The Landloper Part 13

Farr gazed down on her after she had been laid on the ca.n.a.l bank. She was young, but thin and work-worn.

"Weaver," commented old Etienne, laying back on her breast one of the hands he had lifted. "There's the marks on the fingers where she have tie so many knots so quick."

There was a key on her breast; it was secured by a cord that pa.s.sed out of sight between the b.u.t.tons on her waist. Farr stooped and pulled on the key. A folded paper came with the key; the other end of the cord was tied around the paper.

"You must not--it is for the coroner," protested Etienne. "I know the law--I have drag up so many."

"My besetting sin is curiosity," declared the young man, his calm impertinence unruffled. He pulled the wet paper from the noose of the cord. "We'll read this together."

"I cannot read," confessed the rack-tender. "You shall read it to me."

His little black eyes gleamed now with curiosity of his own. "I shall be glad to hear. The coroner he never read to me."

The water had spread the ink and spotted the paper, but Farr was able to decipher the missive. He read aloud:

"'My head has grown bad since my husband died. It is grief, the awful heat, the work at the looms. They said if I would give my little girl away she could go to the country and grow well. But I could not give her up for ever. I could not earn the money to send her to board. I could not earn the money except to buy us bread here in the tenement block.

And my bad head has been telling me it's best to kill myself and take her with me. So I kill myself before my head grows so bad that I might take away my little girl's life. It belongs to her and I hope she may be happy. Will somebody take her and give her happiness? It is wicked to kill myself, but my head is so bad I cannot think out the right way to do. This is the key to the room in Block Ten.

"'MRS. ELISIANE SIROIS.

"'Her name is Rosemarie.'"

Walker Farr finished reading and stared into the glittering eyes of the old man.

Etienne Provancher swore roundly and furiously--the strange, hard oaths that his ancestors had brought from the Normandy of the seventeenth century.

"So you shall see--it is as I have say." He shook his fists again at the mill. Its open windows vomited the staccato chatterings of the myriad looms. "It chews up the poor people. Hear its dam' teeth go chank--chank--chank!"

"The Gallic imagination is always active," said Farr, joggling the key at the end of the cord and eyeing it with peculiar interest. "But in this case it seems to picture conditions pretty accurately. I wonder just what a visitor would find inside the door that this key fits!"

"You shall go tell them at the office of the mill," commanded Etienne.

"Tell them they have killed another. They will telephone for the coroner. I will give the paper and the key when he come." He held out his hand. "It is the law."

"I have a natural hankering--sometimes--to break the law," affirmed the young man. "I feel that fatal curiosity of mine stirring again, Friend Etienne. I will send the coroner. But coroners love mysteries. If we give him the letter it will take all the spice out of this affair. Let's make him happy--he can drag out the inquest and give his friends a long job on the jury." He smiled and started away, shaking his head when the old man protested shrilly. "Better say nothing about this letter and the key. You'll get into trouble for letting a stranger come in here and carry away evidence. Better keep out of the law, Etienne." He grabbed the "No Trespa.s.sing" sign for a hand-hold and climbed over the fence.

"I'll come back and tell you, Etienne. But keep mum," he advised.

"It is his smile--it makes me break the law," mumbled the old man.

VIII

THE KEY TO A DOOR IN BLOCK TEN

Walker Farr gave the first policeman--a fat and sweltering individual--a piece of gruesome news and in return casually asked the location of Block Ten.

The policeman grudgingly growled the information over his shoulder while waiting for the station to answer the call from his box.

The young man, taking his time, found the place at last, one in an interminable row of tenement-houses, all identical in structure and squalor, bearing the mark of corporation n.i.g.g.ardliness in their cheap lumber and stingy accommodations.

The hallway that Farr entered was narrow and stifling--stale odors of thousands of dead-and-gone boiled dinners mingled there, and a stairway with a greasy handrail invited him. The key bore a number. He hunted till he found a room, far up, flight after flight. Through open doors he saw here and there aged women or doddering old men who were guardians of dirty babes who tumbled about on the bare floors.

"Either too old to run a loom or too young to lug a bobbin," Farr informed himself; "that's why they aren't in the mill."

Old folks and babes stared at him without showing interest.

No one looked at him when he opened the door in which the key fitted.

He stepped in quickly and closed and locked the door behind him.

It was a little room and pitifully bare, and it was under the roof, and the ceiling slanted across it so sharply that the young man, tall above the average, was compelled to bow his head.

A little girl, a wraith of a child, pale with the pallor of a prisoner, hardly more than a toddler, sat on the floor and stared up at the intruder, frozen, silent, immobile with the sudden, paralyzing terror that grasps the frightened child. Pathetically poor little playthings were scattered about her: a doll fashioned from gingham and cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels. The man who entered saw all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the mother had toiled. Here now the child waited patiently for--for that water-soaked bundle, with the white, dead face, that lay on the ca.n.a.l bank waiting for the coroner.

And when he realized it and saw this and looked down on that lonely, patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man's breast into his throat. He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul--it was tender, agonizing, heartrending pity.

She still stared at him, terrorized. Probably she had never seen any face come in at that door except her mother's.

His pity must have given Walker Farr a hint of how to deal with this frightened child. He did not speak to her. He made no move toward her.

He smiled!

But it was not the smile he had given the fat plutocrat in the automobile, nor yet the jocular radiance he had displayed to old Etienne. It was such a smile as the man had never smiled before--and he realized it. He did not want to smile. He wanted to weep. But he brought that smile from tender depths in his soul--depths he had not known of before--and tears came with the smile.

Before that time the lines in his face had fitted the smile of the cynic, the grimace of banter, of irony and insolence. But the strange glory that now glowed upon his features came there after the mightiest effort he had ever made to control his feelings and his expression.

He smiled!

In that smile he soothed, he promised, he appealed. Then when he saw the tense expression of fear fade away he smiled more broadly--he provoked reply in kind. And slowly upon the child's face an answering smile began to dawn--little crinkles at the corners of the drooping mouth, little flickerings in the blue eyes, until at last the two beaming faces pledged--on the part of the man tender protection, on the part of the child unquestioning confidence.

But he said no word--he dared not trust his voice.

He went down on his knees cautiously, her smile welcoming him now.

He held out his hands. She hesitated a moment and then gave into them her chiefest possession--her rag doll. It was as if she had pledged her faith in him. He danced the doll upon his broad palm, and the child's eyes, dancing too, thanked him for the courtesy he was paying to her dearest friend.

But Walker Farr realized that something strange and disquieting in the case of a man who believed himself a cynic was stirring within him.

That hostage of the doll was not sufficient to satisfy the sudden queer craving. The knowledge of the hopeless helplessness of that little girl throbbed through him. The memory of the spectacle of what he had left on the ca.n.a.l bank made the pathos of this little scene in the garret doubly poignant as he looked into the child's eyes. Never, in his memory, had he invited a child to come to him.

Now he put out his hand--and it trembled. She snuggled her warm little fist into his grasp. And then she scrambled up and came and nestled confidingly against him. She couldn't see his face then, and he allowed the tears of a strong man who is overcome before he has understood--who wonders at himself--he allowed those tears to streak his cheeks and did not wipe them away.

Walker Farr was too perturbed to soliloquize just then in his philosopher's style, but he did realize that some part of his altruism had come out of its trance.

And after he had knelt there on the floor for a time he rose and took the child in his arms and sat down in a creaky rocking-chair and crooned under his breath, and was astonished to find that she had gone sound asleep. He stared into the dusk that was gathering outside the dormer window and wondered what ailed him.

He had heard many feet thudding on the stairs below. The workers were returning. The beehive was filling. There were many voices, clatter of dishes, chatter of patois.