Little Miss By-The-Day Part 13

The man helped her respectfully through the doorway, he was thinking as had his employer and as Officer Brennan had, that this odd little woman shouldn't have to go around alone, and yet, it was puzzling, she didn't seem to mind doing it. He obligingly found the telephone number, turned and asked her if she would like him to call Mr.

Hamilt's office for her. The telephone was screwed to a small table near the door. Felicia waited, her heart throbbing. Beside her at the marble counter two giggling young things ordered soda water from a white-coated clerk. They were garbed in the triggest and gayest of spring clothing, they were as impeccably immaculate as the smiling ladies on the perfume bottles in the window. Back of the telephone was a long mirror that reflected their pretty smartness and Felicia's impossible dowdiness. But Felicia did not see anything at all save the round black hole through which she was to speak to Dudley Hamilt. She was awed by it as she had been surprised by everything in this amazing day. She watched closely the way the man held the receiver; not for worlds would she have admitted her ignorance. She took the receiver, she sat down quietly, she drew a long breath. The chauffeur was already disappearing through the door, the drug clerk was joking with his giggling young patrons. Suddenly her rapturous ear caught Dudley Hamilt's resonant voice speaking,

"Who is it?" he demanded impatiently.

Her low sweet laughter purred over the wires to him.

"Can't you remember?" she asked quietly. "I am Felice.--Yes, I _am_ Felice. I have been trying to find your house, Dudley Hamilt, but it's gone, they are building a vairee big house there. I didn't have your letter, that letter that you sent me. Not till Zeb brought it to me day before yesterday. That was why I didn't write to you where I was."

"Where are you now?" the excitement in his voice frightened her. "Tell me, where are you?"

The giggling back of her grew so insistent that it broke in upon even the solitude of her wonderous moment. She raised her eyes to the mirror before her. She caught a swift glimpse of laughing faces, the impishness of their mischievous eyes made her shiver. She instinctively glanced into the looking gla.s.s to see where their gaze rested. And looked straight at--herself!

At Louisa's ugly bonnet, at the damp and shapeless shoulders of the gray coat, at her own pallor, at the deep shadows under her tired eyes, into her own eyes, and saw the whole drab mirrored ghost of the woman who had been the young Felicia. And through the telephone rang Dudley Hamilt's eager voice, as eager as it had been that night when he clambered over the gate.

"Tell me quickly where you are--I must see you--oh, your voice sounds as though I'd not lost you at all--" he laughed nervously like an embarra.s.sed boy, "I want to see you--" he repeated inadequately.

She thought quickly, she could think of only one thing and that was that Dudley Hamilt must NOT see her.

"Let's pretend," she interrupted him, her low contralto voice trembling, "Let's pretend that I'm somewhere you can't see me--I only wanted--to tell you that I had your letter. I wanted you to know how happy it made me to have it. Dudley Hamilt--"

The receiver dropped from her hand; somewhere back of her the giggling grew fainter and farther away. She shook her head weakly when the drug clerk hurried with a gla.s.s of water. She was swaying, dimly conscious of the awe in the face of the girl who was hastening toward her.

"Oh, she looks awfully ill--" she heard a dismayed voice.

"I'm not ill--" her proud chin lifted. She was pulling herself together again, she even managed to stand by holding one hand on the edge of the table.

The whirling blackness of the moment had pa.s.sed. Even while the clerk was hastily calling back the judge's chauffeur, the drooping little figure had straightened itself.

"I think the lady was kinda faint," mumbled the clerk, mechanically replacing the dangling receiver. "She's O.K. now--ain't you?"

"Did you find where you wanted to go?" the man's respectful query helped her.

"If it's not too far," she answered with dignity, "I think I'd like to go to my own house--it's in a street called Montrose Place."

Inside the car her head drooped, she felt the new Babiche licking her lifeless hand, she felt the whir of the motor. It vibrated through every jangling nerve of her weary body. The whole impossible journey was like a nightmare.

"That wasn't I, I saw in there--" her thoughts blurred, "it's just a dreadful dream--that wasn't Felice I saw--oh, Dudley Hamilt--I was so pretty that night! And now I'm just old--like Grandy--like Piqueur--"

After a million years--or was it after one little minute?--the car stopped easily. Like the dream that Felicia had hoped the whole dreadful day had been. She opened her eyes as though she might have been waking up in the bed that Poquelin, the father of Moliere, had carved.

"This," said the judge's chauffeur dubiously, "is Montrose Place."

She got out slowly, tucking Babiche mechanically under her arm. The man lifted out her bag and touched his cap,--she did not even see him go.

The huge willows still arched above Montrose Place, but they were shabby and dying. And the mossy bricked sidewalk was gone but on its muddy concrete successor, scores and scores of noisy, dirty, alien children squabbled and cried. Some of them were pushing against this strange woman who had descended from the motor, some of them fingered her coat, one bolder than the rest sat down upon her bag. It seemed to her as though more children than she had known there were in the whole world were crowding against her. Wherever she looked there were children. They hung from the once lovely old windows, they slid down the once beautiful bal.u.s.trade, they tumbled out of every doorway. And wherever there were not children there were signs. Blatant, dingy signs. The first one she glimpsed was propped before the bas.e.m.e.nt gate through which the housemaids had been wont to enter. It was shaped like a tombstone and with amateur lettering announced:

"TONY HE SELLA COAL WOOD ICE"

And from the rusty iron balcony hung a ragged pair of trousers into which had been inserted a board, the legs flapped dispiritedly in the gusty wind from the river. Painted in scraggling white paint across the seat of the trousers was written

"A. Cohen. Pressing 25 and 50 cents."

It was twilight. The tailor had lighted a single flickering gas jet beside the bas.e.m.e.nt window. In the old days the front bas.e.m.e.nt had been the housemaids' sitting room with a channel-coal fire glowing in the grate and a tidy white cloth on the table and neat rows of geraniums in the windows--a cheery sort of place. Not at all like this stuffy, overcrowded, ill ventilated place with the two silent shirt- sleeved men humped over steaming ironing boards and with a dozen more clattering away at noisy sewing machines.

A grizzled man scowled at her through thick gla.s.ses.

"Vell," he rasped, "Vat do you vant, madam?"

"I want to stay here."

"You vant to rent a room? I calls mine missus--" he called stridently, "I think she gotta room for three dollars, I don' know--"

From the doorway of the once shining and immaculate kitchen a frowsy head protruded, "Four we should get," whined a nasal voice "it is only that it is on the top floor that we can make it so cheap--"

"This," announced Felicia to the slatternly woman "--is my house. How dare you let it get so dirty!"

Her rising anger swept into her heart like a reviving fire. She thought of Zeb, mouthing his scorn of the "dirty filthy heathen," she thought of Mademoiselle D'Ormy scolding a housemaid who left so much as a speck of dust on the hall bal.u.s.trades, she did not see the grinning woman gesturing to her husband, touching her forehead to indicate Felicia's lack of wits.

"That ain't my business," the woman shrugged when she saw Felicia looking at her. "We pays out rent by a receiver since the Mister Burrel goes avay--I gotta get mine renta in adwance. I gotta nice room if you vant to stay."

"But it's my house, of course I'll stay."

"It's a nice room, three dollars a veek--you vant to see it?"

The color blazed in Felicia's cheeks.

"I should like you to take me to it at once," she announced with dignity. "You'll carry my bag, please."

The tailor's wife grumbingly obeyed her, preceding her new lodger with ill concealed temper, her lumpy person almost blocking the ample stairway.

Up they pa.s.sed from the bas.e.m.e.nt to the once stately hallway. Not even the encrusted dirt could hide the beauty of the old tessellated marble floors and arched doorways but where the oval topped doors had once swung hospitably wide their gloomy panels now hid the drawing-rooms, and where the long mirror had once made the hallway bright with reflected light a dingy ill-painted wall made the pa.s.sage so gloomy that one could scarcely see above the first landing. Silently Felicia's weary feet carried her along behind her untidy conductor.

Unconsciously she tiptoed as she pa.s.sed the closed door of her mother's room, tiptoed as gently as though that frail sufferer were still lying listlessly on the "sleighback" bed. Quietly around the bend of the upper hall she followed, past the upstairs sitting room and up the second flight toward the sleeping chambers, her heart beating from the unwonted climb, her breath coming in quick gasps and her damp hair clinging to her aching forehead.

"Maybe," she exulted secretly, "it will be the nursery that I'll have --maybe I left something--" she smiled as she caught herself thinking it on the stairway--"perhaps there will be a little fire in the Peggoty grate and I can shut the door and sit down and think clearly."

But it wasn't the nursery. As they pa.s.sed its closed door she could hear the wrangle of many voices, a baby's fretful cry and the hurrying whir of other sewing machines. The frowsy woman opened the door at the head of the stairs. The-three-dollar-a-week-room was the hall bedroom.

The small room where Mademoiselle D'Ormy's bed had been wont to stand in the old days--with the door left ajar so that Felicia would not be frightened when she awoke in the night.

With the door to the adjoining room closed it looked twice as narrow as she remembered it. And it was not a nice clean room. It held an old iron bed and a pine table and a cheap wicker rocking chair. Yet Felicia could almost have kissed the dingy walls for they were covered with exactly the same droll paper that had always decorated them--the paper on which the oft repeated group of fat faced shepherdesses danced about their innumerable May poles and alternating with these perpetual merry makers were the methodical flocks of lambs. Spang over the middle of the s.p.a.ce back of the bed was the discolored spot where she had thrown the large and dripping bath sponge.

She felt suddenly very small and very, very helpless--she was utterly spent. But there was something in her wide gray eyes--a dignity and a command--that completely dominated the shrewish wife of the hump- shouldered tailor, something that made the slatternly creature back out of the room, for Felicia Day, with her hand on the battered iron railing of the bed, had said clearly, "Woman, go at once."

And when the door was shut she sat down in one chair and put Babiche carefully on the bed. She untied Louisa's bonnet and dropped it to the floor; she loosed the c.u.mbersome traveling coat. Far out on the river the ferry boats and tugs were signaling; across the water the glamour of a million lights shone toward her. It was quite dark now; she stumbled to the window and looked down into the back yard. The dusk had mercifully blurred out for her the heaps of refuse and ashes that were dumped upon the spot where the narcissus border had been. The great iron pots on the top of the garden wall loomed out of the shadows. She looked straight down on the gate to the rectory yard.

She sunk in a crumpled heap and rested her weary head on the window sill, then groped for the wee doggie as she heard the faint click of its tiny paws coming toward her over the bare floor.

"Oh, Babiche!" she whispered, "Babiche, how happy--we should be--to be home!"