, sulphurous stream of mine-water that flowed through the swamp-land on the outskirts of the village. Poor little stream! It was not much like his babbling New' England brooks. It could not have babbled if it had tried. It could only mutter or yowl. For three weeks Harris took these walks alone. Then he took them with Maria di Manicor. Then my story begins. * Harris could hardly have told how his acquaintance with Maria began. First a word or two at the village pump, when she went to draw water; then he came across her once or twice on his solitary evening strolls, until finally it was no longer once or twice; it was no longer a word or two. It was every evening, and they would wander through the swamp for hours. These walks had to be accomplished circumspectly. Harris and .Maria would start out separately and would return separately, but somehow or other they always managed to meet when well out of the village and beyond the peering power of curious eyee. Harris was a good young fellow—as goodness goes, nowadays. It did not occur to him that there was anything inconsistent, in his going to Hazelton to mail a letter to a girl in Keene, New Hampshire, and at the sama time to hunt through the shops for a pair of heavy gilt earrings with garish blue enamel for Maria. Nevertheless, he said nothing about Maria in his letters, and, of course, he said nothing to Maria about the New England girl. They did not talk much in their walks along the. edge of the stripping. He would ask Maria what she called this or that in her tongue and learned to jabber so fluently in the mongrel Italian dialect she spoke, that he thought seriously of buying a copy of Dante in the original if he ever got to a place where he could get so civilized a production. So it happened that Maria never told him of her betrothal.

For Maria was betrothed, and Harj ris did not know it; nor did he know i that the day was set on which she ! and Angelo Rossi, with their respectI ive parents and collective frfends, I were to go to Hazleton to purchase nine yards of purple cashmere, with a sufficient quantity of red velvet and ! silver and gold passementerie, calcuj lated to make a wedding gown that ; would be the envy of the settlement. Angelo worked on the “night shift,” j and earned a dollar and a quarter a i day. It was a good match, and, | besides, her fiance’s nocturnal oeeuj pation gave Maria her evenings to herself, ***** It was after seven o’clock, one j sweet, still evening in June, when Maria stole along behind the enginehouse and through a tqngue of swamp I land, where the naked tree-trunks lifted their knotty branches from the I oily, sulphurous ooze that had dried | the sap in their veins and had reduced | them to weird skeleton frames. She sat down wearily on a tree-stump ; at the edge of the swamp. Dark against the sun-stained glory of the ! west rose the black ridge of an immense culm-heap, and on its crest, silhouetted against the glowing sky, was the dark figure of a car, with mule and driver. Maria looked at the scene listlessly. The driver-boy stooped, pulled a bolt and the carload of refuse slate rolled, grinding down the slope. One big piece of rock bounded farther than the others, and fell at last with a ‘fchug,” on the treacherous, shifting sand of the swamp, and the slimy surfa'He closed over it with a grin. \. “Buon’ notte, Mkria rnia!” called a cheery voice at her side. The girl’s listlessness was gone at once. She turned to Harris quickly with a warning gesture, and he stopped a short distance away, standing, erect and good to see, on a little hummock in the swamp. She had risen to her feet, and was standing facing him on the projecting root of a fallen tree. They were separated by a shallow stream of black water flowing sluggishly over the quicksand. She began to speak at once. “Voy jmist Cjyijf with me,” she said; and then, before he had time to question, she plunged into her story, speaking rapidly, but in clear, low tones. She told him of her betrothal to Angelo Rossi; she told him how to-morrow was the appointed day for the purchase of the purple gown with its glittering accessories; how their secret could no longer be kept; how Angelo was beginning to suspect; how she hated him, and how she loved Harris more than all the world, more than the purple gown an’t were of finest silk and decked with rubies.

Then she disclosed her plan. So childlike and confident she was that Harris could not interrupt her. She showed him the contents of a bundle she had (under her shawl. It was a parcel of belongings she had taken from his room, innocently gleeful at the thought of how she had collected them without the knowledge of Mrs. Dwyer. The bundle was done up in a towel and showed evidences of haste and inexperience on the part of the compiler. There were a pair of overshoes, a handkerchief-case of paleblue silk, two white lawp ties, a bottle of bromo-caffeine, a tumbler of blue glass, enveloped in a net of yellow crochet-work with bows of pink “daisy ribbon,” and intended by Mrs. Dwyer for the reception of burnt matches. There were also two oranges, a clay pipe and a copy of “Edwin Drood.” Harris stood like a statue on the hummock. Maria went on with her story, speaking low and eagerly. Harris was not to go back to the boardinghouse. Had she not hero .all his most precious possessions? And in the bosom of her gown she hud sixtyseven dollars concealed, the sum set apart for her wedding equipment. With this tfiey were to cross the mountain to Hazleton, where they would take the train for New York. Once there—ah, then that dirty Angelo might plead! She would have a husband worth a thousand of him. Harris gave himself a little shake to make sure it was not all a horrible nightmare. “But, Maria, my little girl, you are wrong. Don’t you see it is all a mistake? Go marry Angelo. He deserves you more than I.” She looked at him a moment, and then, with a sob, turned away. She' saw in his face the truth he dared not speak. “ Oh, say not, say not you cast me off!” she moaned and stretched her hands toward him. But she felt no answering touch. He was looking at her with a little smile and whistling softly to himself. For a moment she was transformed from a - pleading angel to a demon of rage. She stooped quickly, picked up the bundle at her feet, raised it high over her head and flung it full in his face. The clumsy missile missed its mark, however, struck at his feet and rolled down into the pool of coal-dirt, that gave a hideous gulp and swallowed the bundle of bric-a-brac, as it swallowed everything else within its reach. But, ah! What was that? Did the branch on which she was standing turn, or did she lose her balance? A faint little cry of terror, and Harris saw Maria struggling knee-deep in the treacherous ooze. He sprang impulsively forward, but as his foot touched the surface of the swamp, and he felt the dead weight pulling it dow r n, he paused for an instant. Maria saw r the hesitation. “Go back! Go back!” she cried. “ It is not for me that you shall die! There is another! Save yourself for her! She is to have your love, not Maria!” The scene grew dim before the young man’s eyes. He saw r no longer the grim mass of the culm-heap, the writhing of the bare tree-trunks and the slimy surface of the swamps. A long, quiet New England street, the great elms, heavy with foliage, meeting overhead, and at a bend in the road, a tall, slender girl, holding her hand to him with a welcoming smile. The vision vanished as quickly as it had come; but it w 7 as enough. A moment before the murderous thought had* flashed upon him: “How easy to escape from.it all! A. minute’s delay, a mock struggle apainst the odds that grew greater

every moment, and then.—freedom.” I Now he cast the thougl** from him with revulsion. He glanced quickly I around. Was there no one to give him aid? Yes, there was the breakerboy on the ridge of the culm-heaps | who, though Beyond hearing, could j get a faint glimpse of the dim figures fifty feet below, and who now, with wild hopes of a row, was scrambling down the slope. And another. Deep in the twilight gloom of the swamp Harris saw approaching the tall, lithe figure of a swarthy miner. With a loud cry for help, the young fellow sprang toward Maria, who by this time had sunk in the quicksand nearly to her waist. She had stopped struggling and was waiting silently for the end. Hardly had Harris’s cry died away in the choking stillness,when another sound was heard—the sharp ring of a pistol-shot. The hiss of a bullet passed his ears, and Harris saw Maria give a sudden start, throw 7 up her hands and fall, face forward, in the black slime. Ah, Angelo! You are more used to dealing death with steel than with lead. A swift blow with the stiletto and the life you sought might have been deftly and quietly cut from the body, but with these clumsy porthern tools-no wonder your hand trembled, the bullet passed its mark and the w r rong life sacrificed to your hatred. The work is done now. It is well for you to slink stealthily away and leave the two alone together. * * * * * And so the purple gown was never bought nor the trip to New York taken. But the breaker-boy saw his “row” and more, too. For it was he who found Angelo Rossi’s body a day or two afterward on the mountainside, with a bullet wound in the temple to show how the Italian’s markmanship improved witn practice. Perhaps the only good that came of the whole thing was that Harris left the region and went back to New England, where he was much happier. For he was a good enough young fellow—as goodness goes, nowadays.— [New York Ledger.