One Man in His Time Part 30

She faced him squarely, with her head held high and her eyes cold and determined. "What do you want me to do? Please don't beat about the bush any longer."

He hesitated a moment, and she inferred that he was trying to decide how far he might venture with safety. "Well, I thought you might speak a word to him," he said. "He sets such store by what you would like. I thought you might drop a hint that he ought to stand by his friends."

"To stand by his friends--that means you," she rejoined.

"Oh, he'll know quick enough what it means! You must be smart about it, of course, but I don't mind his knowing that I've been speaking to you.

It's for his own good that I'm talking--for the very minute that the fellows find out he ain't been on the square with 'em, it will be 'nothing doing' for the Governor."

"It is a threat, then?" she asked sharply.

"I'd call it something else if I were you. Look here," he continued briskly. "You'd like to see the old man go to the Senate, and maybe higher up, wouldn't you?"

"Oh, of course. What has that to do with it?"

He winked and laughed knowingly. "Well, you just take my advice and drop a hint to him about this business. Then, perhaps, you'll see."

"If he doesn't take the hint, what will you do?"

"Ask me that in the sweet bye and bye, honey!" His tone had become offensively familiar. "It's for his good, you know. If it's the last word I ever speak I'm trying to save him from the biggest snag he ever met in his life."

She had drawn disdainfully away from him; but at his last words she came a step nearer. "I'll tell him exactly what you say," she answered; and then she asked suddenly in a firmer tone: "Have you heard anything more of my aunt?"

He looked at her intently. "Why, yes. You hadn't mentioned her again, so I thought you'd ceased to be interested. Would you like to see her?" he demanded abruptly after a pause.

"How can I? I don't know where she is."

For a minute or two before replying he studied her closely. "I wish you would let your hair grow out, Patty," he remarked at the end of his examination, and there was a note of genuine feeling in his bantering.

"I remember how pretty you used to look as a little girl, with your hair flying behind you like the mane of a pony."

"Let my hair alone. Do you know where my aunt is?"

He appeared to yield reluctantly to her insistence. "If you're so bent on knowing--and, mind you, I tell you only because you make me--she ain't so very far from where we are standing. I could take you to her in ten minutes."

She looked at him as if she scarcely believed his words. "You mean that she is in town?"

"Haven't you known me long enough to find out that I always mean what I say?"

"Then you can take me to her now?"

He laughed shortly, and dug the end of his walking stick between the pavement and the edge of the curbstone. "What do you reckon the Governor would say to it?"

"I needn't tell him--not just yet, anyhow. But are you really and truly sure that she is my mother's sister?"

"Well, they had the same parents, and I reckon that makes 'em sisters if anything does. I knew 'em both out yonder in California, and I never heard anybody suggest they weren't related."

"Why did she come here? Was it to see me?"

"Partly that, and partly--well, she's been pretty sick. I reckon she's likely to go off at any time, and she wanted to be back where she was born. She had pneumonia two years ago, and then again last winter. Her lungs are about used up."

"Then, if I went to see her, I'd better go now, hadn't I?"

"It would be surer. Something may happen almost any day. That's why I spoke to you."

"I am glad you did. If it isn't far, will you take me now?"

But instead of walking on with her, he dug the end of his stick more firmly between the pavement and the curbstone. "I don't want to do you any harm, Patty," he said gently at last. "It may give you a shock to see her, you know. She's been through some hard times, and she's about come to the end of her rope. Good Lord, the way life is! When I first saw her out in California she was one of the prettiest pieces of flesh I ever laid eyes on. She had something of your look, too, though you wouldn't believe it now."

But the girl had already started to cross the street. "Don't let's waste any time talking. Which way do we go?"

At her decision his hesitation vanished, and he joined her with a laugh and a flourish of the diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand. "Well, you are a sport, Patty! You always were, even when you weren't much more than knee high to a duck. If you've made up your mind to go, you won't be blaming me afterward?"

"Oh, I shan't blame you, of course. Do we turn up this street?"

"Yes, go ahead. It ain't far--just a little way up Leigh Street."

They walked on rapidly, and presently, so swift and determined was Patty's step, Gershom ceased to speak, and only glanced at her now and then in a furtive and anxious way. There was a look of tragic resolution on her small face--oh, she was meeting life in earnest, she reflected--and even to the coa.r.s.e mind and the dull imagination of the man beside her, she a.s.sumed gradually the appearance of some ethereal messenger. At the moment she was thinking of Stephen, but this he did not suspect. He saw only that there was something almost unearthly in her expression; and he felt the kind of awe that came over him on Sunday when he entered a church. He wouldn't hurt the girl, he told himself, with a twinge, for a pocketful of money.

They had turned into Leigh Street, and had walked some distance in silence, when Patty asked suddenly without looking round, "Then she doesn't know I am coming?"

"I told her I'd bring you whenever I could; but she ain't looking for you this evening. There, that's the house--the one in the middle, with that wooden swing and all those kids in the yard."

He pointed to what had once been a fine old house of stuccoed brick, with a square front porch and green shutters which were sagging on loosened hinges. On the walls where the stucco had peeled away, the red brick showed in splotches, and the pillars of the porch, which had been white, were now speckled with yellow stains. Over the whole place, with its air of fallen respectability, there hung the depressing smell of mingled dust, stale cooking, and bad tobacco. A number of imposing and well-preserved houses stood on the block, for of the whole neighbourhood, it appeared to the girl, they had chosen the most dilapidated dwelling and the one which was most crowded with children.

"We're here all right. Don't go so fast," remarked Gershom, as they ascended the steps. "It ain't going to run away from you." Bending down he picked up a crying urchin from the steps. "Lost your ball, have you?

Well, I expect if you dig deep enough in my pocket, you can find it again. h.e.l.lo! You've got a punch, ain't you, sonny? A regular John L., I reckon." Putting the child down, he continued sheepishly to Patty: "I always had a soft spot for the kids. Never could pa.s.s one in the street without stopping."

On the porch, beside a broken perambulator, which contained a black-eyed baby with a bottle of milk, a stout man sat reading the afternoon paper, while with one hand he patiently pushed the rickety carriage back and forth. As they reached the porch, he laid aside his paper, and rose with his hand still on the perambulator.

"Oh, it's you," he said, "Mr. Gershom."

"I've brought this lady to see Mrs. Green," returned Gershom. "How is she?"

The stout man shook his head and surveyed Patty curiously but not discourteously. He had a kindly, humorous look, and she felt at once that she preferred his blunt frankness to Gershom's facetious insincerity. There was something in his face that suggested the black-eyed baby sucking placidly at the rubber nipple on the bottle of milk.

"She's worse if anything. The doctor came this morning." The baby, having dropped the bottle, lifted a despairing wail, and the father bent over and replaced the nipple gently between the quivering lips. "The rent was due yesterday," he added, "I understood that there was to be no trouble about it."

"Oh, there's no trouble about that. I'm responsible," replied Gershom quickly. He was about to pa.s.s on; but changing his mind, he stopped and drew out his pocket book. "I'll settle it now. Are there any extras?"

"Yes, she's had to have eggs and milk, and there have been medicines. It comes to twelve dollars in all. I'll show you the account."

"Very well. Get anything that she needs." Then, as Gershom followed Patty into the hall, he pointed to the fine old staircase. "It's the back room. Go straight up. You ain't timid, are you?"

"Timid? Oh, no." Running lightly up the stairs, the girl hesitated a moment before the half-open door of the room at the back of the house.

Then, in obedience to a gesture from Gershom as he pushed the door wider, she crossed the threshold, and went rapidly toward a couch in front of the window. As she went forward there floated to her a heavy, sweetish scent which seemed to her to be the very breath of despair. Her first thought was that the sun had gone under a cloud; the next instant she perceived that the window was shaded by a ragged ailantus tree and that beyond the tree there was a high brick wall which shut out the daylight. Then she looked at the woman lying under a ragged blanket on the couch; and she felt vaguely that the haggard features framed in coa.r.s.e black hair awakened a troubled sense of familiarity or recognition. The next instant there returned to her the memory of her walk in the Square with Corinna a few weeks before, and of the strange woman who had looked at them so curiously.

"I have come to see you," she began gently, "Mr. Gershom brought me."

Raising her head, the woman stared at her without replying. Her eyes were dull and heavy, with drooping lids beneath which a sombre glow flickered and died down. There was a wan yellow tinge over her face; and yet now that the approach of death had refined and purified her features, she was not without a gravity of expression which made her strangely impressive, like some wax mask of an avenging Fate. With a sensation of relief, Patty's eyes wandered from the haggard face to a calla lily in a pot on the window-sill, and she noticed that it bore a single perfect blossom. While she waited, overcome by a dumbness which seemed to invade her from head to foot, her eyes clung to that calla lily as if it were her one connection with reality. All the rest, the close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the sickening sweetish odour with which she was unfamiliar, the waxen mask and the blank, drooping eyes of the woman; all these things seemed to exist not in her actual surroundings, but in some hideous dream from which she was struggling to awake. Somewhere long ago, in a dreadful nightmare, she had smelled that cloying scent and seen those half-shut eyes looking back at her. Somewhere--and yet it was impossible. She could only have imagined it all.