Part 5

All that night and all the succeeding day Miss Bailey's imagination reverted again and again to the two little ones keeping house in Mrs. Mowgelewsky's immaculate apartment. Even increasing blindness had not been allowed to interfere with sweeping and scrubbing and dusting, and when Teacher thought of that patient matron, as she lay in her hospital cot trusting so securely to her Christian friend's guardianship of her son and home, she fretted herself into feeling that it was her duty to go down to Monroe Street and investigate.

There was at first no sound when, after climbing endless stairs, she came to Mrs. Mowgelewsky's door. But as the thumping of the heart and the singing in her ears abated somewhat, she detected Morris's familiar treble.

"Bread," it said, "iss awful healthy for you, only you dasn't eat it 'out chewin'. I never in my world seen how you eats."

Although the words were admonitory, they lost all didactic effect by the wealth of love and tenderness which sang in the voice. There was a note of happiness in it, too, a throb of pure enjoyment quite foreign to Teacher's knowledge of this sad-eyed little charge of hers. She rested against the door frame, and Morris went on:

"I guess you don't know what iss polite. You shall better come on the school, und Miss Bailey could to learn you what iss polite and healthy fer you. No, you couldn't to have no meat! No, _sir_! No, _ma'am_! You couldn't to have no meat 'til I cuts it fer you. You could to, maybe, make yourself a sickness und a bashfulness."

Miss Bailey put her hand on the door and it yielded noiselessly to her touch, and revealed to her guardian eyes her ward and his little friend. They were seated _vis-à-vis_ at the table; everything was very neat and clean and most properly set out. A little lamp was burning clearly. Morris's hair was parted for about an inch back from his forehead and sleeked wetly down upon his brow. The guest had evidently undergone similar preparation for the meal. Each had a napkin tied around his neck, and as Teacher watched them, Morris carefully prepared his guest's dinner, while the guest, an Irish terrier, with quick eyes and one down-flopped ear, accepted his admonishings with a good-natured grace, and watched him with an adoring and confiding eye.

The guest was first to detect the stranger's presence. He seized a piece of bread in his teeth, jumped to the ground, and walking up to Teacher on his hind legs, hospitably dropped the refreshment at her feet.

"Oh! Teacher! Teacher!" cried Morris, half in dismay at discovery, and half in joy that this so sure confidant should share his secret and appreciate his friend. "Oh! Teacher! Missis Bailey! this is the friend what I was telling you over. See how he walks on his feet! See how he has got smilin' looks! See how he carries somethings by his teeth! All times he makes like that. Rover, he don't carries nothin's, und gold fishes, they ain't got no feet even. On'y Izzie could to make them things."

"Oh, is his name Izzie?" asked Miss Bailey, grasping at this conversational straw and shaking the paw which the stranger was presenting to her. "And this is the friend you told me about? You let me think," she chided, with as much severity as Morris had shown to his Izzie, "that he was a boy."

"I had a 'fraid," said the Monitor of the Gold Fish Bowl frankly.

So had Teacher as she reviewed the situation from Mrs. Mowgelewsky's chair of state, and watched the friends at supper. It was a revelation of solicitude on one side, and patient gratitude on the other. Morris ate hardly anything, and was soon at Teacher's knee--Izzie was in her lap--discussing ways and means.

He refused to entertain any plan which would separate him immediately from Izzie, but he was at last brought to see the sweet reasonableness of preparing his mother's mind by degrees to accept another member to the family.

"Und he eats," his protector was forced to admit--"he eats somethin' fierce, Missis Bailey; as much like a man he eats. Und my mamma, I don't know what will she say. She won't leave me I shall keep him; from long I had a little bit of a dog, und she wouldn't to leave me I should keep _him_, und he didn't eat so much like Izzie eats, neither."

"And _I_ can't very well keep him," said Miss Bailey sadly, "because, you see, there is Rover. Rover mightn't like it. But there is one thing I can do: I'll keep him for a few days when your mother comes back, and then we'll see, you and I, if we can persuade her to let you have him always."

"She wouldn't never to do it," said Morris sadly. "That other dog, didn't I told you how he didn't eat so much like Izzie, and she wouldn't to leave me have him. That's a cinch."

"Oh! don't say that word, dear," cried Teacher. "And we can only try. We'll do our very, very best."

This guilty secret had a very dampening effect upon the joy with which Morris watched for his mother's recovery. Upon the day set for her return, he was a miserable battle-field of love and duty. Early in the morning Izzie had been transferred to Miss Bailey's yard. Rover was chained to his house, Izzie was tied to the wall at a safe distance from him, and they proceeded to make the day hideous for the whole neighborhood.

Morris remained at home to greet his mother, received her encomiums, cooked the dinner, and set out for afternoon school with a heavy heart and a heavier conscience. Nothing had occurred in those first hours to show any change in Mrs. Mowgelewsky's opinion of home pets; rather she seemed, in contrast to the mild and sympathetic Miss Bailey, more than ever dictatorial and dogmatic.

At a quarter after three, the gold fish having received perfunctory attention, and the Board of Monitors being left again to do their worst, unguarded, Morris and Teacher set out to prepare Mrs. Mowgelewsky's mind for the adoption of Izzie. They found it very difficult. Mrs. Mowgelewsky, restored of vision, was so hospitable, so festive in her elephantine manner, so loquacious and so self-congratulatory, that it was difficult to insert even the tiniest conversational wedge into the structure of her monologue.

Finally Miss Bailey managed to catch her attention upon financial matters. "You gave me," she said, "two dollars and ten cents, and Morris has managed so beautifully that he has not used it all, and has five cents to return to you. He's a very wonderful little boy, Mrs. Mowgelewsky," she added, smiling at her favorite to give him courage.

"He iss a good boy," Mrs. Mowgelewsky admitted. "Don't you get lonesome sometimes by yourself here, huh?"

"Well," said Miss Bailey, "he wasn't always alone."

"No?" queried the matron with a divided attention. She was looking for her purse, in which she wished to stow Morris's surplus.

"No," said Teacher; "I was here once or twice. And then a little friend of his----"

"Friend!" the mother repeated with a glare; "was friends here in mine house?"

Miss Bailey began a purposely vague reply, but Mrs. Mowgelewsky was not listening to her. She had searched the pockets of the gown she wore, then various other hiding-places in the region of its waist line, then a large bag of mattress covering which she wore under her skirt. Ever hurriedly and more hurriedly she repeated this performance two or three times, and then proceeded to shake and wring the out-door clothing which she had worn that morning.

"Gott!" she broke out at last, "mine Gott! mine Gott! it don't stands." And she began to peer about the floor with eyes not yet quite adjusted. Morris easily recognized the symptoms.

"She's lost her pocket-book," he told Miss Bailey.

"Yes, I lost it," wailed Mrs. Mowgelewsky, and then the whole party participated in the search. Over and under the furniture, the carpets, the bed, the stove, over and under everything in the apartment went Mrs. Mowgelewsky and Morris. All the joy of home-coming and of well-being was darkened and blotted out by this new calamity. And Mrs. Mowgelewsky beat her breast and tore her hair, and Constance Bailey almost wept in sympathy. But the pocket-book was gone, absolutely gone, though Mrs. Mowgelewsky called Heaven and earth to witness that she had had it in her hand when she came in.

Another month's rent was due; the money to pay it was in the pocket-book. Mr. Mowgelewsky had visited his wife on Sunday, and had given her all his earnings as some salve to the pain of her eyes. Eviction, starvation, every kind of terror and disaster were thrown into Mrs. Mowgelewsky's wailing, and Morris proved an able second to his mother.

Miss Bailey was doing frantic bookkeeping in her charitable mind, and was wondering how much of the loss she might replace. She was about to suggest as a last resort that a search should be made of the dark and crannied stairs, where a purse, if the Fates were very, very kind, might lie undiscovered for hours when a dull scratching made itself heard through the general lamentation. It came from a point far down on the panel of the door, and the same horrible conviction seized upon Morris and upon Miss Bailey at the same moment.

Mrs. Mowgelewsky in her frantic round had approached the door for the one-hundredth time, and with eyes and mind far removed from what she was doing, she turned the handle. And entered Izzie, beautifully erect upon his hind legs, with a yard or two of rope trailing behind him, and a pocket-book fast in his teeth.

Blank, pure surprise took Mrs. Mowgelewsky for its own. She staggered back into a chair, fortunately of heavy architecture, and stared at the apparition before her. Izzie came daintily in, sniffed at Morris, sniffed at Miss Bailey, sniffed at Mrs. Mowgelewsky's ample skirts, identified her as the owner of the pocket-book, laid it at her feet, and extended a paw to be shaken.

"Mine Gott!" said Mrs. Mowgelewsky, "what for a dog iss that?" She counted her wealth, shook Izzie's paw, and then stooped forward, gathered him into her large embrace, and cried like a baby. "Mine Gott! Mine Gott!" she wailed again, and although she spent five minutes in apparent effort to evolve another and more suitable remark, her research met with no greater success than the addition:

"He ain't a dog at all; he iss friends."

Miss Bailey had been sent to an eminently good college, and had been instructed long and hard in psychology, so that she knew the psychologic moment when she met it. She now arose with congratulations and farewells. Mrs. Mowgelewsky arose also with Izzie still in her arms. She lavished endearments upon him and caresses upon his short black nose, and Izzie received them all with enthusiastic gratitude.

"And I think," said Miss Bailey in parting, "that you had better let that dog come with me. He seems a nice enough little thing, quiet, gentle, and very intelligent. He can live in the yard with Rover."

Morris turned his large eyes from one to another of his rulers, and Izzie, also good at psychologic moments, stretched out a pointed pink tongue and licked Mrs. Mowgelewsky's cheek. "This dog," said that lady majestically, "iss mine. Nobody couldn't never to have him. When I was in mine trouble, was it mans or was it ladies what takes und gives me mine money back? No! Was it neighbors? No! Was it you, Miss Teacher, mine friend? No! It was that dog. Here he stays mit me. Morris, my golden one, you wouldn't to have no feelin's 'bout mamma havin' dogs? You wouldn't to have mads?"

"No, ma'am," responded her obedient son; "Missis Bailey she says it's _fer_ boys they should make all things what is lovin' mit cats und dogs und horses."

"Goot," said his mother; "I guess, maybe, that ain't such a foolishness."

It was not until nearly bedtime that Mrs. Mowgelewsky reverted to that part of Miss Bailey's conversation immediately preceding the discovery of the loss of the purse.

"So-o-oh, my golden one," she began, lying back in her chair with Izzie on her lap--"so-o-oh, you had friends by the house when mamma was by hospital."

"On'y one," Morris answered faintly.

"Well, I ain't scoldin'," said his mother. "Where iss your friend? I likes I shall look on him. Ain't he comin' round to-night?"

"No, ma'am," answered Morris, settling himself at her side, and laying his head close to his friend. "He couldn't to go out by nights the while he gets adopted off of a lady."

THE MAGIC CAPE

The heart of the janitor of an East Side school is not commonly supposed to be a tender organ. And yet to Miss Bailey, busy with roll-books and the average attendance of First Readers, there entered the janitor with an air half apologetic, half defiant. There was snow upon the janitor's cap and little icicles upon his red mustache, for a premature blizzard had closed down upon New York during the last days of November.

"Well, Mr. McGrath, what can I do for you?" asked Miss Bailey pleasantly, for McGrath was the true despot of the school, controlling light and air and heat and cold, and his good-will was a thing worth having.

"I just stepped in," answered this kindly god of the machine, "to pass the remark that there's one of your children, a girl what oughtn't to be left down in the yard with the others, waiting for the bell to ring and let them up. She ain't dressed for it."

"So few of them are," said Miss Bailey sadly. "I wish you could send them all straight up here instead of lining them up in the cold. Some of them are so determined to be in time that they have to wait down there for ten or fifteen minutes."

"I know they do," the janitor acquiesced. "But I can't let them all up. But this little girl I'm telling you about--you know her--she wears a blue gingham dress, and"--he dropped his voice to confidential pitch--"and mighty little else as I can see."

"Yes, yes," said Miss Bailey, "that is Becky Zabrowsky."

"Well, I could pass _her_ right straight up to you here where it's warm. I'm a married man myself, and I've got kids of my own, so I guess you'll excuse me butting in on this."

"But I shall be very grateful to you," cried Teacher. "It breaks my heart to see her. And she comes dressed just as you say, whatever the weather may be."

After a few professional questions as to heating and sweeping, after taking the temperature of the radiators with a thermometric hand, and examining their valves, the janitor withdrew, and when Miss Bailey reached Room 18 on the next morning, Becky Zabrowsky, as blue of lips and fingers as of vesture, was waiting for her. And indeed her costume gave cause for pity, even as her smile and her bravery gave cause for tears. Besides the gingham dress referred to by the janitor, she wore a pair of black and pink stockings, of mature growth and many holes, flapping adult shoes with all the buttons gone, and a hair ribbon which had begun life as a bandage. That was all. But she was clean. And her self-respect made her seven years as high a barrier against patronage as though they had been seventy. She was as proudly and as sensitively on her guard as though she were an old marquise fallen upon evil days, and obliged to give lessons in French or die, and who was restrained from the bitter and pleasanter alternative only by religion.

Miss Bailey was accustomed to more normal children. As a rule her little First Readers took all that was offered to them, and a good deal that was not. Their consumption of Kindergarten materials--colored paper, colored sticks, chalks, pencils, books--anything which could be cached upon the human body--was colossal, and only an eagle eye and a large corps of subsidized monitors kept the balance true between the number of "young learners" and the number of readers. But this particular little Becky had none of these taking ways. Had she been like other Beckies and Rachels, Miss Bailey would have bought her a little shawl and a few suits of underwear. With this particular Becky such a liberty was out of the question. Teacher had encountered the Zabrowsky spirit once, and had been defeated by it.

That had been upon the question of lunch. Teacher had noticed that Becky frequently remained at school during the luncheon hour, but that she never ate anything. Other little girls sometimes urged refreshment upon her in vain. Miss Bailey, wise by this time in the laws of kosher and of traff, the clean and the unclean, according to Mosaic dietary laws, suggested a glass of milk at a neighboring dairy, or a roll from the delicatessen shop across the street. Any one of her charges would starve cheerfully to death or at the hospital ward before they would touch any of her food. She was a Christian, and though they loved her, learned from her, and honored her, they, like Shylock of old, would not eat with her. And Becky Zabrowsky, adding pride unto faith, and manners unto both, would smile her heart-breaking smile, shake her bandage-bowed head, and go on starving.

"Teacher, I tells you s'cuse, I don't needs I shall eat," was her always courteous answer. And not all Miss Bailey's tact or wiles could prevail against it.

It was at about this time that Miss Bailey in her unofficial capacity accepted an invitation to a costume dance. Looking through old trunks and long-neglected shelves, she came upon a little tight-fitting shoulder cape of prehistoric date and fashion. It was such a cape as you can find in some of Du Maurier's drawings. It pinned the wearer's arms to her side, it gagged her tightly around the throat, it was of velvet, and its color was royal blue.

Constance Bailey, peering back into the dim vista of the years, could remember the pride and happiness which she had felt when her over-indulgent grandmother had given her, then a child of about twelve, this gorgeous garment. She could remember how it had dwarfed and faded the rest of her wardrobe, how she had wept to wear it upon all possible and impossible occasions, and how tragic had been the moment when it refused to meet across her loving breast.

Here, she thought triumphantly, was something before which the Zabrowsky spirit would break down. It did not in any way suggest the useful, serviceable, humiliating, charitable devotion. It was gay and festive, palpably a gift, and Teacher, with many misgivings but some hope, submitted it to Becky's consideration. She represented that she had herself outgrown it, that she had no costume with which it could appropriately be worn, that it was menaced by moths, a prey to creases, and a responsibility under which she could no longer find peace or security. Under the circumstances, she pleaded, would Becky relieve her of it? And Becky was delighted, translated, enchanted. She would never allow that cape to hang with the ordinary outdoor apparel of the other members of the class. It rested in her desk when she was busy, and she lulled it in her arms when she was not. Before coming into this shining fortune she had been rather looked down upon by other members of the class, and had avoided publicity in every possible way. She had with chattering teeth and livid lips assured her more warmly clad classmates that she was "all times too hot on the skin," and that her mamma considered her Sunday coat too stylish to wear at school. But, girded in blue velvet, she was another child. Once the most retiring of the class, she now became the least so. Once the most studious, she now yearned to be sent on outpost duty, on small shopping expeditions for her teacher, to the Principal's office, or to other class rooms with notes or with new students. And upon all these expeditions she wore an air of conscious correctness and the royal-blue velvet cape. She had once been the most truthful of small persons, but the glory of the cape tinged everything, and she allowed the other children to infer--nay, she even definitely stated--that this was the Sunday coat earlier referred to, and that she was wearing it to school because it had been superseded by another even more wonderful. Her auditors were too impressed to be unconvinced, and, to cover her very literal nakedness in every other respect, she invented for herself an entirely new disease.

"Say, Becky," one of the little girls in her class asked her, "don't you never put yourself on mit underwear nor underclothes? Ain't you scared you should to get cold in your bones? My mamma, she puts me on mit all from wool underwear--costs twenty-seven cents a suit by Grand Street--and I puts them on when the school opens, and I don't takes them off to the fourth of July."

"Oh," retorted Becky, with more truth than she knew, "it ain't so awful healthy you should make like that. My mamma says it is healthy for me the wind shall come on my skin. She says sooner no wind comes outside of your skin, no blood could go inside of your skin. And don't you know how teacher says what somebody what ain't got blood going in them is dead ones?"

"Und you _likes_," marvelled her friend, "you _likes_ the wind shall blow on you?"

"Sure," lied Becky, with a shiver, and she certainly had her wish.

But these appearances were only kept up for the eyes of the common herd. In the sanctuary of Teacher's confidence she was more unreserved, and whenever she could secure that young lady's kind ear, she bombarded it with gratitude and with reports of the impression made in the neighborhood of her one-roomed home by the shining splendor of that precious gift.

"Sooner I comes on mine house," she reported, "sooner all the ladies opens the doors and rubbers on mine cape. Sooner I walks by my block all the children wants I shall let them wear it. Only I won't let nobody wear it the while it is a present off of you."

"That's very nice of you," smiled Miss Bailey, not surprised at this new delicacy of feeling in so small and unfortunate and sorely tried a heart. "Very nice of you indeed."

"Sure I won't let anybody wear it," reiterated Becky, "not 'out they pays me a penny for walkin' up and down the block, and two cents for walkin' all round the block mit mine stylish from-plush cape."

"Of course not," Teacher agreed, hastily adjusting herself to this standard of right dealing.

"No, ma'am," said Becky. "I should never leave nobody have nothings what you gives me 'out they pays me good. The lady of our floor, she goes on a dancing-ball over yesterday, and she wants I shall leave her put her on mit mine cape--she's a awful little lady--only she don't wants she shall pay me. Und so I ain't let her take it, the while you gives it to me, and I am loving much mit you."

A teacher who gains the confidence of her small charges, even to a slight degree, is sure to be made familiar with their family history unto the third or fourth generation. And so Teacher knew that the poverty of Becky's home life was embittered and made even harder to bear by the contrasting elegance of an aunt, who lived, amid rank and fashion, in the "tony" purlieus of Cherry Street. Her abode consisted, according to her smarting small relative, of "a room and a closet," a lavish and extravagant area for a household as small as hers.

"Why," Becky informed Miss Bailey, with upturned palms, upscrewed shoulders, and upturned eyes, "my aunt, she ain't got only five children and three boarders!"

It had been the habit of this rich and fashionable dame to pay visits of state and ceremony to her less fortunate sister-in-law, whose abode differed from hers only by the subtraction of the room. There, in the chaste consciousness of an incredible wig and an impenetrable shawl, she would monopolize many hundreds of cubic feet of space and air; indulge in conversations of the elegant and fashionable kind, which, so Becky reported to her teacher, "makes the tears in my mamma's eyes, and gives my papa shamed feelings," and caused an epidemic of ill-temper, with resulting slaps and kicks and yelling among her nephews and nieces.