MATER DOLOROSA.
Honora Riley, who washed for Mrs. Barlow, lived in a ramshackle,
desolate district of the city which was appropriately known as "the
Barrens." Colliers, sooty to the eyerims, trudging home; ashy
dump-pickers; women cowled in drab shawls from beneath whose folds
peeped pitchers brimmed with foam like the whipped surface of the milk
pail, but the liquor was not milk; such were the sights Emily noticed
when she called at Mrs. Riley's to inquire whether it was a spell of
illness that had prevented her from coming to wash that Monday.
"Come in," a feeble voice answered her knock. "Oh, is it you, Miss
Barlow?"
Emily saw that the supper on the table, laid for two, was untasted, and
that the eyes of the woman who sat on the chair clasping her knees
before her, were red.
"We thought you might be ill, Mrs. Riley," she said.
"It is heartsick I am, and too broken-hearted to work, dear. Land knows
I have good reason or I wouldn't fail your mother."
"It isn't the pneumonia again, I hope."
"Shame and loneliness have come upon me in my old age," said Mrs. Riley,
wiping her tears with the corner of her tidy apron. "They've taken
Walter away."
"Who took him away?"
"The officer came with a warrant this morning--and he my only child, and
the kindest boy to his mother, with no harm or wickedness in him at all,
at all."
Walter was Mrs. Riley's only child, the last of seven. All the others
had preceded their father to the grave, narrowing the resources of the
little family with continual illnesses and funerals. Finally her husband
himself, an honest roofer, had been fatally injured in a fall and had
passed away, kissing the six-months' infant who would never know a
father. This was long ago. For this child the good mother had provided
by her willing labor, and he had grown to be her pride and hope, a
promising boy of 14.
"'It was a bicycle he stole,' said the officer, 'away out in the
country.' 'But I never meant to steal it, mother,' says Walter, and the
boy was that truthful he never lied to a soul that breathes. 'I never
meant to steal it, mother,' he says," repeated Mrs. Riley softly, her
grief overmastering her.
"Did you say Walter stole a bicycle?" asked Emily, a vague reminiscence
coming back to her.
"It was the bad company I warned him against, especially that Fenton boy
and Mrs. Watts' little imp that has more tricks in him than a monkey.
'Keep away from them, Walter,' says I, but no, he would choose them for
companions. And 'tis old Bagley, the junkman, I blame most of all. Upon
my word, I believe he put them up to the trick. What would three little
boys travel out to the country like that for, and ride away on three
bicycles and then sell them to Bagley?"
"Walter sold it, then?" said Emily, thoughtfully.
"Indeed, Walter did not. 'Mine is safe and sound in the club-room,' says
he; that's Lanty Lonergan's back kitchen he lets them use for a meeting
place. 'It's in the club-room,' says Walter, 'and I wouldn't sell it,
mother, but I was afraid to give it back; only I never meant to steal
it.'"
"That I believe, Mrs. Riley, for I saw him take that bicycle."
Mrs. Riley's tears stopped flowing for a moment in her surprise. Then
Emily related the story of her trip to Hillsboro and the conversation of
the boys which she had overheard, not forgetting to explain her own
share in frightening them away.
"So perhaps by my officiousness I converted an innocent prank into
something more serious," she concluded.
"If it was the price of it only, I'd give double that, and land knows
I've no stockingful, like some that go to the city for help, for I'd
rather rub my knuckles off than beg," said the good woman.
There was a piece of old carpet stuffed in one window-pane, adequate in
summer, no doubt, but hardly impregnable to the winter winds--and Emily
judged from the table before her that more than once the mother and son
had sat down to a Barmecide feast, in which the imagination had to be
called on to help appease the palate. So it was by inheritance that the
Whistler came by his aversion to Shagarach's charity.
"I think it strange Walter and I have never become acquainted."
"Indeed he knows all your goodness to me."
"Is he still at school?"
"Graduated this year, and his masters recommend him for the
best-tempered boy and as innocent--but full of the old Harry, like his
father, that would always be dancing, even with seven children between
him and his youth."
"What a pity if he should turn out bad now after you've made so many
sacrifices for him."
"Oh, for the sacrifices, Walter's willing to take his share. With his
paper route he would bring me in sometimes $2 a week, and there was
nothing he wouldn't do, distribute handbills, deliver baskets in the
meat-market on Saturday nights. Look, here's the shoeblack's kit he just
bought. Come in, Miss Barlow."
Emily entered the small side room which completed Mrs. Riley's suite.
"There's the blacking-box. Bought it himself with his own savings."
"But he was too changeable. I should think he would have done better to
stick to one thing."
"That's what I told him. But you know how a boy is fickle-minded. 'Get
me something good, mother,' says he. There's the little cradle I rocked
him in that I kept all these years--" Emily herself could hardly check
her tears at thought of the mother rocking this empty memento.
"His Aunt Mary gave it to me--not that we couldn't afford it--plenty and
to spare I had when my husband was alive, but it wasn't lucky to buy a
cradle for your first baby, she said, and so I rocked them all in hers,
and now six of them are in heaven with their father, God ha' mercy, and
Walter, all that was left me, is in the lockup this night with the bad
people."
Walter's little room was bare but not squalid. A knockabout suit hung on
pegs at one side, and a washbowl stood on a cheap commode, like a
prophecy of cleanliness in the occupant.
"Don't worry, Mrs. Riley. Since I helped Walter into this scrape, I am
bound to help him out of it."
"Heaven bless you, if you can save my Walter--and I know you would try
if you knew him. The lovingest boy, full of mischief like his father,
but he'd give the blood out of his heart to a soul in trouble. Oh, well
I knew he had something on his mind all these weeks. For he wouldn't run
up stairs two steps at a time, as he used to, and whistle so that it was
sweeter and louder than a cage full of canaries. When I heard him
whistle low I knew it was something troubling his mind. 'Yes, mother, it
is,' says he, but that was all I could get out of him."
"Suppose I bring a very great lawyer to be his counsel," said Emily,
deeply moved by the lonely mother's sorrow, and haunted, too, by a dim
remembrance of the central face among the three gamins--a frank
boy-face, with red lips and cheeks. "Wouldn't he stand a better chance
of getting off?"
"Just as you say, Miss Barlow," answered the sad woman, brightening a
little.
"He is very busy, but I feel sure that he will attend to this if I ask
him. I'll see him to-night. Don't brood over it too much and never mind
about the washing. I will have Mr. Shagarach call at the station and
talk with Walter, and then let you know. Good-night."
"Good-night and bless you," said Mrs. Riley, holding the little
candlestick high at the landing. Emily picked her way down two crazy
flights of stairs and a doorway barred with sprawling children on to the
sidewalk. "While we wink, the lightning may have flashed," was a motto
she had copied out of an old book of maxims and embroidered into her
life; so, without taking time even for a wink, she hailed a passing car
that would carry her near Shagarach's house.
Not all that Mrs. Riley had said of her boy, the Whistler, should be set
down to a mother's partiality. Mischievous Walter was, if the
unquenchable avidity for excitement which reigns at fourteen entitles a
boy to such an aspersion. The five hours' rigid confinement at a school
desk especially provoked him to perpetual fidget, and no teacher had yet
been found who could make him buckle to his books so long. Yet he was a
favorite with one and all, less because of his deft hand at the drawing
lesson than because of the real salubrity of his nature, which made him
exceptional among the slum children who were his fellow-pupils.
To these very schoolmates Walter figured as a hero, an Admirable
Crichton, invincible at all games and master of most things worth
knowing for boys. There was no swimmer of his age could equal him in
grace or speed, and his dive from the top of the railroad dock was
famous in local annals. So was his successful set-to in the brewery yard
with Lefty Dinan, the Tenth street cock-of-the walk.
Yet for all his proficiency in the art of give, take and avoid, Walter
was the least combative of boys, being, as his mother said, "loving" in
disposition. The great gray Percherons with shaggy fetlocks, that drew
the fire-engines, knew this, and admitted him to a brotherly
comradeship, bowing with delight when he patted and stroked them.
Mechanics found him handy beyond his years, and often employed him at
odd jobs. For he had a carpenter's eye for short distances and a
surveyor's for long, and there was no tool that did not fit his fingers.
If he had run away to join the circus last summer, that was not the
unpardonable sin.
Shagarach heard Emily gravely.
"An important witness for our cause," he answered, when she had
finished. "We surely cannot suffer him to be thrust into prison." Emily
knew that it was unnecessary for her to press the matter further, so she
spent a brief evening in conversation with the quaint, affectionate
mother, rarely alluding to the Floyd case or the mysterious oaf who had
so alarmed her in that oriental room.
The following noon she ran down to the jail to see Robert,
half-expecting to hear him playing the violin which she had sent him the
day before. Robert's own Stradivarius, with all his other personal
effects, had been destroyed at the fire, so Emily, having begged the
sheriff's permission, had pinched herself to buy him a new one as
richly toned as her slender means could purchase. Her own instrument was
the piano, whose keys turned to silver beneath her touch, and it had
been in the ensemble classes of the conservatory that she and Robert
(through Beulah Ware) first met. When Dr. Silsby, the botanist, who had
just come home from the west, called yesterday, she had insisted on his
taking the violin to Robert, without betraying the giver's name.
However, Robert's corridor (murderers' row, the name made her indignant)
was silent when she approached it, and she searched his cell vainly for
a violin box.
"Dr. Silsby has been to see you, Robert?" she asked, after the greetings
due from sweetheart to sweetheart.
"He came in yesterday to cheer me."
"His usual method of cheering, I suppose."
"Oh, yes, said he had never expected me to outlive uncle; I always acted
so much older than he did," laughed Robert.
"He is such a droll tease," said Emily, who never could be brought to
admit that Robert was overserious for his years.
"But I made myself even with him before he went. He promised to read an
article I had written while in prison, and took the manuscript under his
arm, little suspecting what was in store for him. You know how he abhors
my social heresies."
"And the article was----"
"My 'Modest Proposal for a Consumers' Trust,' socialistic from kappa to
kappa. How Jonas will writhe! The last words he spoke were a thrust at
my 'fad.' Yet every letter-carrier and uniformed employe I meet," added
Robert, returning to his natural gravity, "contented and useful,
convinces me more and more that the world is moving toward
co-operation."
"But the reading will be torture to Dr. Silsby."
"It ought to do him good. How hard that lumper works!" Several negroes
were staggering down the corridor, shouldering huge sides of beef for
the jail cuisine. "And in fifty offices within a radius of a mile men
are receiving large salaries for dawdling at elegant desks two or three
hours a day."
"There are no sinecures at $10 a week," sighed Emily, drawing upon
experience for this generalization. "But did Dr. Silsby have nothing
with him when he called?"
"I believe he had--a violin box."
"Just so," said a cheerful voice behind them; "a violin-box, and forgot
to leave it. You see I had the jacketing of that birch tree so much on
my mind," it was Dr. Silsby himself, "everything else slipped out. You
remember my speaking of the birch tree, Rob?"
"At least seven times," answered Robert.
"Cruelty, Miss Barlow, positive cruelty. That fine silver-birch in the
jailyard--you saw it, I suppose, coming in--all peeled and naked from
the ground as high as my reach. Wanton cruelty. Think of the winter
nights. It will die. It will die."
One of Jonas Silsby's eccentricities was his keen sympathy for arboreal
life, to which his rugged nature yearned even more than to the delicate
products of the flower garden.
"I complained to the sheriff. There ought to be an ordinance severely
punishing the barking of trees."
"Don't they fine the boys who mutilate foliage in the parks?" asked
Emily.
"Fine! Horsewhip them! Rattan their knuckles! I'd teach them a lesson or
two! The young barbarians! Well, cut it short, thinking of the trees, I
forgot your violin. So last night I ordered a jacket made, good canvas
cloth, that'll interest you, Rob, if you haven't forgotten all your
botany in your wild----"
"How did you like my essay, Jonas?" asked Robert, mischievously.
"Quackery! A poultice to cure incurable diseases. Bah!"
"But you brought the violin to-day?" asked Emily, smiling.
"Yes, with the canvas jacket. You see it's Miss Barlow's present----"
"What!" cried Robert.
"There! Thunder! I've let it out. She was going to blindfold you and let
you guess the giver."
"And the violin is in your vest pocket, I suppose?" asked Emily,
innocently, on the brink of a peal of laughter.
"The violin! Jupiter!" exclaimed Dr. Silsby, thunderstruck. "It's a box
of bulbs. I thought they were rather heavy."
Emily and Robert had a merry time over the botanist's absentmindedness,
but he insisted that the original fault lay with the young barbarians
who had upset him by unbarking the birch tree.
There was little news to exchange except the arrest of their "important
witness," and the lunch hour at best was only sixty minutes long, so
Emily was soon forced to make her adieus and leave Robert with his
second best friend.