Part 11

"Fine-kine-rady," she murmured, brokenly.

Casey, his cap in his hand, stood looking down upon the silent figure on the bed. "Starvation, most likely," he hazarded. "She's bin dead fur an hour, maybe more," he mused aloud. "An' she's laid herself out, d'ye mind. Whin she found death comin' she drew her feet together, an' crost her hands on her breast, an' shut her eyes. They do ut sometimes, whin they know they's no wan to do ut for thim. But first she washed an' dressed her child in uts best an' sint ut out--so ut w'u'dn't be scairt. D'ye know th' woman?" he added. "Have ye ivir seen her? It seems t' me _I_ have!"

Holding the baby tight, her head against my shoulder, that she might not see what I did, I went forward and looked at the wasted face. There was something vaguely familiar about the black hair-line on the broad, Madonna-like brow, about the exquisitely shaped nose, the sunken cheeks, the pointed chin. For a long moment I looked at them while memory stirred in me and then awoke.

"Yes," I said, at last. "I remember her now. Many evenings last month I saw her standing at the foot of the elevated stairs when I was going home. She wore a little shawl over her head--that's why I didn't recognize her at once. She never begged, but she took what one gave her. I always gave her something. She was evidently very poor. I remember vaguely that she had a child with her--this one, of course. I hardly noticed either of them as I swept by. One's always in a rush, you know, to get home, and, unfortunately, there are so many beggars!"

"That's it," said Casey. "I remember her now, too."

"If only I had realized how ill she was," I reflected aloud, miserably, "or stopped to think of the child. She called me 'kind lady.' Oh, Casey! And I let her starve!"

"Hush now," said Casey, consolingly. "Sure how could ye know? Some of thim that's beggin' has more than you have!"

"But she called me 'kind lady,'" I repeated. "And I let her--"

"Fine-kine-rady," murmured the child, drowsily, as if hearing and responding to a cue. She was quiet and well content, again playing with a coat-button; but she piped out her three words as if they were part of a daily drill and the word of command had been uttered. Casey and I looked at each other, then dropped our eyes.

"_Find kind lady_," I translated at last. Then I broke down, in the bitterest storm of tears that I have ever known. Beside me Casey stood guard, silent and unhappy. It was the whimper of the child that recalled me to myself and her. She was growing frightened.

"Oh, Casey," I said again, when I had soothed her, "do you realize that the poor woman sent this baby out into New York to-night on the one chance in a million that she might see me at the station and that I would remember her?"

"What else c'u'd the poor creature do?" muttered Casey. "I guess she wasn't dependin' on her neighbors much. 'Tis easy to see that ivery stick o' furniture an' stitch o' clothes, ixcept th' child's, was pawned. Besides, thim tiniment kids is wise," he repeated. His blue eyes dwelt on the baby with a brooding speculation in their depths. "She's sleepy," he muttered, "but she's not starved. Th' mother fed her t' th' last, an' wint without herself; an' she kep' her warm. They do that sometimes, too."

With quick decision he put on his cap and started for the door. "I'll telephone me report," he said, briskly. "Will ye be waitin' here till I come back? Thin we'll take th' mother t' th' morgue an' the child t' th' station."

"Oh no, we won't," I told him, gently. "We'll see that the mother has proper burial. As for this baby, I'm going to take care of her until I find an ideal home for her. I know women who will thank God for her. I wish," I added, absently--"I wish I could keep her myself."

Casey turned on me a face that was like a smiling full moon. "'Tis lucky th' child is to have ye for a friend. But she'll be a raysponsibil'ty," he reminded me, "and an expinse."

I kissed the tiny hand that clung to mine. "That won't worry me," I declared. "Why, do you know, Casey"--I drew the soft little body closer to me--"I feel that if I worked for her a thousand years I could never make up to this baby for that horrible moment when I turned her adrift again--after she had found me."

* * * * *

Two hours later my waif of the fog, having been fed and tubbed and tucked into one of my nightgowns, reposed in my bed, and, still beatifically clutching a cookie, sank into a restful slumber. My maid, a "settled" Norwegian who had been with me for two years, had welcomed her with hospitable rapture. A doctor had pronounced her in excellent physical condition. A trained nurse, hastily summoned to supervise her bath, her supper, and her general welfare, had already drawn up an impressive plan indicating the broad highway of hygienic infant living. Now, for the dozenth time, we were examining a scrap of paper which I had found in a tiny bag around the child's neck when I undressed her. It bore a brief message written in a wavering, foreign hand:

Maria Annunciata Zamati 3½ years old

Parents dead. No relations. Be good to her and God will be good to you.

Besides this in the little bag was a narrow gold band, wrapped in a bit of paper that read:

Her mother's wedding-ring.

Broodingly I hung over the short but poignant record. "Maria Annunciata," I repeated. "What a beautiful name! Three and a half years old! What an adorable age! No relations. No one can ever take her from us! I shall be her godmother and her best friend, whoever adopts her. And I'll keep her till the right mother comes for her, if it takes the rest of my life."

The doctor laughed and bade us good night, after a final approving look at the sleeping baby in the big bed. The trained nurse departed with evident reluctance for her room.

The telephone beside my bed clicked warningly, then tinkled. As I took up the receiver a familiar voice came to me over the wire.

"Is that you, May?" it said. "This is Josephine Morgan. Did you get a dinner invitation from me yesterday? Not hearing from you, I've been trying to get you on the telephone all evening, but no one answered."

"I know," I said, cheerfully. "Awfully sorry. I've been busy. I've got a baby."

Maria Annunciata stirred in her sleep. Speaking very softly, that I might not awaken her, I told Josephine the story of my adventure.

"Come and see her soon," I ended. "I mustn't talk any more. Annunciata is here beside me. She's absolutely different from any other child in the world. Good night."

I undressed slowly, stopping at intervals to study the pleasing effect of Maria Annunciata's short black curls on the pillow. At last, moving very carefully for fear of disturbing her, I crept into bed. As promptly as if the yielding of the mattress had been a signal that set her tiny body in motion, Maria Annunciata awoke, smiled at me, cuddled into the curve of my left arm, reached up, and firmly grasped my left ear. Then, with a long sigh of ineffable content, she dropped back into slumber.

The only light was the soft glow of an electric bulb behind an amber shade. The button that controlled it was within easy reach of my hand; a touch would have plunged the room into darkness. But I did not press the little knob. Instead, I lay for a long, long time looking at the sleeping child beside me.

There was a soft knock at the door. It opened quietly and my servant appeared.

"Mr. and Mrs. Morgan are outside," she whispered. "They say they've come to see the baby."

"But," I gasped, "it's after eleven o'clock!"

"I know. Mrs. Morgan said they couldn't wait till morning. Shall I show her in?"

I hesitated. I felt a sense of unreasonable annoyance, almost of fear. "Yes," I said, at last, "let her come in."

Josephine Morgan came in with a soft little feminine rush. Something of the atmosphere of the great world in which she lived came with her as far as the bedside, then dropped from her like a garment as she knelt beside us and kissed me, her eyes on Maria Annunciata's sleeping face.

"Oh, the darling, the lamb!" she breathed. "She's the most exquisite thing I ever saw! And the pluck of her! George says she ought to have a Carnegie medal." Still kneeling, she bent over the child, her beautiful face quivering with feeling. "What do you know about her family?" she asked.

With a gesture I indicated the scrap of paper and the ring that lay on my dressing-table. "There's the whole record," I murmured.

She rose and examined them, standing very still for a moment afterward, apparently in deep thought. Then, still holding them, she returned to the bedside and with a quick but indescribably tender movement gathered Maria Annunciata into her arms. "Let me show her to George," she whispered.

I consented, and she carried the sleeping baby into the next room. I heard their voices and an occasional low laugh. A strange feeling of loneliness settled upon me. In a few moments she came back, her face transfigured. Bending, she put the child in bed and sat down beside her.

"May," she said, quietly, "George and I want her. Will you give her to us?"

The demand was so sudden that I could not speak. She looked at me, her eyes filling.

"We've been looking for a little daughter for two years," she added. "We've visited dozens of institutions."

"But," I stammered, "I wanted to keep her myself--for a while, anyway."

She smiled at me. "Why, you will--" she began, and stopped.

"You may have her," I said, quietly.

She kissed me. "We'll make her happy," she promised. "I suppose," she added, "we couldn't take her away _to-night_? Of course the first thing in the morning will _do_," she concluded, hastily, as she met my indignant gaze.

"Josephine Morgan," I gasped, "I never met such selfishness! Of course you can't have her to-night. You can't have her in the morning, either. You've got to adopt her legally, with red seals and things. It will take lots of time."

Mrs. Morgan laughed, passing a tender finger through one of Maria Annunciata's short curls. "We'll do it," she said. "We'll do anything. And we're going to be in New York all winter, so you can be with her a great deal while she's getting used to us. Now I'll go." But she lingered, making a pretext of tucking in the bedclothes around us. "You've seen the _Sentinel_," she asked, "with that story about you?"

I shook my head at her. "Don't, please," I begged. "We'll talk about that to-morrow."

She kissed the deep dimple in Maria Annunciata's left cheek. "Good night," she said, again. "You'll never know how happy you have made us."

The door closed behind her. I raised my hand and pressed the button above my head. Around me the friendly darkness settled, and a silence as warm and friendly. In the hollow of my neck the face of Maria Annunciata rested, a short curl tickling my cheek. I recalled "the great silence" that fell over the convent at nine o'clock when the lights went out, but to-night the reflection did not bring its usual throb of homesickness and longing. Relaxed, content, I lay with eyes wide open, looking into the future. Without struggle, without self-analysis, but firmly and for all time, I had decided _not_ to be a nun.

IX

THE REVOLT OF TILDY MEARS

Every seat in the primitive town hall was occupied, and a somber frieze of Dakota plainsmen and their sad-faced wives decorated the rough, unpainted sides of the building. On boxes in the narrow aisles, between long rows of pine boards on which were seated the early arrivals, late-comers squatted discontentedly, among them a dozen women carrying fretful babies, to whom from time to time they addressed a comforting murmur as they swung them, cradle-fashion, in their tired arms.

The exercises of the evening had not yet begun, but almost every eye in the big, silent, patient assemblage was fixed on a woman, short and stout, with snow-white hair and a young and vivid face, who had just taken her place on the platform, escorted by a self-conscious official of the little town. Every one in that gathering had heard of Dr. Anna Harland; few had yet heard her speak, but all knew what she represented: "new-fangled notions about women"--women's rights, woman suffrage, feminism, unsettling ideas which threatened to disturb the peace of minds accustomed to run in well-worn grooves. Many of the men and women in her audience had driven twenty, thirty, or forty miles across the plains to hear her, but there was no unanimity in the expressions with which they studied her now as she sat before them. In the men's regard were curiosity, prejudice, good-humored tolerance, or a blend of all three. The women's faces held a different meaning: pride, affectionate interest, admiration tinged with hope; and here and there a hint of something deeper, a wireless message that passed from soul to soul.

At a melodeon on the left of the platform a pale local belle, who had volunteered her services, awaited the signal to play the opening chords of the song that was to precede the speaker's address. In brackets high on the rough walls a few kerosene lamps vaguely illumined the scene, while from the open night outside came the voices of cowboys noisily greeting late arrivals and urging them to "go on in an' git a change of heart!"

The musician received her signal--a nod from the chairman of the evening--and the next moment the voices of a relieved and relaxed audience were heartily swelling the familiar strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." As the men and women before her sang on, Dr. Harland watched them, the gaze of the brilliant dark eyes under her straight black brows keen and intent. Even yet she had not decided what she meant to say to these people. Something in the music, something in the atmosphere, would surely give her a cue, she felt, before she began to speak.

Sitting near her on the platform, I studied both her and her audience. The Far West and its people were new to me; so was this great leader of the woman's cause. But it behooved me to know her and to know her well, for I had accompanied her on this Western campaign for the sole purpose of writing a series of articles on her life and work, to be published in the magazine of which I had recently been appointed assistant editor. During our long railroad journeys and drives over hills and plains she had talked to me of the past. Now, I knew, I was to see her again perform the miracle at which I had not yet ceased to marvel--the transformation of hundreds of indifferent or merely casually interested persons into a mass of shouting enthusiasts, ready to enlist under her yellow banner and follow wherever she led.

To-night, as she rose and for a moment stood silent before her audience, I could see her, as usual, gathering them up, drawing them to her by sheer force of magnetism, before she spoke a word.

"My friends," she began, in the beautiful voice whose vibrating contralto notes reached every person in the great hall, "last Monday, at Medora, I was asked by a missionary who is going to India to send a message to the women of that land. I said to him, 'Tell them the world was made for women, too.' To-night I am here to give you the same message. The world is women's, too. The West is women's, too. You have helped to make it, you splendid, pioneer women, who have borne with your husbands the heat and burden of the long working-days. You have held down your claims through the endless months of Western winters, while your men were away; you have toiled with them in the fields; you have endured with them the tragedies of cyclones, of droughts, of sickness, of starvation. If woman's work is in the home alone, as our opponents say it is, you have been most unwomanly. For you have remained in the home only long enough to bear your children, to care for them, to feed them and your husbands. The rest of the time you have done a man's work in the West. The toil has been yours as well as man's; the reward of such toil should be shared by you. The West is yours, too. Now it holds work for you even greater than that you have done in the past, and I am here to beg you to begin that work."

The address went on. In the dim light of the ill-smelling lamps I could see the audience leaning forward, intent, fascinated. Even among the men easy tolerance was giving place to eager response; on row after row of the rough benches the spectators were already clay in the hands of the speaker, to be molded, for the moment at least, into the form she chose to give them. My eyes momentarily touched, then fastened intently on a face in the third row on the left. It was the face of a woman--a little, middle-aged woman of the primitive Western type--her graying hair combed straight back from a high, narrow forehead, her thin lips slightly parted, the flat chest under her gingham dress rising and falling with emotion. But my interest was held by her eyes--brown eyes, blazing eyes, almost the eyes of a fanatic. Unswervingly they rested on the speaker's face, while the strained attention, the parted lips, the attitude of the woman's quivering little body betrayed almost uncontrollable excitement. At that instant I should not have been surprised to see her spring to her feet and shout, "_Alleluia!_"

A moment later I realized that Dr. Harland had seen her, too; that she was, indeed, intensely conscious of her, and was directing many of her best points to this absorbed listener. Here was the perfect type she was describing to her audience--the true woman pioneer, who not only worked and prayed, but who read and thought and aspired. The men and women under the flickering lights were by this time as responsive to the speaker's words as a child to its mother's voice. They laughed, they wept, they nodded, they sighed. When the usual collection was taken up they showed true Western generosity, and when the lecture was over they crowded forward to shake hands with the woman leader, and to exhaust their limited vocabulary in shy tributes to her eloquence. Far on the outskirts of the wide circle that had formed around her I saw the little woman with the blazing eyes, vainly endeavoring to force her way toward us through the crowd. Dr. Harland observed her at the same time and motioned to me.

"Will you ask her to wait, Miss Iverson?" she asked. "I would like to talk to her before she slips away." And she added, with her characteristic twinkle, "That woman would make a perfect 'Exhibit A' for my lecture."

I skirted the throng and touched the arm of the little woman just as she had given up hope of reaching the speaker, and was moving toward the door. She started and stared at me, almost as if the touch of my fingers had awakened her from a dream.

"Dr. Harland asks if you will wait a few moments till the others leave," I told her. "She is anxious to meet you."

The brown-eyed woman drew in a deep breath.

"Tha's whut I want," she exclaimed, ecstatically, "but it looked like I couldn't git near her."

We sat down on an empty bench half-way down the hall, and watched the human stream flow toward and engulf the lecturer. "Ain't she jest wonderful?" breathed my companion. "She knows us women better 'n we know ourselves. She knows all we done an' how we feel about it. I felt like she was tellin' them people all my secrets, but I didn't mind." She hesitated, then added dreamily, "It's high time men was told whut their women are thinkin' an' can't say fer themselves."

In the excited group around the speaker a baby, held high in its mother's arms to avoid being injured in the crush, shrieked out a sudden protest. My new acquaintance regarded it with sympathetic eyes.

"I've raised six of 'em," she told me. "My oldest is a girl nineteen. My youngest is a boy of twelve. My big girl she's lookin' after the house an' the fam'ly while I'm gone. I druv sixty miles 'cross the plains to hear Dr. Harland. It took me two days, an' it's jest about wore out my horse--but this is worth it. I ain't had sech a night sence I was a girl."

She looked at me, her brown eyes lighting up again with their queer, excited fires.

"My Jim he 'most fell dead when I told him I was comin'," she went on. "But I says to him, 'I ain't been away from this place one minute in twenty years,' I says. 'Now I guess you folks can git 'long without me fer a few days. For, Jim,' I says, 'ef I don't git away, ef I don't go somewhere an' have some change, somethin's goin' to snap, an' I guess it'll be me!'"

"You mean," I exclaimed, in surprise, "that you've never left your ranch in twenty years?"

She nodded.

"Not once," she corroborated. "Not fer a minute. You know whut the summers are--work, work from daylight to dark; an' in the winters I had t' hol' down the claim while Jim he went to the city an' worked. Sometimes he'd only git home once or twice the hull winter. Then when we begin to git on, seemed like 'twas harder than ever. Jim he kept addin' more land an' more stock to whut we had, an' there was more hands to be waited on, an' the babies come pretty fast. Lately Jim he's gone to Chicago every year to sell his cattle, but I ain't bin able to git away till now."

During her eager talk--a talk that gushed forth like a long-repressed stream finding a sudden outlet--she had been leaning toward me with her arm on the back of the bench and her shining eyes on mine. Now, as if remembering her "company manners," she sat back stiffly, folded her work-roughened hands primly in her lap, and sighed with supreme content.

"My!" she whispered, happily, "I feel like I was in a diff'rent world. It don't seem possible that only sixty miles out on the plains that ranch is right there, an' everything is goin' on without me. An' here I be, hearin' the music, an' all the folks singin' together, an' that wonderful woman talkin' like she did! I feel"--she hesitated for a comparison, and then went on, with the laugh of a happy girl--"I feel like I was up in a balloon an' on my way to heaven!"

I forgot the heat of the crowded hall, the smell of the smoking lamps, the shuffle of hobnailed shoes on the pine floors, the wails of fretful babies. I almost felt that I, too, was floating off with this ecstatic stranger in the balloon of her imagination.

"I see," I murmured. "You're tired of drudgery. You haven't played enough in all these years."

She swung round again until she faced me, her sallow cheeks flushed, her eager, brilliant eyes on mine.

"I ain't played none at all," she said. "I dunno what play is. An' work ain't the only thing I'm tired of. I'm tired of everything. I'm tired of everything--except this."

Her voice lingered on the last two words. Her eyes left my face for an instant and followed the lecturer, of whose white head we obtained a glimpse from time to time as the crowd opened around her. Still gazing toward her, but now as if unseeingly, the plainswoman went on, her voice dropping to a lower, more confidential note.

"I'm sick of everything," she repeated. "Most of all, I'm sick of the plains and the sky--stretching on and on and on and on, like they do, as if they was no end to 'em. Sometimes when I'm alone I stand at my door an' look at 'em an' shake my fists an' shriek. I begun to think they wasn't anything but them nowhere. It seemed 's if the little town back East where I come from was jest a place I dreamed of--it couldn't really be. Nothin' _could_ be 'cept those plains an' the cattle an' the sky. Then, this spring--"

She turned again to face me.

"I dunno why I'm tellin' you all this," she broke off, suddenly. "Guess it's because I ain't had no one to talk to confidential fer so long, an' you look like you understand."

"I do understand," I told her.

She nodded.