CHAPTER XXI.

AT THE ARROW STREET POLICE COURT.

Nervous people are generally too early, and on the fatal Monday morning Miss Prudence Semaphore, who was still weak and ill, but meantime had found comparative repose in her quiet and obscure lodgings, presented herself at the door of the Arrow Street Police Court almost as soon as it was opened. She was dressed all in black, and with her white face and long veil looked like a newly made widow.

The baby farming case had excited great interest in the neighbourhood, where “good Mrs. Brown” was a well-known personage, and though three cases stood before it on the list, already dirty drabs from the surrounding alleys, with still dirtier infants clasped in their arms, had gathered on the pavement in hope of seeing the prisoner and witnesses arrive.

Prudence had the satisfaction of hearing herself described as “the mother o’ one o’ Sal Brown’s children,” and of being threatened with personal violence by a brawny matron, who shook her fist under the poor lady’s nose, and exclaimed, in an access of virtuous indignation, “I know your sort, I do,” promising, if Prudence would come outside, to give her “a jolly good ’iding.” At this point a policeman interfered, and conducted the terrified victim to a private room where she awaited in misery the usher’s summons.

Meantime the witnesses began to collect. The various serjeants and detectives concerned in the case, the spectators of Sal Brown’s war dance when she used a baby as a weapon, and others arrived singly or in groups. Amongst the rest came a workhouse matron, and an assistant in charge of the infants concerned, since in accordance with the usual procedure, the infants had been sent to the workhouse while awaiting the trial of Sal.

The matron was a portly, red-faced woman of fifty, with that brusqueness of manner acquired by officials accustomed to deal with those whom they consider their inferiors. Her friend was a pale and highly genteel person who made many objections to appearing in court at all. The children, miserable, pinched objects, with the big, bright eyes, long lashes, and weird faces of the starved, were packed by twos and threes in perambulators in charge of a couple of pauper women, fifteen unhappy infants in all.

Weirdest of the party, was the elder Miss Semaphore, in a pink cotton frock, an infant’s bib, and an old and often-washed white shawl. Little Augusta was a singularly unprepossessing baby.

“Drat the child,” said the workhouse nurse. “She has just the look of a little old woman, and I never did see one of her age that took such notice of everything a body does. I declare to you I took a sip of her milk just to see if it was sweet, and when I turned round I caught her eye, an’ I’m blest if she didn’t wink. It gave me quite a turn. A real wicked wink it was, an’ when I gave her the bottle if she didn’t push it away, and wipe the top before she’d drink a drop.”

“She was starved, nurse,” said her subordinate. “That’s what it was. Them children that is starved has a look and ways as if they was ninety. Many a one of them I’ve seen brought in here, so I knows the kind.”

“Oh! this one couldn’t have been starved. It was only two days in Brown’s place I hear. They do say its mother is a lady, and gave it to Sal with a hundred pounds in gold, and told her to get rid of it as soon as she liked. Sal went on the spree with the money, an’ that’s how she was run in. The neighbours said that child had not been long with her. Look! it’s a deal plumper than the others. They’re regular starved I’ll allow, but this ’un has queer ways. Now to give you an idear, the matron and me we had a friendly glass of punch last night after a ’ard day’s work, and the matron, she says to me, as how she’d like to see the children in the baby farming case, as there’s so much interest took in it you know, it made her curious, an’ so I brought her in to see ’em all a laying in their cots. An’ this ’ere one was awake, staring at us with all its eyes. So matron, she stoops an’ says, ‘Ow wazzums?’ an’ kisses it, an’ the cretur it makes a face at her, turns away its head, and pulls out a bit of blue ribbon as was on a doll I gave it, and makes signs to her to take it. Struck all of a heap she was. ‘Watever does it mean?’ sez she. ‘Wy take the blue ribbon,’ sez I, half jokin’, for I couldn’t believe it, and the objeck looks at me and nods three times very slowly, just as if to say ‘you’re right.’ It frightened me, it did.”

“’Tis your imagination, nurse, that’s wot it is.”

“Not it,” retorted the nurse. “Imagination don’t trouble me, so it don’t; but I see wot I see, and there’s no good a trying to persuade me different. That child is queer. Just look at it now a sucking its thumb and listening to every word we say, and taking it all in you’d think.”

Augusta, her scanty downy hair brushed, her nose and cheeks shining with recent ablutions, certainly had something weird about her, or so it seemed to both the women. Her eyes had an elfish intelligence that was startling. She looked as if at any moment she might speak.

That she understood was only too evident, for she obeyed every direction given to her when it was to her fancy. At times her efforts to find a voice, to tell all she knew, could not be mistaken, and inspired as much fright and pity as the inarticulate cries of the deaf and dumb.

“What is she doing of now?” said the subordinate suddenly.

Augusta had been looking at her fixedly until she attracted her attention, and when the eyes of the nurse and her assistant were fixed on the elderly infant, they saw she was making violent efforts to get up.

“What is it, pet? What is it now?” said the assistant soothingly. “What does my precious want?”

“I vow and declare,” said the matron, “that child is making signs as if she was writing. Look at her finger, do. She makes me nervous, she does. ’Tis no way for a baby like that to go on.”

“How old would you say she was, nurse?”

“Oh, ’bout a year I’d say, or fourteen months.”

“Would you now? Well, p’raps she is; but d’you know when first I saw her she didn’t seem to look a month old. Queer, wasn’t it? p’raps ’twas the light, but she do seem a deal older now.”

“Wat an interest you take in her,” said the matron. “Wy ’er more ’an the others? Nasty little varmint she is I thinks myself. She might be an ’undred by the looks of ’er.”

“Wot ken you expect from a pore little neglected come-by-chance? She’s ’ad a bad time, she ’as. I wish I ’ad ’er mother ’ere, an’ I’d give ’er wot for, so I would.”

“Will you stop that talking, please,” said a burly policeman, thrusting his head into the room where the witnesses were assembled. “They can ’ear you in court.”

The voices fell immediately.

“Oh, there they are, poor little dears!” said a new-comer, bustling in, a neighbour of “good Mrs. Brown,” who had been called on to give evidence as to the condition in which the children were kept. “Let me see, there’s Florrie and Joey and Ada and Rosy and Tommie; yes, everyone of them, but where’s the last child? The one Sal got all the dibs with?”

“Here she is,” said the workhouse matron, indicating Augusta.

“No you don’t,” said the woman rudely. “’Twas a new-born hinfant, it was. That child’s a goin’ on two years old, or I’m a Dutchman, an’ I never set heyes on her before. She don’t belong to Sal’s little lot.”

The matron made an angry reply, which Sal’s neighbour resented, and trouble would have ensued, but that the big policeman interfered once more and commanded silence. Both parties appealed to him, but he would listen to neither, and gruffly told them to “stow their talk, and keep their story till they got into court.”

While this went on in the waiting-room, Prudence was sitting in an agony of apprehension expecting the summons.

At last the case of The Queen _v._ Brown was called, and Sal was put forward on remand charged with the criminal neglect of certain infants under one year, committed to her charge, and for that she, an unlicensed person, did receive more than one such infant, contrary to the regulations of the Act 25 Victoria, section 22, clause 4.

An officer from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children deposed that the police had informed him of the deplorable condition of the unhappy infant, whom Sal was using as an offensive weapon on the occasion of the arrest. He went to the station where the woman had been charged, obtained her name and address, and proceeded to make enquiries. A graphic description of Plummer’s Cottages followed, and of the wretched objects found there—starved, dirty, and miserable.

Witness after witness was called to testify to the children being left for hours without food, fire, or attention. The children were formally exhibited. The workhouse matron deposed to their condition when admitted.

Finally, it was announced that the names and addresses of parents or other relatives of the children had been found, some of them people of good position, and that they would be brought forward to swear to their condition when delivered over to the prisoner.

There was a thrill of excitement in court, anticipative of scandals. People of good position do not hand over babies to a Sal Brown without strong reason. To the rustle and stir succeeded a strained silence as the usher called the name of “Prudence Semaphore.”