Part 11

As to this Molly made not the slightest difficulty. She had regained her courage and her Irish fighting spirit, and she was now ready to face life and make it give her an honest return for honest work again; ready for anything, indeed, except an attempt to get her money back which might involve her seeing Mr. D. Wiggett. At the mere mention of his name she fell into a cold and shuddering silence.

With brief preliminaries, and on the Bonnie Lassie's guarantee of “old Mrs. Dunstan's” reliability, that semi-mythical person was installed as Miles Morse's housekeeper and general factotum, having taken the informal triple oath of her employment: industry, senility, and invisibility. Six dollars a week was the wage which the Goddess from the Machine had wrung from the Meanest Man's violent protests, with a warning that it would have to be increased later on. The instructions given to the new employee were that she was to keep out of her employer's sight; or if he should arrive at an untimely hour she was to huddle into a shawl or handkerchief and conceal her age behind a toothache.

For six weeks all went well and simply. Miles Morse was obliged to confess, grudgingly, that his house was more livable and comfortable. Dust disappeared. The furniture took to arranging itself with less stiffness and more amiability. When he gave a whist party of an evening, the cigars were in place, the ash trays ready, the rooms aired and fresh, and the ice box stocked, all by invisible hands. Orders were issued and requisitions made through the Bonnie Lassie. Meeting her neighbor in Our Square one day, the Bonnie Lassie hinted at the ten-dollar check for the Legal Aid Society. “When I'm sure I'm satisfied,” said the Meanest Man, bending frowning brows from above his owlish glasses upon her. “D' you know what that old hag has been up to?”

“What old hag?” inquired the Bonnie Lassie unguardedly.

“The Dunstan woman.”

“Oh, you've seen her, then?”

“Not to speak of. She was curled up like a worm, and had her face swathed up like a harem, and talked like the croak of a frog. And she's been putting flowers on my breakfast table,” he concluded with the accents of one detailing an intolerable outrage.

“What of it?” inquired the surprised agent.

“What of it! Flowers cost money, don't they?”

“Have you received any bill for flowers yet?”

“I've received bills for brooms, mops, pails, towels, cups, plates, nails, tacks, picture hangers, baking tins, soap, and God knows what all,” replied Mr. Morse in a breathless and ferocious voice.

“Yes? And which of those do you find in the floral catalogues?” queried the Bonnie Lassie interestedly. “If you want to know,” she added as the Meanest Man struggled for competent utterance, “those flowers came from your own back yard. Look at it some time. You'll be pleased.”

The Meanest Man was pleased when he looked, so pleased that one fresh and glorious June day when he should by the known regimen of his life have been at the Y. M. C. A. (supposedly reading) he came home early to putter about among the pansies. At the moment of his arrival Molly Dunstan, her work finished and her shawl laid aside, was standing in her neat, close-fitting black dress, inside the area railing, brooding with deep eyes over the glad flush of summer which glorified Our Square, and thinking, if the unromantic truth must be told, of the little place up near White Plains where her ducks and chickens would have been so happy and productive if D. Wiggett (she shivered) hadn't kept the place and her money too. The owner of the house stood regarding her with surprise and disfavor. “What are you doing here?” he barked.

With a startled jump, Molly came out of her brown study and returned the natural but undiplomatic answer: “I'm the housekeeper.”

“You! What has become of Mrs. Dun-stan?”

“I'm Mrs. Dunstan.” Realization of her self-betrayal came to her. The soft tears welled up into her soft eyes. “Oh, dear; oh, dear!” she mourned.

“Don't make that noise,” he ordered testily; “what's the matter with the woman!”

“Ye'll not--not be wanting me here any more.”

“Oh, I don't say that,” returned the cautious Mr. Morse. “You're not wholly unsatisfactory. But what does that mummery of an old woman mean?”

In vain Molly tried to penetrate the blue glasses which masked his expression. Anyway, his voice had mollified. “I'll tell ye it all, if ye'll listen,” she said wistfully.

Miles Morse surprised himself by promptly saying: “I'll listen.”

No one could have wished a more intent listener. Molly told it all, including the deal whereby D. Wiggett had secured her money. At the conclusion her employer suggested that Molly bring him the deed, or other documents in the case, on the morrow. She did so. He read the principal document with a queer tightening of the lips which Molly couldn't understand at all, but which the Bonnie Lassie, had she been present, would have interpreted readily enough since she had seen it on another occasion, when the spare and arid man had set out to trail the horse-flaying teamster to justice.

“This isn't a deed at all,” said he.

“That's what Mr. Wiggett was telling me.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“He told me if I'd pay him the two thousand dollars and would go out there he'd see I got enough embroidery work so that I could easily make the twenty-dollar-a-month payments till I owned it all.”

“He didn't tell you that if you failed in a payment you'd lose it all?”

“Not till after.”

“It's here in the agreement to sell. That's all this paper is”;--he flecked the document with a contemptuous finger--“an agreement to sell; not a deed. You've bought nothing but empty print. Did you never read this?”

She shook her head. “I trusted Mr. Wiggett. He seemed so kind and helpful at first.”

“Until the fly was in his web. You signed that paper without knowing what you were undertaking,” he accused. “Did you know that you were promising to pay taxes, interest, and insurance on the buildings?”

“No,” said Molly Dunstan meekly.

“And to keep the buildings in good repair and painted? What buildings were they?”

“A house and a barn. They leaked.”

“Naturally. Also”--Miles Morse referred to the document in his hand--“'to plant a good, live California privet hedge and to entertain the same.' What's your notion of a California privet hedge and entertaining the same? Could you do that?”

Into Molly Dunstan's Irish-brown eyes there crept a little Irish devil of a twinkle. “Could I not!” said she. “Can ye not see me, of a moonlight night, taking me foot in me hand, and going out to entertain me dull and lonely hedge with a turn of Kilkenny jigging!” Her sole tapped the ground as she spoke.

“Don't do it here,” he interposed hastily. “How you can joke about it is beyond me, with your two thousand dollars in the pocket of D. Wiggett. And what makes you look sick at the name of him?” he concluded sharply.

“That's a terrible man,” she answered with a catch of the breath. “When I went to him to ask for a bit more time he swore at me. He threatened me with jail. He said he'd ruin my reputation. He said if I sent a lawyer there he'd hammer him to pulp. He could do it, for he's a terrible, big, strong, angry man. I came away sick to live in the same world with him. And that's why I got the carbolic,” she finished in a low, shamed tone.

“Carbolic! You were going to kill yourself?”

“Didn't Mrs. Staten tell ye?”

“She told me nothing--but lies.”

Miles Morse spoke harshly because he was experiencing within himself a stir of strange and wrathful and protective emotion. Abruptly he changed the subject. “Would you,” he said hesitantly, “for a raise of wa--ahem ---salary, come a little earlier and get me my breakfast?”

“I'll not wait on table,” she returned with a flash of color.

“It was not my idea,” he said quite humbly. “But if you would have a coffee machine and a toaster and sit opposite at the table, and--and--it would save me money as against the restaurant,” he added lamely.

“I'll consult my manager,” returned his housekeeper with a twinkle.

The gist of her consultation with the Bonnie Lassie bore upon the point as to whether Our Square, which was already adopting her since she had rented a little room there, would regard the new basis as proper.

“That old thing!” said the arbitress of destinies scornfully. “He's a hundred years old, and he'll be two hundred, I'm afraid,” she added ruefully, “before I get that check out of him.”

Molly looked dubious. “I'm not sure he's so old,” she said. “And I'm sure he's not so mean as people think him. But I do need the money.”

Behold, then, Mrs. Molly Dunstan, housekeeper, seated opposite Miles Morse, the Meanest Man in Our Square, with a coffee apparatus, a toaster, and a little centerpiece bright with flowers, both of them breakfasting in a dim and painful silence. But food is a great solvent of embarrassment, and breakfast coffee has powers beyond the spirit of grape, corn, or rye, to break down the barriers between human and human. So that, by the end of a week, Molly was chattering like a cheery bird with just enough instigation from her employer to keep her going. One subject was tacitly tabooed as a kill-joy; to wit, the devil as embodied by Mr. D. Wiggett and all his works.

Not that Miles Morse had forgotten. Quite the contrary. But he was a calculating, careful, and meticulous person, prone to plan out every step before taking it. On a Monday morning some six weeks after Molly's installation as a breakfast fixture he spoke abruptly: “I've been up there.”

“Where?” she asked.

“To the place you thought you'd bought. It's a trap.”

“I'm out of it, at least with my life.”

“You are not the only one that's been caught. He's fleeced four others that I know of on that plant--all perfectly legal. I have a notion,” said Miles Morse with an effect of choosing his words, “that D. Wiggett & Co. was incorporated in hell, and the silent partner is his Satanic Majesty.”

“Why did ye go up there?”

“Curiosity.”

“Not kindness--just a little bit?”

“I wanted to see the work of a man meaner than the Meanest Man in Our Square,” he said with a sour grin.

Molly Dunstan flushed.

“I'd not be letting them call me that!” she declared. “And I'll not believe it true of ye.” This was, indeed, an advance upon the dim realm of personal relationship, but Molly's loyal Irish blood was up. “What ails ye at the world, at all!” she demanded.

“I'll tell you since you ask,” he replied defiantly. “I'm getting even with it for treating me like a dog.”

“So that's it.” There was a pause. “Would ye tell me about it!” she asked shyly.

Much to his astonishment, Miles Morse discovered that he wanted to tell her about it. Quite to his chagrin, he found that it didn't seem a very convincing indictment, when he tried to formulate it. However, he did his best.

“A man that I thought my friend cheated me out of the first ten thousand dollars that I made.”

“Whish! Ye made more, didn't ye?” she replied calmly. “I wouldn't be hating the world for that.”

“Then there was a woman,” he said with more difficulty. “I thought--she made me believe she cared for me. I was young. She got me into a fake stock proposition with some confederates, and they fleeced me.”

“Whoof!” Molly blew an imaginary thistledown from her dainty fingers. “She was a light thing.'T was your bank account she hurt, not your heart.”

Suddenly Miles Morse realized that this was so. It wasn't wholly pleasant, however, to have his cherished grudges thus lightly dismissed.

“There's nothing else worth speaking of,” he said, a bit sullenly, “except a bit of boy's silliness that you'd laugh at.”

“Tell it to me.”

“It was when I was seven years old and we lived in the country. My father was a hard sort of man; he saw no sense in play or such nonsense, and when Fourth of July came he'd give me no fireworks nor let me draw any of my little money out of the bank. All the other boys had firecrackers but me. So I got a spool and filled it with sand and put a bit of string in it and I lighted the end. When it didn't go off I ran away and hid and felt pretty bad. I've always laid that up against things. Foolish, isn't it!”

The little woman opposite lifted eyes which had grown suddenly bright and soft with a disturbing hint of tears. “Ye poor lamb!” she said.

“Tut-tut!” gruffly retorted the Meanest Man in Our Square, who had never before been called a poor lamb. He spoke without conviction.

“But that shouldn't make ye hate the world,” argued Molly earnestly. “It should only make ye hate what's mean and unfair in the world.”

“Well, there's D. Wiggett,” replied the other hopefully. “I think I could learn to hate him. In fact, I think I'll make a trial of it by calling on him to-day.”

“Oh, don't do that,” she implored tremulously. “He'll do ye harm. He's a terrible man, and twice the size of ye!”

“This will be a strictly peaceable errand,” he averred, meaning what he said.

By no means reassured, Molly Dunstan made her way, at the hour when she thought that her employer would call upon D. Wiggett & Co., to a spot in St. Mark's Square which gave her a good view of the real-estate office. After an hour's wait, devoted to the most dismal forebodings, she saw her employer stride around the corner and enter the door. Had she actually summoned the nerve to interpose, as she had vaguely designed to do, there was no time. Her brief and alarmed glimpse of Miles Morse had oppressed her with a quality hitherto unknown in him. He was clad in his accustomed neat and complete black, even to the black string tie. His big blue glasses were set as solemnly level as usual upon his ample nose. His spare figure was held stiffly erect, in its characteristic attitude. But there was something about the way he walked which suggested an arrow going to keep an important engagement with a bull's-eye.

Three minutes later Mr. Miles Morse emerged.

He emerged by force and arms; a great deal of the former and a large number of the latter. To the terrified watcher there seemed to be at least half a dozen tangled persons engaged in the eviction of Mr. Morse, of whom D. Wiggett was not one. Having propelled the unwelcome guest out upon the stoop, the persons withdrew in pell-mell haste, and the sound of a door being violently barred after them eloquently testified to their distaste for any more of Mr. Morse's society. That gentleman descended the steps as one who walks upon the clouds, albeit with a considerable limp.

Molly ran to meet him. Five yards away she stopped dead, lifting dismayed hands to heaven. Mr. Morse was a strange and moving sight. A small stream of blood was trickling from the corner of his mouth, which was expanded in an astounding and joyous smile. His sober black string necktie was festooned over his left ear. Half of his large, solemn blue spectacles was jammed down his neck inside a dislocated collar; the other half presented a scandalous and sightless appearance, having lost its lens. His coat was split in three places and torn in one. His hat simply was not; it could be identified as a hat solely from the circumstance that it was jammed inextricably down upon his head. From his right cheek bone there had already sprouted a “hickey” fit to hang a bucket on. But these were minor injuries compared to the condition of Mr. Morse's hands. Bruised and cut, scarified, scalped, and swelling, the “grand pair of hands” which Terry the Cop so admired, testified unmistakably to having come into violent and repeated contact with some heavy and hard object. Horror-stricken, Molly turned her eyes from them to the real-estate office of D. Wiggett & Co. A front window flew up. The countenance of D. Wiggett appeared therein, and Molly at once identified it as the heavy and hard object to which her employer's manual plight was due. The countenance opened, somewhat slantwise, and sent forth a gasping and melancholy bellow: “Police!”

Without a word, Molly seized one of the battered hands and ran. Perforce, her employer ran with her. A taxi was prowling up Second Avenue. Mollie hailed it.

On the trip Mr. Miles Morse exhibited silent but alarming symptoms. Arrived at home, he flatly refused to enter. “Air and space,” he said, were his special and immediate needs. He made his way to the most secluded bench in the park, followed by his dismayed housekeeper, sat down, and began to chuckle. The chuckle grew into a laugh, the laugh into a series of chokes, the chokes into a protracted convulsion of mirth. When at length it had passed, leaving him spent and gasping, Molly Dunstan spoke seriously to him.

“Are ye finished?”

“I am.”

“Have ye been drinking?”

“I have not.”

“What did ye do to him?”

“I did everything,” said Mr. Miles Morse with a long reminiscent sigh of utter satisfaction, “but bite him.”

“Ye told me,” accused Molly with heaving bosom, “that it would be a strictly peaceable errand.”

“So it would,” replied the other calmly, “if he hadn't said something about you.” Molly's brown eyes widened and brightened with amazement. Her lips parted. “About me!” she said. Then she committed what the lawyers call a non sequitur. “Mother of all the Saints!” cried Molly. “How old are ye?”

“Thirty-seven years and four months,” replied the Meanest Man in Our Square gravely.

“And me thinking--” He never found out what she was thinking, for she broke off abruptly, and said: “Clap a bit of raw beef to that cheek,” and vanished from his sight.

No Molly appeared for breakfast in the morning. In her stead arrived a court officer with a warrant in which the term “feloniously” played a conspicuous and dispiriting part. At court Miles Morse, prisoner, found a delegation from Our Square awaiting him, including Molly, Cyrus the Gaunt, the Bonnie Lassie, Terry the Cop, and Inky Mike, the tipster disguised in a clean collar and taking copious notes with an absorbed and ferocious expression, with a view to daunting wrongdoers by the prospective fierce white light of the Press. This was part of the Bonnie Lassie's strategy. So also was the presence of Merrivale, the young lawyer of the Legal Aid branch, for the Bonnie Lassie had correctly guessed that the accused would disdain to spend money on a lawyer. As he awaited his turn at the bar of judgment (before Wolf Tone Hanrahan, the Human Judge, his friends remarked with satisfaction) Terry the Cop caught sight of his damaged knuckles. “I always said he had a grand pair of hands,” murmured Terry to the Bonnie Lassie.

“And here they are in court, where you said they were at their best,” she commented.

An expression of bewilderment gave place to a grin on Terry's handsome face. “_The_ court,” I said, “the hand-ball court at the Y. M. C. A. He packs a wallop in either hand'ud kill a bull.”

Then the plaintiff came in, and there was no further need of explanations.

D. Wiggett was a horrid sight. He would have been a horrider sight if he hadn't been almost totally obscured by bandages. The gist of his testimony was comprised in the frequently repeated word “murder.” The accused put in no defense. In the Human Judge's eye were doubt and indecision. Obviously there was something behind this case. As he hesitated, the Legal Aid lawyer came forward with the light-pink document of D. Wiggett & Co., and handed it to the judge with a few words. D. Wiggett's lawyer entered vehement objections. Stilling his protests with a waving hand, Magistrate Hanrahan read the “Agreement to Sell.” Then he called for Mrs. Molly Dunstan. More objections. Overruled. At the conclusion of Molly's testimony he turned to the protesting lawyer. “Did ye drah up this dockyment?”

“I did, your honor.”

“It's as full of holes as the witch's cullender. Y'otta be disbarred fer it!”

The lawyer hastily receded. The remains of D. Wiggett were led forward to listen to a few brief but pointed dicta by the court, while Inky Mike (under promptings) edged up and took copious notes in a book such as no reporter ever carried except upon the stage. At the end of the ordeal, D. Wiggett, in broken and terrified accents, disclosed that his motives were of spotless purity, that his document was a harmless joke, and that Mrs. Dunstan could have the place and a deed thereto if she'd just make the payments.

“I'll guarantee that,” put in Cyrus the Gaunt.

“And I'll see that she gets work to keep going on,” added the Bonnie Lassie.

Whereupon both D. Wiggett, the party of the first part (in the document) and Mrs. M. Dunstan, the party of the second part, dissolved in tears, though for very different reasons. The court then proceeded to the sentence of the defendant. Judgment was delivered in two mediums; full-voiced for the proper judicial process, and sotto voice for the benefit of those most concerned.

“Prisoner at the Bar-r-r: Ye have brootally assaulted a peaceful citizen (_not more than half-agin as big as yerself_). Ye have bate him to a poolp (_an' him but a scant tin years younger, an with a repitation for bein' a roughneck--with women and childer_). Ye have haff murdered him (_an' take shame to yerself ye didn't do th' other haff_). Because of yer youth an' inexperience (_I mane yer age an the wallop ye carry_) I will let ye off light with a fine of fifty dollars (an if ye'll sind me word when yer goin' to operate again I'll remit the fine). Nixt Ca-ase!”

For a culprit who had got off easy, Mr. Miles Morse presented far from a cheerful appearance when Molly Dunstan presented herself on the following morning. Molly exhibited strange and inexplicable symptoms, flushing and paling, finding no place for her regard to rest, until she discovered that Miles Morse was much worse confused than herself. Thereupon, after the manner of women, she became quite composed and easy. Through breakfast he was very silent. After lingering over his coffee to an unwonted degree, he finally arose, with an air of great determination, said “Well” in what was meant to be a businesslike tone, walked briskly to the door, then turned and stood in the most awkward unease.

“The house won't be like a home without you,” said he desolately.

“Won't it?” said Molly.

“You'll be going out to your own place very soon now?”

“Suppose I don't want to.”

“It's all arranged. I've been talking to Mr. and Mrs. Staten.”

“Have ye now!” said Molly with a mutinous uptilt of the chin.

“She's arranged for you to get your own kind of work out there.”

“I like my own job here.”

“It's all arranged,” said Miles Morse with dismal iteration.

“Does that mean I'm discharged?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“And I'm to go up there to the country--alone--and entertain my California privet hedge?”

Her little foot tapped the ground as it had on the unforgettable occasion of that first interview. The Meanest Man in Our Square winced. Molly saw it, and her eyes grew, tender, but her tone was still uncompromising. “What am I discharged for?”

Silence.

“For not being old enough to be your housekeeper?” She looked the merest wisp of a girl with her color coming and going as she spoke.

He muttered something undistinguish-able.

“For not being ugly enough?” And she contrived to look bewilderingly pretty.

“Why do you plague me, Molly?” he burst out.

She pointed a finger at his chin. “I dare ye, Miles Morse,” she said, her voice fluttering in her throat, for all her audacious words; “I dare ye to discharge me. For all ye're called the Meanest Man in Our Square, ye wouldn't be that mean as to send me away from ye!”

And, with the finger still leveled, she walked' straight to him and was caught and held close to the sober and respectable black coat.

“I'd never dared have asked you, Molly,” said Miles Morse in the voice of one who walks ecstatic amid the wonders of a dream.

“Don't I know that!” she retorted. And then, with a quiver: “Oh, Miles, it's I will make it up to you for that sand-and-spool firecracker!”