HITTY
Hitty put on her bonnet--she had worn widow's weeds for twenty-five
years--and went out into the morning. She finally succeeded in
boarding a south-bound Sixth Avenue car,--though since it was her
habit to ignore the near side stop regulation, she always had
considerable trouble in getting on any car,--and in seating herself
bolt upright on the lengthwise seat, her black gloved hands folded
indomitably before her.
At Fourth Street she descended and made her way east to the square,
and thence to the top floor of the studio building to which Collier
Pratt had taken his little daughter on the memorable occasion when he
had plucked her from her warm nest of blankets and led her, sleepy and
shivering, into the cold of the night. She had been at some pains to
secure the address without taking Nancy into her confidence.
She took each creaking stair with a snort of disgust, and reaching the
battered door with Collier Pratt's visiting card tacked on the smeary
panel on a level with her eye, she knocked sharply, and scorning to
wait for a reply, turned the knob and walked in.
Collier Pratt was making coffee on a small spirit lamp, set on the
wash-stand, which was decorously concealed during the more formal
hours of the day behind a soft colored Japanese screen. He was wearing
a smutty painter's smock, and though his face was shining with soap
and water, his hair was standing about his face in a disorder eloquent
of at least a dozen hours' neglect. Sheila, in a mussy gingham dress,
was trying to pry off the pasteboard covering of a pint bottle of milk
with a pair of scissors, and succeeding only indifferently. They both
turned on Hitty's entrance, and the milk bottle went crashing to the
floor when the little girl recognized her friend, but after one
terrified look at her father she made no move at all in Hitty's
direction.
"And to what," Collier Pratt ejaculated slowly and disagreeably, as is
any man's wont before he has had his draught of breakfast coffee, "am
I to attribute the pleasure of this visit?"
"It ain't no pleasure to me," Hitty said, advancing, a figure of
menace, into the center of the dusty workshop, strangely uncouth and
unprepossessing in the cold morning light,--"and if it's any pleasure
to you, that's an effect that I ain't calculated to produce. I've come
here on business--the business of collecting that poor neglected child
there, and taking her back where she belongs, where there's folks that
knows enough to treat her right."
"Another of Miss Martin's friends and well-wishers, I take it. These
American girls are given to surrounding themselves with groups of warm
and impulsive associates. Do you by any chance happen to know a young
lawyer by the name of Boynton, Hitty? A collection lawyer?"
"I'll thank you to call me Mrs. Spinney, if you please, or if you
don't please. Mrs. Spinney is the name I go by when I'm spoken to by
them that knows their manners. If Billy Boynton thinks he can collect
blood out of a stone he's welcome to try, but I should think he was
too long headed to waste his time."
"I gave him my I. O. U.," Collier Pratt said wearily. "If you don't
mind, Hitty,--I really must be excused from your inexcusable
surname--I am going to drink a cup of coffee before we continue this
interesting discussion--_café noir_, our late unfortunate accident
depriving me of _café au lait_ as usual. Sheila, get the cups."
"You don't mean to say that you feed that peaked child with full
strength coffee, do you? It'll stunt her growth; ain't you got the
sense to know that?"
"I don't like _big_ women," Collier Pratt said. "She's very fond of
coffee."
"Well! I've come to get her and take her away where you won't be in a
position to stunt her growth, whatever your ideas on the subject is."
Collier Pratt seated himself at the deal table that Sheila had set
with the coffee-cups and a big loaf of French bread, and began slowly
consuming a bowl of inky fluid, strong of chicory, into which from
time to time he dipped a portion of the loaf. Sheila imitated his
processes with less daintiness and precision, since she was shaken
with excitement at Hitty's appearance.
"I should spread a newspaper down if I was you," Hitty said, "before I
et my vittles off a table that way. If a table ain't scrubbed as often
as twice a day it ain't fit to be et off."
"I know your breed," Collier Pratt said. "You'd be capable of taking
your breakfast off _The Evening Telegram_ if no more appropriately
colored sheet were at hand. Tell me, did Miss Martin send you here
this morning, or was the inspiration to come entirely your own?"
"Nobody had to send me. Wild horses wouldn't have kept me away from
here."
"Nor drag you away from here, I suppose, until your gruesome visit is
accomplished. What makes you think that I would give up Sheila to
you?"
"I don't _think_ you would. I know you're a-goin' to."
"Indeed."
"We want the child. You don't want her, and you can't pretend to me
that you do. Even if you did want her you can't take care of her in no
way that's decent."
"There's a great deal in what you say, Hitty."
"What you're going to do is to sign a paper giving up your claim to
her, and then Nancy can adopt her when she sees fitting to do so."
"What would you suggest my doing about the child's mother? She has a
mother living, you know."
"Well, I didn't know," Hitty said, "but now I do know I guess I ain't
going to have so much trouble as I thought I was. You're just a plain
low-down yellow cur that any likely man I know would come down here
and lick the lights out of."
"Well, don't send any more of them, Hitty," Collier Pratt protested.
"My work won't stand it."
"You 'tend to the child's mother then, and I'll 'tend to you. You'd
better let Sheila come away peaceable without any more trouble."
"What do you propose doing to me if I don't?"
"There's so many different things I could use," Hitty said thoughtfully,
"that I don't know which one to hold over your head first."
"I don't see how you could use anything you've got."
"I'd just as soon use something I hadn't got," Hitty said grimly. "I'd
sue you for breach o' promise myself ruther than lose what I come
after."
"I don't doubt you're capable of it," Collier Pratt said, surveying
her ruefully. "That certainly would ruin my reputation. But seriously,
supposing I were to give my consent to Sheila's going back to Miss
Martin--Sheila's fond of her, and I should be very glad to do Miss
Martin a service--little as you may be inclined to believe it of me.
I'm fond enough of the child, but she is a considerable embarrassment
to a man situated as I am. Supposing I should consent to giving her up
as you suggest, how can a woman situated as Miss Martin is situated
undertake such a charge permanently? How could she afford it? What
kind of a future should I be surrendering my little girl to? One has
to think of those things. Miss Martin is a poor girl--"
"It's a lucky thing that you didn't know it before," Hitty said
deliberately. "What you don't know that a woman's got, you wouldn't be
trying to get away from her. Nancy's Uncle Elijah that died last year
left her a million dollars in his will."
"The devil he did--"
"I guess if anybody's going to talk about devils it had better be me,"
Hitty said dryly. "Does the child go or stay?"
"Oh! she goes," Collier Pratt said. "I'm sorry you didn't come after
me too, Hitty."
"Nobody from up our way is ever coming after you. You can put that in
your pipe and smoke it. Put on your bonnet, Sheila."
"In some ways that is more of a relief than you know, Hitty. Some of
the young men from up your way are so violent."
"It ain't generally known yet," Hitty said as a parting shot when,
Sheila's hand in hers, she stood at the door preparatory to taking her
triumphal departure. "But Nancy is going to marry considerable money
in addition to what she's inherited."
Nancy finding it impossible to spend an hour of her time idly and with
no appointments before noon that day, was engaged in darning a basket
full of slum socks that she had brought home from the tenements to
occupy Hitty's leisure moments. She was not very expert at this
particular task, and the holes were so huge, and their method of
behaving under scientific management so peculiar--it is hardly
necessary to say that Nancy knew the theory of darning perfectly--that
she was becoming more and more dissatisfied with her progress. Hitty's
unprecedented and taciturn donning of her best bonnet in the early
morning hours, followed by her abrupt departure without explanation or
apology, was also a little disconcerting to any one acquainted with
her habits. Nancy was relieved to hear her key in the lock again, and
put down her work to greet her.
The door opened and Sheila stood on the threshold. Hitty was close
behind her, but Nancy had eyes only for the child.
"Don't cry, Miss Dear," Sheila said, in her arms. "I cried hard every
night when I was gone from you, but now I have come back. My father
does not want me, and he says that you can have me."
"He signed a paper," Hitty said. "I've got it in my bag with my specs.
If ever he shows his face around here we can have the law on him."
"Can I really have Sheila?" Nancy cried. "I can't believe that--her
father would let her go. I can't understand it."
"He's a kind of a poor soul," Hitty said. "He ain't got no real
contrivance. He's glad enough to get rid of her."
"Did he say so?"
"Well, nearabout. He has a high-falutin way of talking but that was
the amount of it. He knows which side his bread is buttered. He ain't
nobody's fool. I'll say that for him."
"I can't say that you make him out a very pleasant character," Nancy
said. "But he's an artist, Hitty. Artists don't react to the same set
of laws that we do. They're different somehow."
"They ain't so different, when it comes to that," Hitty said dryly.
"They won't take a hint, but the harder you kick 'em the better for
all concerned. Don't you go sticking up for that low-down loon. He
ain't worth it."
"I suppose he isn't," Nancy said; "he's a pretty poor apology for a
man as we understand men, Hitty, but there's something about him,--a
power and a charm that you can't altogether discount, even though you
have lost every particle of your respect for him."
"He has a kind of way," Hitty conceded, "but I ain't one o' them kind
o' women that hankers much for the society of a man that's once shown
himself to be more of a sneak than the average."
"I don't think that I am, either," Nancy said gravely.
"I want to be your little girl always," Sheila announced, "if I may
talk now, may I? And Monsieur Dick's, too, and sit on a cushion and
sew a fine seam, and feast upon strawberries, sugar and cream. I want
to see Monsieur Dick. Where is he?"
"He's been sick," Nancy said, "but he's getting better now, I think. I
haven't seen him for some time, myself."
"Don't you love him very much and aren't you very sorry?"
"He probably isn't very sick," Nancy said. "I don't think he could
be--but if he were I should be sorry, of course."
"I don't want him to be sick," Sheila said, making herself a nest in
Nancy's lap, and curling around in it like a kitten. "If he was I
should be very, very unhappy, and I am tired of being unhappy, Miss
Dear."
Nancy's arms closed tight about her little body, which was lighter in
her arms than she had ever known it. "Oh! I'm going to make such a
strong well, little girl of you," she cried, "and we're going to have
so many pleasant times together. I'm tired of being unhappy, too,
Sheila, dear."