John Marvel, Assistant Part 10

I had no one to look for; so, after helping my neighbor and her frowsy little brood off, I sauntered along with Dix at my heel, feeling about as lonely as a man can feel on this populated earth.

After gazing about and refusing sternly to meet the eye of any of the numerous cabmen who wildly waved their whips toward me, shouting: "Kebsuh--kebsuh--keb--keb--keb?" with wearying iteration, I had about made up my mind to take the least noisy of them, when I became conscious that my fellow-traveller, Mrs. McNeil with her little clan, was pa.s.sing out of the station unescorted and was looking about in a sort of lost way. On my speaking to her, her face brightened for a moment, but clouded again instantly, as she said, "Oh! sir, he's gone! He came to meet me this morning; but the train was late and he couldn't wait or he'd lose his job, so he had to go, and the kind man at the gate told me he left the message for me. But however shall I get there with all the children, for I haven't a cent left!"

The tears welled up in her eyes as she came to her sad little confession. And I said, "Oh! Well, I think we can manage it somehow. You have his address?"

"Oh! yes, sir, I have it here," and she pulled out an empty little pocket-book from the breast of her worn frock, and while she gave the baby to the eldest girl to hold, tremblingly opened the purse. In it was only a crumpled letter and, besides this, a key--these were all. She opened the letter tenderly and handed it to me. I read the address and fastened it in my memory.

"Now," I said, "we'll straighten this out directly." I turned and called a hackman. "I want a carriage."

There was a rush, but I was firm and insisted on a hack. However, as none was to be had, I was fain to content myself with a one-horse cab of much greater age than dimension.

Bundling them in and directing the driver to go around and get the trunk from the baggage-room, I mounted beside him and took Dix between my feet and one of the children in my arms, and thus made my entry into the city of my future home. My loneliness had somehow disappeared.

My protegee's destination turned out to be a long way off, quite in one of the suburbs of the city, where working people had their little homes--a region I was to become better acquainted with later. As we began to pa.s.s bakeries and cook-shops, the children began once more to clamor to their mother for something to eat, on which the poor thing tried to quiet them with promises of what they should have when they reached home. But I could perceive that her heart was low within her, and I stopped at a cook-shop and bought a liberal allowance of bread and jam and cookies, on which the young things fell to like famished wolves, while their mother overwhelmed me with blessings.

We had not gone far, and were still in the centre of the city, when a handsome open carriage drove by us, and as it pa.s.sed, there sat in it the young lady I had seen on the train, with a pleasant looking elderly man, whom I conjectured to be her father, and who appeared in a very good-humor with her or himself. As I was gazing at them, her eyes fell full into mine, and after a half-moment's mystification, she recognized me as I lifted my hat, and her face lit up with a pleasant smile of recognition. I found my feelings divided between pleasure at her sweet return of my bow and chagrin that she should find me in such a predicament; for I knew what a ridiculous figure I must cut with the dog between my feet and a frowsy child, thickly smeared with jam, in my arms. In fact, I could see that the girl was talking and laughing spiritedly with her father, evidently about us. I confess to a feeling of shame at the figure I must cut, and I wondered if she would not think I had lied to her in saying that I had never met them before. I did not know that the smile had been for Dix.

When we reached, after a good hour's drive, the little street for which we were bound, I found my forecast fairly correct. The dingy little house, on which was the rusted number given Mrs. McNeil in her husband's letter, was shut up and bore no evidence of having been opened, except a small flower-pot with a sprig of green in it in a dusty, shutterless window. It was the sort of house that is a stove in summer and an ice-box in the winter. And there was a whole street of them. After we had knocked several times and I had tried to peep over the fence at the end of the street, the door of an adjoining tenement opened, and a slatternly, middle-aged woman peeped out.

"Are you Mrs. McNeil?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Well, here's your key. Your man told me to tell you 't if you came while he was at work, you'd find something to eat in the back room 't he'd cooked this mornin' before he went to work. The train was late, he said, and he couldn't wait; but he'd be home to-night, and he'd bring some coal when he came. What a fine lot o' children you have. They ought to keep you in cinders and wood. I wish I had some as big as that; but mine are all little. My two eldest died of scarlet fever two years ago.

Drainage, they said."

She had come out and unlocked the door and was now turning away.

"I think your man had someone to take the up-stairs front room; but he didn't come--you'll have to get someone to do it and you double up. The Argand Estate charges such rent, we all have to do that. Well, if I can help you, I'm right here."

I was struck by her kindness to the forlorn stranger, and the latter's touching recognition of it, expressed more in looks and in tone than in words.

Having helped them into the house, which was substantially empty, only one room having even a pretence of furniture in it, and that merely a bed, a mattress and a broken stove, I gave the poor woman a little of my slender stock of money and left her murmuring her thanks and a.s.surances that I had already done too much for them. In fact, I had done nothing.

As my finances were very low, I determined to find a boarding-house instead of wasting them at a hotel. I accordingly stopped at a sizable house which I recognized as a boarding-house on a street in a neighborhood which might, from the old houses with their handsome doors and windows, have once been fashionable, though fashion had long since taken its flight to a newer and gaudier part of the town, and the mansions were now giving place to shops and small grocers' markets. A wide door with a fan-shaped transom gave it dignity. A large wistaria vine coiled up to the top of a somewhat dilapidated porch with cla.s.sical pillars lent it distinction. The landlady, Mrs. Kale, a pleasant looking, kindly woman, offered me a small back-room on reasonable terms, it being, as she said, the dull season; and, having arranged for Dix in a dingy little livery stable near by, I took it "temporarily," till I could look around.

I found the company somewhat nondescript--ranging all the way from old ladies with false fronts and cracked voices to uppish young travelling men and their rather sad-looking wives.

Among the boarders, the two who interested me most were two elderly ladies, sisters, whose acquaintance I made the day after my arrival.

They did not take their meals at the common table, but, as I understood, in their own apartment in the third story. They were a quaint and pathetic pair, very meagre, very shabby, and manifestly very poor. There was an air of mystery about them, and Mrs. Kale treated them with a respect which she paid to no others of her variegated household. They occasionally honored the sitting-room with their presence on Sunday evenings, by Mrs. Kale's especial invitation, and I was much diverted with them. They were known as the Miss Tippses; but Mrs. Kale always spoke of them as "Miss Pansy" and "Miss Pinky." It seems that she had known them in her youth, "back East."

My acquaintance with the two old ladies at this time was entirely accidental. The morning after my arrival, as I started out to look around for an office, and also to take Dix for a walk, as well as to take a look at the city, I fell in with two quaint-looking old women who slipped out of the door just ahead of me, one of them slightly lame, and each with a large bundle in her arms. They were dressed in rusty black, and each wore a veil, which quite concealed her features. But as they limped along, engaged in an animated conversation, their voices were so refined as to arrest my attention, and I was guilty of the impropriety of listening to them, partly out of sheer idleness, and partly because I wanted to know something of my boarding-house and of my fellow boarders.

They were talking about a ball of the night before, an account of which they had read in the papers, or rather, as I learned, in a copy of a paper which they had borrowed, and they were as much interested in it as if they had been there themselves. "Oh, wouldn't you have liked to see it?" said one. "It must have been beautiful. I should have liked to see Miss ----" (I could not catch the name). "She must have been exquisite in chiffon and lace. She is so lovely anyhow. I did not know she had returned."

"I wonder Mr. ---- did not tell us." Again I failed to hear the name.

"For a very good reason, I suppose. He did not know."

"He is dead in love with her."

"Oh, you are so romantic!" said the other, whom I took from her figure and her feebleness to be the elder of the two.

"No; but any one can tell that at a glance."

"What a pity he could not marry her. Then we should be sure to see her as a bride."

The other laughed. "What an idea! We have nothing fit to go even to the church in."

"Why, we could go in the gallery. Oh, this bundle is so heavy! I don't believe I can ever get there to-day."

"Oh, yes, you can. Now come on. Don't give up. Here, rest it on the fence a moment."

As the lame one attempted to lift the bundle to rest it on the fence, it slipped to the ground, and she gave a little exclamation of fear.

"Oh, dear! suppose it should get soiled!"

I stepped forward and lifted it for her, and to my surprise found it very heavy. Then, as they thanked me, it occurred to me to offer to carry the bundle for them to the street car for which I supposed them bound. There was a little demur, and I added, "I am at Mrs. Kale's also.

I have just come." This appeared to relieve one of them at least, but the other said, "Oh, but we are not going to the street car. We don't ride in street cars."

"Yes; it is so unhealthy," said the younger one. "People catch all sorts of diseases on the car."

Thinking them rather airy, I was about to hand the bundle back, but as I was going their way I offered to carry the bundles for both of them as far as I was going. This proved to be quite twenty blocks, for I could not in decency return the bundles. So we went on together, I feeling at heart rather ashamed to be lugging two large bundles through the streets for two very shabby-looking old women whose names I did not know. We soon, however, began to talk, and I drew out from them a good deal about Mrs. Kale and her kindness. Also, that they had seen much better days, to which one of them particularly was very fond of referring. It seemed that they had lived East--they carefully guarded the exact place--and had once had interests in a railroad which their father had built and largely owned. They were manifestly anxious to make this clearly understood. After his death they had lived on their dividends, until, on a sudden, the dividends had stopped. They found that the railroad with which their road connected had pa.s.sed into new hands--had been "bought up" by a great syndicate, their lawyer had informed them, and refused any longer to make traffic arrangements with the road. This had destroyed the value of their property, but they had refused to sell their holdings at the low price offered--"As we probably ought to have done," sighed one of them.

"Not at all! I am glad we didn't," a.s.serted the other.

"Well, sister, we got nothing--we lost everything, didn't we?"

"I don't know. I am only glad that we held out. That man knows that he robbed us."

"Well, that doesn't help us."

"Yes, it does. It helps me to know that he knows it."

"Who was it?" I asked.

"Oh, there was a syndicate. I only know the names of two of them--a man named Argand, and a man named Canter. And our lawyer was named McSheen."

Argand was a name which I recalled in connection with Mr. Poole's interest in the Railways in the case I have mentioned.

"Well, you held on to your stock. You have it now, then?" I foresaw a possible law-case against Argand, and wondered if he was the owner of the Argand Estate, which I had already heard of twice since my arrival.

"No," said one of them, "they bought up the stock of all the other people, and then they did something which cut us out entirely. What was it they did, sister?"

"Reorganized."

"And then we came on here to see about it, and spent everything else that we had in trying to get it back, but we lost our case. And since then----"

"Well, sister, we are keeping the gentleman. Thank you very much," said the younger of the two quickly, to which her sister added her thanks as well. I insisted at first on going further with them, but seeing that they were evidently anxious to be rid of me, I gave them their bundles and pa.s.sed on.