John Marvel, Assistant Part 23

"Rich! You bet. He's Jim Canter. Got all his daddy's money and going to get all the Argand and Leigh piles some day. He'll need it, too," added my informant.

"I should think so." I recalled his name in connection with Miss Leigh's name in the account of the ball, and I was feeling a little bitter.

"Why, he'd just as lief try to corner water as to bet a hundred dollar bill on a card. This is just play to him. He'd give all he'd win to-night to any one of his women."

"His women?"

"Yes. He's one of the real upper cla.s.s."

"The upper cla.s.s!" So this was the idea of the upper cla.s.s held by this man and his kind! My soul revolted at the thought of this man standing as the type of our upper cla.s.s, and I was turning away when Pushkin shoved back his chair. As I turned he looked up and I saw him start, though I did not catch his glance. The dealer saw him, too, and as he looked at me I caught his eye. He motioned to me, but I took no notice.

As I walked out the man near the door spoke to me.

"There's supper in the next room."

"Thank you. I don't want it."

"Come in again. Better luck to-morrow."

"For you, I hope," I said, and I saw his mystification.

I had of late been having an uncomfortable thought which was beginning to worry me. The idea of doing away with myself had suggested itself to me from time to time. I do not mean that I ever thought I should really do it; for when I reflected seriously, I knew I should not. In the first place, I was afraid; and in the next place, I never gave up the belief that I should some day achieve success. When I a.n.a.lyzed my feelings I found that the true name for my unhappiness was egotism. But the idea would come up to me and now began to pester me. I had a pistol which I could never bring myself to p.a.w.n, though nearly everything else was pledged. I put the pistol away; but this did not help matters; it looked like cowardice. So that evening I had taken the pistol out and put it into my pocket when I went into the street. If I could only catch some burglar breaking into a bank, or some ruffian beating a woman, or some scoundrel committing any crime, it would attract attention, and I might get work. I often used to think thus, but nothing ever happened, and I knew nothing would happen that evening when I walked out of the gambling house. So presently the pistol began to be in my way, and my mind went to working again on the ease with which I could go to my office and lock myself in. Still I kept on, and presently I found myself near the river, a black stream that I had often thought of as the Styx. It was as black and silent now, as it slipped on in the darkness, as the River of Death.

I was sauntering along, chewing the cud of fancy, wholly bitter--and sinking lower and lower every step in the slough of despond, working over what would come if I should suddenly chuck up the whole business and get out of life--pondering how I should destroy all marks by which there could be any possibility of identification, when the current of my thoughts, if that moody train of dismal reflection could be dignified with such a name, was turned aside by a small incident. As I wandered on in the darkness, the figure of a woman standing--a shadow in the shadow--at a corner of an alley arrested my attention. Even in the gloom the att.i.tude of dejection was such as to strike me, and I saw or felt, I know not which, that her eyes were on me, and that in some dim, distant way they contained an appeal. I saw that she was young, and in the dusk the oval outline of a face that might have both refinement and beauty challenged my attention. Was she a beggar or only an unhappy outcast, waiting in the darkness for the sad reward which evil chance might fling to her wretchedness? I put my hand in my pocket, thinking that she might beg of me, and I would give her a small portion of my slender store, but she said nothing and I pa.s.sed on. After a little, however, still thinking of her dejected air and with a sudden sympathy for her wretchedness, I turned back. She was still standing where I left her. I pa.s.sed slowly by her, but she said nothing, though I felt again that her eyes were on me. Then my curiosity or possibly, I may say, my interest, being aroused, I turned again and walked by her.

"Why so sad to-night?" I said, with words which might have appeared flippant, but in a tone which she instantly recognized for sympathy. She turned half away and said nothing and I stood silent watching her, for her face must once have been almost beautiful, though it was now sadly marred, and an ugly scar across her eye and cheek, as if it might have come from the slash of a razor, made that side drawn and distorted.

"Do you want money?"

She slowly shook her head without looking at me.

"What is it, then? Maybe, I can help you?"

She turned slowly and looked at me with such indescribable hopelessness in her face that my heart went out to her.

"No, I'm past help now."

"Oh, no, you're not." My spirits rose with the words, and I felt suddenly as if I had risen out of the slough which had been engulfing me, and as though I had gotten my feet on a firm place where I could reach out a hand to help this despairing and sinking sister.

"Yes, past help now."

"Come and walk with me." And as she did not stir, I took her hand and drew it through my arm and gently led her forward along the street. I had a strange feeling as I walked along. I somehow felt as though I had escaped from something which had been dragging me down. It was a strange walk and a strange and tragic story that she told me--of having left her home in the country, inspired by the desire to do something and be something more than she was, a simple farmer's daughter in another State, with some little education such as the country schools could give; of having secured a position in a big shop where, for a small sum, she worked all day and learned to see and love fine clothes and beautiful things; of having fallen in with one or two gay companions in this and other shops who wore the fine clothes and had the beautiful things she admired; of having been put forward because she was pretty and polite; and then of having met a young man, well dressed and with fine manners; of having fallen in love with him and of having accepted his attentions and his gifts; and then, of having been led astray by him; and then--of such an act of base betrayal as, had I not had it substantiated afterward in every horrid detail, I should never have believed. I had known something of the wickedness of men and the evil of an uncontrolled life in the city, where the vilest pa.s.sions of the heart are given play, but I had never dreamed of anything so revolting as the story this girl told me that night. She had been deliberately and with malice aforethought lured not only to her destruction but to a life of slavery so vile as to be unbelievable. The man who had secured her heart used his power over her to seize and sell her into a slavery for which there is no name which could be used on the printed page. Here, stricken by the horror of her situation, she had attempted to escape from her captors, but had been bodily beaten into submission. Then she had made a wild dash for liberty and had been seized and slashed with a knife until she fell under her wounds and her life was in imminent danger.

From this time she gave up and became the slave of the woman of the house: "Smooth Ally," she said they called her; but she would not give me her name or her address. She would have her killed, she feared, if she did so. Here she gradually had yielded to her fate and had lived in company with her other slaves, some willing, some as unwilling as herself, until finally her place was needed for one more useful to her owner, when she had been handed on from one owner to another, always sinking in the scale lower and lower, until at last she had been turned into the street with her choice limited only to the river or the gutter.

Long before she had finished her story I had made up my mind that life still held for me something which I might do, however poor and useless I knew myself to be. The only person I could think of who might help her was Miss Leigh. How could I reach her? Could I write her of this poor creature? She could not go back to her home, she said, for she knew that they had heard of her life, and they were "good and Christian people."

She used to write to and hear from them, but it had been two years and more since she had written or heard now. Still she gave me what she said was her father's address in another State, and I told her I would find out how they felt about her and would let her know. I gave her a part of what I had. It was very little, and I have often wished since then that I had had the courage to give her all.

I was walking on with her, trying to think of some place where she might find a shelter and be taken care of until her friends could be informed where she was, when, in one of the streets in front of a bar-room, we heard mingled laughter and singing and found a group of young men, ruffians and loafers, standing on the sidewalk, laughing at the singers who stood in the street. As we drew near, I saw that the latter were a small group of the Salvation Army, and it appeared to me a providence.

Here were some who might help her. At the moment that we approached they ended the dirge-like hymn they had been singing, and kneeling down in the street one of them offered a prayer, after which a woman handed around something like a tambourine, asking for a collection. The jeers that she encountered might have daunted a much bolder spirit than mine, and as each man either put in or pretended to put something in, one a cent, another a b.u.t.ton or a cigarette-stump, she responded, "Thank you and G.o.d bless you." I was ashamed to make an appeal to them there for the poor girl, so I walked with her a little further on and waited until the blue-clad detachment came along and their tormentors retired to warm themselves, without and within, in the saloon in front of which they had been standing. I accosted the woman who had taken up the collection and asked her if she could take care of a poor girl who needed help badly, and I was struck by the kindness with which she turned and, after a moment's glance, held out her hand to the girl.

"Come with us," she said, "and we will take you where you will find friends."

Even then the young woman appeared too frightened to accept her invitation. She clung to me and seemed to rely upon me, asking me to go with her, but partly from shame and partly from what may possibly have been a better motive, I told her my way led elsewhere, and, after persuasion, she went with the Salvationists, and I walked home happier than I had been in some time.

I even took some steps to call public attention to the horrible story the poor Magdalen had told me of her frightful experience, and actually wrote it up; but when I took it to a paper--the one that had published my first article--I was given to understand that the account was quite incredible. The editor, a fox-faced man of middle age, with whom my paper secured me the honor of an interview, informed me that the story was an old one, and that they had investigated it thoroughly, and found it without the slightest foundation. If I wanted further proof of this, he said, he would refer me to Mr. Collis McSheen, one of the leading lawyers in the city, who had conducted the investigation.

XVIII

THE DRUMMER

I believe Mrs. Kale would have let me stay on free almost indefinitely; for she was a kind-hearted soul, much imposed on by her boarders. But I had been playing the gentleman there, and I could not bring myself to come down in her esteem. I really did not know whether I should be able to continue to pay her; so when my time was up, I moved again, to my landlady's great surprise, and she thought me stuck up and ungrateful, and was a little hurt over it, when, in fact, I only did not want to cheat her, and was moving out to the poorest part of the city, to a little house on which I had observed, one afternoon during one of my strolls, the notice of a room for rent at a dollar a week. I think a rose-bush carefully trained over the door decided me to take it. It gave me a bit of home-feeling. The violet, of course, is in color and delicacy the half-ethereal emblem of the tenderest sentiment of the heart. "The violets all withered when my father died," sighed poor Ophelia. And next to violets, a rose-bush, growing in the sun and dew, has ever stood to me for the purest sentiment that the heart can hold.

I heard shortly afterward of the engagement of Miss Lilian Poole to the man she used to laugh at; but after a single wave of mortification that Peck should have won where I had lost, I did not mind it. I went out to look at the sunny house with the trees and the rose-bushes about it and wonder how I could meet Miss Leigh.

The room I took when I left Mrs. Kale's was only a cupboard some nine feet by six in the little house I have mentioned; but it was spotlessly clean, like the kind-looking, stout, blue-eyed Teuton woman who, with skirt tucked up, came to the door when I applied for lodging, and, as the price was nearer my figure than any other I had seen, I closed with Mrs. Loewen, and the afternoon I left Mrs. Kale's sent my trunk over in advance. It held the entire acc.u.mulation of my life. There was something about the place and the woman that attracted me. As poor as the house was, it was beyond the squalid quarter and well out in the edge of the city, with a bit of gra.s.s before it, and there were not only plants in the windows well cared for; but there was even a rose-bush beside the door making a feeble attempt to clamber over it with the aid of strings and straps carefully adjusted.

The only question my landlady asked me was whether I was a musician, and when I told her no, but that I was very fond of music, she appeared satisfied. Her husband, she said, was a drummer.

I asked if I might bring my dog, and she a.s.sented even to this.

"Elsa was fond of animals," she said.

When I bade good-by to Mrs. Kale and my friends at the boarding-house, I was pleased at the real regret they showed at my leaving. Miss Pansy and Miss Pinky came down to the drawing-room in their "best" to say good-by; Miss Pinky with her "scratch" quite straight. And Miss Pansy said if they ever went back home she hoped very much I would honor them by coming to see them, while Miss Pinky, with a more practical turn, hoped I would come and see them "there--and you may even bring your dog with you," she added, with what I knew was a proof of real friendship. I promised faithfully to come, for I was touched by the kindness of the two old ladies who, like myself, had slipped from the sphere in which they had belonged, and I was rather grim at the reflection that they had been brought there by others, while I had no one to blame but myself--a solemn fact I was just beginning to face.

When I walked out of the house I was in a rather low state of mind. I felt that it was the last day when I could make any pretension to being a gentleman. I had been slipping down, down, and now I was very near the bottom. So I wandered on in the street with Dix at my heels and my pistol in my pocket.

Just then a notice of a concert, placarded on a wall, caught my eye, and I gave myself a shake together as an unmitigated a.s.s, and determined suddenly that I needed some amus.e.m.e.nt and that a better use for the pistol would be to sell it and go to the concert. I would, at least, be a gentleman once more, and then to-morrow I could start afresh. So I hunted up a p.a.w.nshop and raising from the villain who kept it a few dollars on my pistol, had a good supper and then took Dix home and went to the symphony. As it happened, I got one of the best seats in the house. It was a revelation to me--a revolution in my thoughts and feelings: the great audience, gay with silks and flowers and jewels, filling up all the s.p.a.ce about and above me rising up to the very top of the vast auditorium. I did not have time at first to observe them, I only felt them; for just as I entered the Director came out and the audience applauded. It exhilarated me like wine; I felt as if it had been myself they were applauding. Then the music began: The "Tannhauser Overture." It caught me up and bore me away: knighthood, and glory, and love were all about me; the splendor of the contest; the struggle in which a false step, a cowardly weakness might fling away the world; the reward that awaited the victor, and the curse if he gave way, till I found myself dazzled, amazed, and borne down by the deluge of harmonious sound--and could do nothing but lie drifting at the mercy of the whelming tide, and watch, half-drowned, whatever object caught my eye.

The first thing I took in was the tall old Drummer who towered above the great bank of dark bodies with swaying arms. Still and solemn he appeared out of the mist, and seemed like some landmark which I must hold on to if I would not be swept away. No one appeared to pay much attention to him, and he appeared oblivious of all but his drums. Now he leant over them and listened to their throbbing, now he beat as if the whole world depended on it. I held on to him and felt somehow as if he were the one to whom the Director looked--the centre of all the music and pomp and mystery, and I must keep him in sight.

I don't know much of what came on the programme after that; for I was wakened by the storm of applause which followed and during the intermission I looked about at the audience around me. They filled the house from floor to roof; every seat was occupied, and the boxes looked like banks of flowers. All the faces were strange to me, though, and I was beginning to feel lonely again, and was turning to my old Drummer, when, sweeping the boxes, my eye fell on a girl who caught me at once.

She was sitting a little forward looking across toward the orchestra with so serious an expression on her lovely face that I felt drawn to her even before I took in that she was the girl I had seen on the train and whom I had handed into her carriage. As I gazed at her this came to me--and with it such a warm feeling about my heart as I had not had in a long time. I looked at the men about her, one of whom was the good-looking clergyman, Dr. Capon, and the next instant all my blood was boiling--there, bending down over her, talking into her ear, so close to her that she had to sit forward to escape his polluting touch, was the gambler whom I had heard say not three weeks before that every American girl was open to a proposal from him. I don't know really what happened after that. I only remember wishing I had my pistol back--and being glad that I had p.a.w.ned it, not sold it; for I made up my mind anew in that theatre that night to live and succeed, and preserve that girl from that adventurer. When the concert was over I watched the direction they took, and made my way through the crowd to the exit by which they would go into the foyer. There I waited and presently they came along. She was surrounded by a little party and was laughing heartily over something one of them had just said, and was looking, in the rich pink wrap which enveloped her, like a rich pink rosebud. I was gazing at her intently, and caught her eye, and no doubt struck by my look of recognition, she bowed. She had not really thought of me, she was still thinking of what had been said, and it was only a casual bow to some one in a crowd who knows you and catches your eye; but it was a bow, and it was a smiling one, and again that warm feeling surged about my heart which had come when I met her on the street. The next second that fellow came along. He was taller than most of the crowd, and well dressed, was really a handsome enough fellow but for his cold eyes and hard look. The eyes were too bold and the chin not bold enough. He was walking beside a large, blondish girl with shallow blue eyes, who appeared much pleased with herself or with him, but at the moment he was bowing his adieux to her while she was manifestly trying to hold on to him.

"I don't think you are nice a bit," I heard her say, petulantly, as they came up to me. "You have not taken the least notice of me to-night."

This he evidently repudiated, for she pouted and smiled up at him.

"Well, then, I'll excuse you this time, but you needn't be running after her. She won't----"

I did not hear the rest. I was thinking of the girl before me.

He was looking over the heads of the people before him, and the next moment was elbowing his way to overtake my young lady. Close to him in the crowd, as he came on, stood Mrs. Starling's daughter, painted, and in her best finery, and I saw her imploring eyes fastened on him eagerly. He glanced at her and she bowed with a gratified light dawning in her face. I saw his face harden. He cut her dead. Poor girl! I saw her pain and the look of disappointment as she furtively followed him with her eyes. He pushed on after my young lady. But I was ahead of him.

Just before he reached her, I slipped in, and when he attempted to push by I stood firm before him.

"Beg pardon," he said, trying to put me aside to step ahead of me. I turned my head and over my shoulder looked him in the face.

"I beg _your_ pardon."