THE STOLEN POCKET-BOOK
Early one evening Stargarde was sitting sewing in her room when she
heard on the veranda the blustering noise that usually accompanied Dr.
Camperdown’s arrival. She smiled and glanced apprehensively at Zeb, who
had been spending the day with her, and who now lay on the sofa
apparently asleep.
Then she dropped her work and turned to greet the newcomer.
“No, thank you, I can’t sit down,” he said. “I came to bring you some
money that Mr. Warner handed me for your poor people. Here it is,” and
taking out his pocket-book he handed her a check. “You’d better spend
some of it on that little mudlark of yours,” with a nod of his head in
the direction of the sofa.
Zeb, who was only pretending to be asleep, heard the half-contemptuous
half-good-natured epithet, and like a flash she was off the sofa and
clinging to his arm, scratching, snarling, and biting at him like an
enraged cat.
Stargarde was intensely distressed, and Dr. Camperdown was electrified.
Around and around the table he went, trying to shake the child off
without hurting her, and yet becoming more and more disturbed as he
heard the ripping of cloth.
“Stop, stop—you little fury,” he exclaimed. “Let go! I’ll have to hurt
you, I see,” and bending back the child’s fingers in his powerful hands
he dropped her on the floor gently, but as hastily as if she were a rat,
and snatching at his hat hurried to the door.
He flung it open and rushed out, none too soon, however, for the child
was at his heels. Across the veranda and out under the archway they
dashed, and Stargarde, hastening to watch them, heard their hurrying
footsteps echoing down the frosty street. Used to surprising scenes of
all kinds she was not unduly alarmed, and thoughtfully smoothing out the
check and murmuring, “Poor little Zeb,” she sat down to write a note of
thanks.
After some time there was a cautious knock at the door, then a head was
thrust slowly in, which, to her surprise, she saw belonged to Dr.
Camperdown.
“Are you alone?” he said. “Has that—that little witch come back? If she
has I won’t come in.”
“No, she hasn’t.”
Camperdown advanced into the room making a wry face. “I have been
robbed.”
“Brian!”
“Yes; that small darling of yours has made off with my pocket-book.”
“Impossible, Brian!” exclaimed Stargarde clasping her hands.
“Not so,” he retorted coolly. “She has it. I was on my way to the police
station, but changed my mind and thought I’d come here first.”
“Brian, I cannot have her arrested.”
“Very well; then get my property from her. There are papers in that book
worth a large sum to me. I’ve traveled half over the world and carried a
pocket full of notes here, there, and everywhere, and never was robbed
before.”
Stargarde suddenly became calm. “Sit down and let us talk it over.”
He gave utterance to his favorite exclamation, “Good—there’s
considerable of the detective about you, Stargarde, and you’ve had
experience with people of this stripe. Now what shall we do?”
She smiled feebly at him. “Where did you keep your pocket-book, Brian?”
He displayed a well of a pocket in his inside coat situated immediately
over his brawny chest. “Impossible to fall out you see. Put your hand
in.”
“Oh, I can see; do you always keep it there?”
“Always.”
“When did you have it last?”
“When I took it out to give you the check. I had the book half-way back
into my pocket when the young lamb sprang upon me. You remember how she
grabbed and dived at me—wanted to tear her way to my heart, I think.
Probably she snatched the book and concealed it among her rags.”
She had no rags to conceal it among," said Stargarde reproachfully; “she
had on a decent frock.”
“Well, what is your theory?” he said impatiently.
“She was angry and thought only of punishing you. The book must have
fallen from your coat as you ran and she picked it up and is keeping it
to tease you.”
“I will tease her,” grimly, “if she doesn’t give it up. Come, what shall
we do? Get a policeman?”
“No, Brian, I will get it for you,” and she left him and went into her
bedroom and put her hand to her head with a swift ejaculation, “O Lord,
give me wisdom. They are terrible people—her parents. If they find the
book on her they will not give it up.”
She looked around the room as if for inspiration. “I have it,” she said,
snatching a little box from her dressing table. “Thank God for putting
it into the hearts of kind friends to send me the wherewithal to do
good.” Then taking a hat and cloak from a drawer, and rolling Zeb’s cap
and shawl in a parcel, she went out to Dr. Camperdown and said quietly,
“I am ready.”
He held open the door for her, and looked down approvingly at the large
black dog that went silently out with his nose against her skirts.
They went up a street leading to the Citadel Hill, which crouched in the
midst of the city like some huge animal turned stiff in the cold, its
flanks covered with yellow, tufted, frozen grass, the great crown of the
fort resting solidly on its brow. A few lights flashed at the top of the
signal staff but the grim fortification sunk in the ground was outwardly
dark and gloomy, though within they knew there were lights and fires and
soldiers keeping ceaseless watch.
Near the Citadel was a tenement house, inhabited by nearly twenty
persons. Stargarde knew them all, knew just which rooms they occupied,
and on arriving in front of the building, she refused to allow
Camperdown to accompany her within.
Very unwillingly he consented to stay outside, a little comforted to see
that the dog slunk in after her like her shadow. Stargarde had requested
him not to linger by the door, so he walked up and down the opposite
side of the street, where there were no houses, surveying moodily
sometimes the frozen glacis on one side of him, and sometimes the gaudy
windows of the little eating and drinking shops on the other. A few
soldiers in greatcoats passed at intervals up and down the street, but
always across from him, and occasionally a man or a gayly dressed girl
would swing open a shop door and let a stream of music and a smell of
cooking food out on the night air.
While he waited, he mourned angrily and bitterly, as he had done a
thousand times before, the passion, or credulity, or madness, or
whatever it was, that took his pure, white lily into such houses as
these. “Those people are well enough off,” he muttered angrily; “why
can’t she let them alone? They live their life, we live ours. She thinks
she can raise them up. Pah! as easily as rats from a gutter.”
He grumbled on mercifully unconscious of the fact that could he have
seen Stargarde at the time his uneasiness would not have been allayed.
The old tenement house was one of the worst in the city, and when
Stargarde entered it, she knew she must step cautiously. Passing through
the doorway she found herself in a narrow, unlighted hall, not
evil-smelling, for the door had been partly ajar, but as cold as the
outer world, and with an uneven floorway, almost covered by an
accumulation of ice and snow brought in during many days by many feet,
and that would linger till a thaw came to melt it.
At the back of the hall was a sound of running water, where the
occupants of the house, with a glorious disregard of the waste, kept
their tap running to save it from freezing. Beyond the tap Stargarde
knew she must not go, for there was a large hole in the floor utilized
as a receptacle for the refuse and garbage of the house, which were
thrown through it into the cellar. As for the cellar itself, it was
entirely open to the winter winds. The windows had been torn away, part
of the foundation wall was crumbling, and over the rickety floor she
could hear the rats scampering merrily, busy with their evening feast.
Stargarde avoided the icy sink, the running water, and the crazy steps
that led to the cellar, and guiding herself along the hall by touching
the wall with the tips of her outstretched fingers, put her foot on the
lowest step of the staircase. Carefully she crept up one flight of
stairs after another, past walls flecked with ugly sores, where the
plaster had fallen off in patches, past empty sockets of windows staring
out at the night with glass and sash both gone, and past the snowdrifts
lying curled beneath on the floor.
On two flats she passed by doors where threads of light streamed out and
lay across the rotten boards, while a sound of laughter and rough
merrymaking was heard within.
In the third, the top flat, there was no noise at all. “Foreigners they
are, and queer in their ways,” ejaculated Stargarde; and pausing an
instant to listen for some sign of life, she lifted up her face to the
crazy, moldy roof overhead, where some of the shingles were gone,
affording easy ingress to snow and rain, which kept the floor beneath
her feet in a state of perpetual dampness.
“Iniquitous!” she murmured; “judgment falls on the city that neglects
its poor.” Then bringing down her glance to the doors before her, she
sighed heavily and proceeded a little farther along the hall. There were
three rooms in this story, and Zeb’s parents lived in the front one.
Their door had been broken in some quarrel between the people of the
house, and one whole panel was gone. There was a garment clumsily tacked
over it, and Stargarde might have pulled it aside if she had been so
minded; but she had not come to spy upon her _protégés_, and contented
herself with knocking gently.
The very slight, almost inaudible, sound of voices that she had been
able to hear within the room instantly ceased; after a short interval a
voice asked her in excellent English who she was and what she wanted.
“Miss Turner,” she replied good-humoredly, “and I should like to see Zeb
for a few minutes.”
The door was opened part way, and she was sullenly motioned to enter by
a tall woman, who slipped behind it so as to be partly unobserved,
giving her visitor as she did so a look which certainly would have
attracted Stargarde’s attention could she have seen it, so blended with
a curious variety of emotions was it.
They were having a quiet carousal Stargarde saw, when she found herself
in the room. There was a tearing fire in the stove, and on its red-hot
top foamed and bubbled a kettle of boiling water. The windows were
tightly closed and draped with dirty garments; a small table, having on
it candles, a pack of cards, and a jug of steaming liquor, stood at one
side of the room, and beside it sat two men, both foreigners, judging by
their swarthy faces and plentiful supply of silky, black hair.
They were very drunk, but the woman was only partly so. The men eyed
Stargarde in insulting, brutish curiosity, hurling interjections,
remarks, and questions at her in a gibberish which she fortunately could
not understand.
She paid little attention to them. Her eyes leaped beyond to the dirty
bed on the floor, and held a pair of glittering orbs that she knew
belonged to the child of whom she had come in search. She did not wish
Zeb to have one instant to herself in which to secrete the pocket-book.
The child had pulled about her some of the rags with which she was
surrounded, and was sitting up, looking like a wild animal disturbed in
its lair.
Stargarde crossed the room quickly and knelt down beside her. “You ran
away from me this evening,” she whispered; “see, darling,” and opening a
box she showed the child a layer of sweetmeats daintily wrapped in
colored paper.
“Take one, Zeb,” she said, and the child silently submitted to have one
put in her mouth. “Now I must go,” said Stargarde; “you keep this pretty
box, and will you come and see me to-morrow?”
“Mebbe,” said the child sullenly, and taking another sweetmeat.
Stargarde’s heart beat fast. The girl was an enigma to her in her moody
self-possession. Perhaps she had not taken the pocket-book. “Goodbye,
Zeb,” she murmured, making as though she would rise from the floor.
“Have you no present for me? I thought you might have.”
Zeb flashed her a look, half cunning, half admiring. “You’re a quaint
one,” she observed in Italian _patois_; then she displayed her sharp,
white teeth in a mirthless smile: “If you’ll give me a kiss.”
Stargarde leaned over and took the child in a capacious embrace, and as
she did so, felt something flat slipped into the bosom of her dress. “Is
it all there?” she murmured in Zeb’s ear; “you haven’t taken anything
out?”
“_Pas si bête_,” returned the child. “Not I. Think I want to cool my
heels in the little saint? I was goin’ to fetch it in the mornin’; but
you take the curlyhead back his sacred. I don’t want it. It danced out
of his pocket. Some day,” coolly, “I’ll pick him. He’s a——I’d like to
see his grape jam running,” with an oath and sudden darkening of face.
Stargarde was familiar with some of the slang of recidivists collected
together in large cities, but she had never before the advent of Zeb’s
parents heard it in the small city of Halifax. With a sensation of
poignant and intense grief she looked at the child who, whether it was
due to her environment or not, was talking more of it this evening than
she had ever heard from her before.
“Curlyhead,” Stargarde knew, meant Jew; “little saint,” prison;
“sacred,” purse; and “grape jam” was blood. Oh, to get the child away
from here, from the choking, stifling atmosphere of poverty and vice
that was ruining her!
Zeb, as if aware of her distress, had curled herself up sullenly among
the rags, and Stargarde rose to her feet and turned to speak to her
mother.
In a corner of the room she found an extraordinary scene being enacted.
Unknown to her, while she bent over Zeb, the younger of the two men had
managed to stagger quietly from his seat and stand behind her, divided
between an admiration for her magnificent physique, such a contrast to
his own puny strength, and an endeavor to keep on his tottering legs.
The gravely watchful dog that had walked into the room behind his
mistress, and lay curled on the floor beside her, saw nothing hostile in
the man’s attitude, and beyond keeping an observing eye upon him took no
measures to make him retreat.
Not so sensible was the woman behind the door. For some reason or other
she was highly displeased with the proceeding of the young man.
Springing upon him as silently and as stealthily as a wild beast of the
cat tribe would have done, she hissed in his ear, “Not for you to look
at, Camaro; back! back!” and she motioned him to his seat.
He had reached the obstinate stage of drunkenness, and though a little
fear of her shone out of his black and beady eyes, he shrugged his
shoulders carelessly, and said in Italian, “Presently, presently, my
lady.”
“Not presently, but now,” said the woman in pure and correct English,
and having taken enough of the fiery liquor to be thoroughly
quarrelsome, she threw herself upon him, dragged him to a corner where,
when Stargarde turned around, she was quietly and persistently beating
him with a stick of wood that she had caught from beside the stove.
Her husband sat stupidly watching her from the table, his hand going
more and more frequently to the jug; and her victim, making not the
slightest effort to withstand her, lay taking his beating as a
submissive child might resign itself to deserved punishment from a
parent.
“Stop, stop!” exclaimed Stargarde, hurrying to her side. “That’s enough,
Zeb’s mother”—and throwing her cloak back over her shoulders she laid
her hand on the woman’s club.
“He insulted you,” exclaimed the woman in maudlin fury, “I shall punish
him.”
Stargarde towered above her, strong and firm and beautiful, and would
not release her. “Who are you?” she said in surprise. “You speak Italian
and French, and now good English; I thought you were Zeb’s mother.”
“So I be,” said the woman sulkily, relapsing into inelegant language,
and pulling her hair over her eyes so that Stargarde could not see her
features distinctly. “Here, give me that stick,” and seeing that
Stargarde would not obey her, she began beating the man with her fists.
“Oh, this is dreadful,” gasped Stargarde, holding her back and gazing
around the room, half choked by the heat, which was bringing out and
developing a dozen different odors, each fouler than the last. “How can
I leave Zeb here? Give me the child, won’t you?” she said pleadingly to
the woman.
“No, no,” and a stream of foreign ejaculations and asseverations poured
from the woman’s lips, in which the man at the table, comprehending
dully what was said, hastened to add his quota.
Stargarde turned to look at him, and found that he was fondling tenderly
a little monkey that had crept to his bosom. She remembered hearing Zeb
say that her father loved his monkey and would feed it if they all had
to go hungry.
“Sweet, Pedro, thou art beautiful,” he murmured, and Stargarde seeing
that he cared nothing for the friend whom his wife was so unmercifully
beating, knew that she must not relax in her protection of the
unfortunate one, or there might be broken bones, and possibly loss of
life before morning.
“You were kind to want to protect me,” she said, catching the woman’s
wrists in her hands and holding them firmly; “but you should not beat
the man. He would not have hurt me. I am never afraid of drunken people.
See, I will take him away from you,” and sliding her hand under the
little man’s shirt collar she slipped him swiftly over the floor to the
doorway. Strong and muscular, and a trained athlete though she was a
woman, she did easily in cool blood what the other woman had only been
able to do in her rage.
Zeb’s mother precipitating herself upon her, hindered her from opening
the door, till Zeb sprang from the bed and addressed her unreasoning
parent in an eager jargon, in which Stargarde knew she plainly told her
of the evil consequences which would arise from the indulgence of her
wrath.
The woman, not too far gone to be amenable to reason, came so quickly to
her daughter’s view of the matter that she even gave the now insensible
man several helping kicks to assist Stargarde in dragging him out into
the hall. Stargarde going ahead, slid him down the few steps to the next
landing, where she laid his head on a bed of snow, and bound her
handkerchief around an ugly cut on his wrist.
Before she finished, the woman exclaimed at the cold wind sweeping
through the hall, and went into the room; but Zeb remained, watching and
shivering, though she had on all the clothes she had worn through the
day.
“Zeb,” exclaimed Stargarde passionately, looking up at her, “how can I
leave you here? I shall not sleep to-night for thinking of you.”
The child shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing.
“Will you not come with me, darling?” said Stargarde. “I think your
mother would give you up.”
“Yer’ll marry that——” Zeb scorned to bestow a name upon him; “then
where’ll I find myself?”
“My present plan is to live always in the Pavilion,” said Stargarde
firmly; “and Zeb, I want you with me.”
Zeb relented a little. “I’ll see yer to-morrer,” she observed at length.
“I’m tired o’ this kind o’ thing,” pointing contemptuously at the
prostrate man.
“And Zeb,” continued Stargarde, as the girl showed signs of leaving her,
“do open a window in there; the air is stifling.”
Zeb chuckled. “So I does, every night. In an hour them,” with a jerk of
her finger over her shoulder, “will be sound off. Then I jumps up and
opens both winders, ’cause I likes fresh air. Goodnight to ye,” and with
a farewell glance at Stargarde she slammed the crazy door behind her and
went into the room.