Chapter 2

Then I stepped closer to the little figure lying in the old blue curtain, that was stiffened now with blood. The parted lips were gray; the whole face, except the vivid eyes, was dead. The night-dress was thrown back from the poor throat and chest, stained here and there with spots of crimson on the white skin, that seemed stretched over the small bones. I stooped beside her, in answer to an appealing look. She could not lift the frail, tired hand that lay by her, its fingers uncurled, the hand of one who, dying, relinquishes gladly its grasp on life. The hands of the strong, torn from a world they love, clench and clutch at the last; it is an involuntary hold on earth. The doctor moved away. The whining sobs of the old man became more audible. I put my ear to her cold lips.

"His letters ... the letters ... and ... my book ... I told you of, take them. Here, in the closet ... by ... the chimney...."

I could hardly distinguish the faint whispers. I raised my hand impatiently, and the old man stopped moaning. Mrs. Hikes and the doctor ceased speaking in low undertones. Only a great moth, that had fluttered inside the lamp chimney thudded heavily from side to side.

"Yes, yes. What shall I do with them?"

She did not speak, and seeing her agonized eyes trying to tell mine, I cried aloud, "Give her brandy--something. She wants to speak. Oh, give her a chance to speak!"

The doctor stepped to my side. He lifted the wrist, let it fall, and shook his head. "Don't you see?" he said. I looked at the eyes, and saw.

Some days later I went to the lonely house. The old man was sitting in a loose, disconsolate heap in his seat by the apple-tree. The tears rolled down the wrinkles into his beard, when I spoke of his daughter.

"There were some letters and papers she wished me to have," I said. In the closet by the chimney. "If you are willing--"

The old man shuffled into the house, and threw open the blinds of the darkened room. Some one had set the books in neat piles on the table; the chairs were placed against the wall. The drapery had been washed and stretched smoothly across the mattress. There were two or three dark stains on the floor that could not be washed out. The slim little slipper still decked the wall.

I looked up at the door by the chimney. "Here's the key," said the old man, brokenly. "I found it to-day under the mattress." I tried it, but it did not turn in the lock. I was hardly tall enough to reach it. The old man fetched me a chair on which I stood, and after a moment or two I felt the rusty lock yield. The little door gave and opened.

Nothing was there, nothing but the dust of years that blackened my fingers, as I put in my hand, unconvinced by my sense of sight.

"Are you sure no one has been here, no one who could open the closet?"

"Nobody," he proclaimed in the cracked tone of extreme age. "She must have wandered when she told you that. People wander when they are dying, you know. Her mother--but that was long ago." He tapped the key thoughtfully on the mantel. "You see how the lock stuck, and the door. I don't expect Agnes had it open for years. I expect she wandered, like her mother." He peered vaguely in at the empty space, and then turned to me. "I forget a great deal now. I'm getting an old man, a very old man," he said, in an explanatory tone.

"But did you know she had letters somewhere, a pile of papers? You remember her getting letters, do you not, letters from her lover?"

He looked up at me apologetically, with dim, watery blue eyes. "I don't expect I remember much," he confessed. "Not of later years. I could tell you all about things when I was a boy, but I can't seem to remember much that's happened since mother died. That must have been along about twenty years ago. I'm all broken down now, old--very old. You see I am a very old man."

I left him shutting the room into darkness, and passed out into the sunlight, sorely perplexed.

Mrs. Libby was baking when I returned, and the air of the kitchen was full of the sweet, hot smell that gushed from the oven door she had just opened. She stood placidly eating the remnants of dough that clung to the pan.

"Mrs. Libby," said I, sinking down on the door-step, "what was the name of Agnes Rayne's lover? You told me once you could not remember. Will you try to think, please?"

"Well, I was talking to Mrs. Hikes after the fun'r'l," said Mrs. Libby, still devouring the dough. "He boarded to the Hikeses', you see, 'n' she had it as pat as her own," and then Mrs. Libby mentioned calmly a name that now you can hardly pass a book-stall without reading, a name that of late is a synonym for marvellous and unprecedented success in the literary world. I had met this great man at a reception the winter before; let me rather say, I had stood reverently on the outskirts of a crowd of adorers that flocked around him. I looked so fixedly at Mrs. Libby that her smile broadened.

"Don't know him, do you?" she queried.

"I think I have met him," I replied. "Was he engaged to Agnes Rayne?"

Mrs. Libby waited to pierce a loaf of cake with a broom splint. She ran her thick fingers carefully along the splint and then turned the brown loaf on to a sieve.

"Mrs. Hikes says she don't believe a word of it. Folks think he just courted her one spell that summer, not real serious, just to pass the time away, you might say, like many another young man. Mrs. Hikes says, she never heard of him writin' to her, or anything, 'n' if he had, old Hawkins that brings the mail couldn't have kep' it, any more'n he could keep the news he reads off postal cards. They talked enough first about her being love-cracked, but there wa'n't any signs of it I could hear, excep' her trailin' 'round the beach, 'n' looking wimbly, 'n' not doin' jus' like other folks. She never _said_ a word to anybody. Might 'a' been it turned her some," said Mrs. Libby, thoughtfully, rolling the flour in white scales from her heavy wrists. "Might 'a' been she was queer any way--sending off to the city for white silk gowns, 'n' things to wear in that old rack of boards, jus' because she was bein' courted. Most would 'a' kep' the money 'gainst their fittin' out. I guess that was all there was, jus' a little triflin', 'n' she took it in earnest. Well, it don't make any difference now," she concluded coolly, as she turned to her sink of baking-dishes.

I sat listening stupidly to her heavy tread, to the cheery clash of the tins as she washed and put them in place. To never know any more! Yet after all, I knew all that could be known, strangely enough. Then, with a long shiver, I remembered the small closet beside the chimney with its empty, dusty shelves.

"Mrs. Libby," said I, rising, "I think I will go back to the city to-morrow."

A STORY OF THE VERE DE VERE.

The landlord called it an apartment-house, the tenants called their three or four little closets of rooms, flats, and perhaps if you or I had chanced to be in West ---- Street, near the river, and had glanced up at the ugly red brick structure, with the impracticable fire-escape crawling up its front, like an ugly spider, we should have said it was a common tenement house.

Druse, however, had thought it, if a trifle dirty, a very magnificent and desirable dwelling. The entrance floor was tesselated with diamonds of blue and white; there was a row of little brass knobs and letter-boxes, with ill-written names or printed cards stuck askew in the openings above them. Druse did not guess their uses at first, how should she? She had never in all her fifteen years, been in the city before. How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?

It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a town office, which penetrated even to the Hand's little gray kennel of a house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to read it.

"Well, you ain't a-goin'," she said to Drusilla, who stood quite patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face. "No, sir, you ain't a-goin' one step. She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive, 'n' you ain't a-goin' to take care of her children dead, 'n' that's the end of it."

Druse made no reply. She never did. Instead, she bent her thin, childish back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.

None the less, Druse went.

It was all Pop's work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that should be, it was,--at least in the little house on the edge of the village.

And Pop had said Druse should go. For after all, the case is hard, even if one _is_ occupying a lofty position to rural eyes as a carpenter in "York," with a city wife, who has flung her head contemptuously at the idea of visiting his ne'er-do-weel brother; the case is hard, no matter how high one's station may be, to be left with three motherless children, over-fond of the street, with no one to look after them, or make ready a comfortable bit of dinner at night. And so, considering that Elviry was fourteen, and stronger than Druse, any way, and that John Hand had promised to send a certain little sum to his brother every month, as well as to clothe Druse, Druse went to live in the fourth flat in the Vere de Vere.

Perhaps that was not just the name, but it was something equally high-sounding and aristocratic; and it seemed quite fitting that one of the dirty little cards that instructed the postman and the caller, should bear the pleasing name, "Blanche de Courcy." But Druse had never read novels. Her acquaintance with fiction had been made entirely through the medium of the Methodist Sunday School library, and the heroines did not, as a rule, belong to the higher rank in which, as we know, the lords and ladies are all Aubreys, and Montmorencis, and Maudes, and Blanches. Still even Druse's untrained eye lingered with pleasure on the name, as she came in one morning, after having tasted the delights of life in the Vere de Vere for a couple of weeks. She felt that she now lived a very idle life. She had coaxed the three children into a regular attendance at school, and her uncle was always away until night. She could not find enough work to occupy her, though, true to her training, when there was nothing else to do she scrubbed everything wooden and scoured everything tin. Still there were long hours when it was tiresome to sit listening to the tramping overhead, or the quarrels below, watching the slow hands of the clock; and Druse was afraid in the streets yet, though she did not dare say so, because her bold, pert little cousins laughed at her. She was indeed terribly lonely. Her uncle was a man of few words; he ate his supper, and went to sleep after his pipe and the foaming pitcher of beer that had frightened Druse when she first came. For Druse had been a "Daughter of Temperance" in East Green. She had never seen any one drink beer before. She thought of the poem that the minister's daughter (in pale blue muslin, tucked to the waist) had recited at the Temperance Lodge meeting. It began:

"Pause, haughty man, whose lips are at the brim Of Hell's own draught, in yonder goblet rare--"

She wished she had courage to repeat it. She felt if Uncle John could have heard Lucinda recite it--. Yet he might not think it meant him; he was not haughty, although he was a carpenter, and the beer he drank out of one of the children's mugs. But it troubled Druse. She thought of it as she sat one afternoon, gravely crotcheting a tidy after an East Green pattern, before it was time for the children to be back from school. It was a warm day in October, so warm that she had opened the window, letting in with the air the effluvia from the filthy street, and the discordant noises. The lady in the flat above was whipping a refractory child, whose cries came distinctly through the poor floors and partitions of the Vere De Vere.

Suddenly there was a loud, clumsy knock at the door. She opened it, and a small boy with a great basket of frilled and ruffled clothes, peeping from under the cover, confronted her.

"Say, lady," he asked, red and cross, "Is yer name De Courcy?"

"No, it ain't," replied Druse. "She's the back flat to the right, here. I'll show you," she added, with the country instinct of "neighboring."

The boy followed her, grumbling, through the long narrow hall, and as Druse turned to go, after his loud pound on the door, it suddenly flew open. Druse stood rooted to the ground. A dirty pink silk wrapper, with a long train covered with dirtier lace, is not a beautiful garment by full daylight. Yet to untrained eyes it looked almost gorgeous, gathered about the handsome form. Miss De Courcy had failed to arrange her hair for the afternoon, and it fell in heavy black folds on her shoulders, and her temples were bandaged by a white handkerchief. Perhaps it was not strange that Druse stood and gazed at her. The dark, brilliant eyes fixed themselves on the slight, flat-chested little form, clad in brown alpaca, on the pale hair drawn straight back from the pale face, and arranged in a tight knob at the back of the head.

A whim seized the fair wearer of the negligée. "Come in and sit down, I want to talk to you. There, leave the clothes, boy. I'll pay your mother next time," and she pushed the boy out, and drew the young girl in with easy audacity.

Druse looked around the room in bewilderment. It was not exactly dirty, but things seemed to have been thrown in their places. The carpet was bright, and much stained, rather than worn; hideous plaques and plush decorations abounded. A crimson chair had lost a leg, and was pushed ignominiously in a corner of the tiny room; a table was crowded with bottles and fragments of food, and a worn, velvet jacket and much-beplumed hat lay amongst them. A ragged lace skirt hung over the blue sofa, on one corner of which Miss De Courcy threw herself down, revealing a pair of high heeled scarlet slippers. "Sit down," she said, in a rather metallic voice, that ill accorded with the rounded curves of face and figure. "I've got a beastly headache," pushing up the bandage on her low brow. "What did you run for, when I opened the door? Did your folks tell you not to come in here, ever?"

"Why, no, ma'am!" said Druse, raising her blue, flower-like eyes wonderingly.

"Oh! well," responded Miss De Courcy, with a hoarse little laugh of amusement. "I thought they might have--thought maybe they objected to your making 'cquaintances without a regular introduction, you know. Haven't been here long, have you?"

"No," said Druse, looking down at her tidy, with a sudden homesick thrill. "No, I--I come from East Green, Connecticut. I ain't got used to it here, much. It's kind o' lonesome, days. I s'pose you don't mind it. It's different if you're used to it, I guess."

Somehow Druse did not feel as timid as usual, though her weak little voice, thin, like the rest of her, faltered a trifle, but then she had never called on a lady so magnificently dressed before.

"Yes, I'm pretty well used to it by this," replied Miss De Courcy, with the same joyless little laugh, giving the lace skirt an absent-minded kick with her red morocco toe. "I lived in the country before--when I was little."

"You did!" exclaimed Druse. "Then I guess you know how it is at first. When you think every Friday night (there ain't been but two, yet) 'There, they're gettin' ready for Lodge meetin';' and every Sunday evenin' 'bout half-past seven: 'I guess it's mos' time for the Meth'dis' bell to ring. I must get my brown felt on, and--'"

"Your what?" asked Miss De Courcy.

"My brown felt, my hat, an'--oh! well, there's lots o' things I kind o' forget, and start to get ready for. An' I can't sleep much on account of not having Bell an' Virey an' Mimy to bed with me. It's so lonesome without 'em. The children here won't sleep with me. I did have Gusty one night, but I woke her up four times hangin' on to her. I'm so used to holding Mimy in! Oh! I guess I'll get over it all right, but you know how it is yourself."

Miss De Courcy did not reply. She had closed her eyes, and now she gave the bandage on her head an angry twich. "_Oh_, how it aches!" she said through her shut teeth. "Here, give me that bottle on the stand, will you? It'll make it worse, but _I_ don't care. My doctor's medicine don't seem to do me much good, but I sort of keep on taking it," she said to Druse, grandly as she poured out a brownish liquid into the cloudy glass that the good little housekeeper had eyed dubiously, before giving it to her.

Miss De Courcy's doctor evidently believed in stimulants; a strong odor of Scotch whiskey filled the room.

"It smells quite powerful, does'nt it?" she said. "It has something in it to keep it, you know. It's very unpleasant to take," she added, rolling up her brown eyes to Druse's compassionate face.

"I do' know as it would do you any good, prob'ly it wouldn't," said Druse shyly, shifting the glass from one hand to the other, "but I used to stroke Ma's head lots, when she had a chance to set down, and it ached bad."

Miss De Courcy promptly stretched herself at full length, and settled her feet comfortably in the lace skirts, in which the high, sharp heels tore two additional rents, and pulled the bandage from her forehead.

"Go ahead," she said, laconically. Druse dragged a chair to the side of the couch, and for some minutes there was silence--that is, the comparative silence that might exist in the Vere De Vere--while she deftly touched the burning smooth flesh with her finger tips.

Miss De Courcy opened her eyes drowsily. "I guess I'm going to get a nap, after all. You're doing it splendid. You'll come and see me again, won't you? Say, don't tell your folks you was here to-day, will you? I'll tell you why. I--I've got a brother that drinks. It's awful. He comes to see me evenings a good deal, and some daytimes. They'd be afraid he'd be home, 'n' they wouldn't let you come again. He's cross, you see 'n' they'd never--let you come again 'f you--"

Miss De Courcy was almost overpowered by sleep. She roused herself a moment and looked at Druse with dull pleading. "Don't you tell 'em, will you? Promise! I want you to come again. A girl isn't to blame if her father--I mean her brother--"

"Yes, ma'am, I'll promise, of course I will," said Druse hastily, her thin little bosom swelling with compassion. "I won't never let 'em know I know you, if you say so. No, ma'am, it's awful cruel to blame you for your brother's drinkin'. I've got some pieces about it at home, about folkses' families a-sufferin' for their drinkin'. I'd like to come again if you want me. I'm afraid I ain't much company, but I could stroke your head every time you have a headache. It's awful nice to know somebody that's lived in the country and understands just how it is when you first--"

Druse looked down. The doctor's remedy was apparently successful this time, for with crimson cheeks and parted lips, Miss Blanche De Courcy had forgotten her headache in a very profound slumber. Druse gazed at her with mingled admiration and pity. No wonder the room seemed a little untidy. She would have liked to put it to rights, but fearing she might waken her new friend, who was now breathing very heavily, she only pulled the shade down, and with a last compassionate glance at the victim of a brother's intemperance, she picked up her crocheting and tip-toed lightly from the room.

After that life in the Vere De Vere was not so dreary. Druse was not secretive, but she had the accomplishment of silence, and she kept her promise to the letter. Druse could not feel that she could be much consolation to so elegant a being. Miss De Courcy was often _distraite_ when she brought her crocheting in of an afternoon, or else she was extremely, not to say boisterously gay, and talked or laughed incessantly, or sang at the upright piano that looked too large for the little parlor. The songs were apt to be compositions with such titles as, "Pretty Maggie Kelly," and "Don't Kick him when He's Down," but Druse never heard anything more reprehensible, and she thought them beautiful.

Sometimes, quite often indeed, her hostess had the headaches that forced her to resort to the doctor's disagreeable remedy from the black bottle, or was sleeping off a headache on the sofa. Miss De Courcy did not seem to have many women friends. Once, it is true, two ladies with brilliant golden hair, and cheeks flushed perhaps by the toilsome ascent to the fourth floor, rustled loudly into the parlor. They were very gay, and so finely dressed, one in a bright green plush coat, and the other in a combination of reds, that Druse made a frightened plunge for the door and escaped, but not before one of the ladies had inquired, with a peal of laughter, "Who's the kid?" Druse had flushed resentfully, but she did not care when her friend told her afterward, with a toss of the head, "_They're_ nothing. They just come here to see how I was fixed."

After a little Druse offered timidly to clean up the room for her, and quite regularly then, would appear on each Wednesday with her broom and duster, happy to be allowed to bring order out of chaos.

"Well, you are a good little thing," Miss De Courcy would say, pulling on her yellow gloves and starting for the street when the dust began to fly. She never seemed to be doing anything. A few torn books lay about, but Druse never saw her open them. She had warned Druse not to come in of an evening, for her brother might be home in a temper. Druse thought she saw him once, such a handsome man with his hair lightly tinged with gray; he was turning down the hall as Druse came wearily up the stairs, and she saw him go in Miss De Courcy's room; but then again when Gusty was sick, and she had to go down at night and beg the janitress to come up and see if it were the measles, there was a much younger man, with reddened eyes, from whose glance Druse shrank as she passed him, and he certainly reeled a little, and he also went in Miss De Courcy's door, and from motives of delicacy she did not ask which was he,--though she felt a deep curiosity to know. Not that Miss De Courcy refrained from mentioning him. On the contrary, she told heart-rending incidents of his cruelty, as she tilted back and forth lazily in her rocking-chair, while Druse sat by, spellbound, her thin hands clasped tightly over the work in her lap, neglecting even the bon-bons that Miss De Courcy lavished upon her.

One morning there was a cruel purple mark on the smooth dark skin of Miss De Courcy's brow, and the round wrist was red and swollen. Druse's eyes flashed as she saw them. "I expect I'm as wicked as a murderer," she said, "for I wish that brother of yours was dead. Yes, I do, 'n' I'd like to kill him!" And the self-contained and usually stoical little thing burst into passionate tears, and hid her face in Miss De Courcy's lap.

A dark flush passed over that young lady's face, and something glittered in the hard blue eyes. She drew Druse tight against her heart, as though she would never let her go, and then she laughed nervously, trying to soothe her. "There, there, it ain't anything. They're all brutes, but I was ugly myself last night, 'n' made him mad. Tell me something about the country, Druse, like you did the other day--anything. I don't care."