CHASED AS A BIRD WITHOUT CAUSE
Stargarde had had a busy afternoon. The table in the middle of the room
was littered with account books, in the midst of which she had cleared a
small space so that she might take her tea and go on with her work.
Bread and cheese, celery and tea, composed her frugal meal, and she was
eating and drinking cheerily and thanking God in her heart that she had
so many more blessings than she deserved.
Yet there were some things that caused a shadow to pass over her lovely
face. Zeb was one of them. All the afternoon she had been thinking of
her. Out in the playground in front of her windows, the ruddy-faced
children whose parents lived in the Pavilion, had been playing merrily,
and she had wished a dozen times that Zeb was among them.
The very air of Halifax is military, and even the children are warlike
in their games. The children had built a huge snow fort and manned it
with a body of resolute defenders, who gallantly resisted the besieging
force till their supply of ammunition, consisting of snowballs, had
given out. A spirited sortie had not mended matters. They were
overpowered, their officer in command captured, their flag trampled in
the snow, and that of their conquerors run up in its place.
And Zeb might be sharing the children’s fun and frolic if she would; but
she would not. She had plainly given Stargarde to understand that she
did not wish to have anything more to do with her, and was going on in
her own way with sullen resignation.
Stargarde sighed mournfully as she drank her tea. “And it was all on
account of Brian,” she murmured. “Zeb was getting on well with me till
he came here that evening. Strange that she should be so frantically
jealous of him; and she promised to come too. But I will not complain.
God will give me back my wandering lamb. I must beg Brian not to come
here for a time.”
As if in punishment of her inhospitable thought, she at that moment
heard his heavy step on the veranda, and the utterance of her name in
his peremptory accents:
“Stargarde, Stargarde, let me in.”
She sprang up, opened the door, and watched Dr. Camperdown in surprise,
as he walked in holding something in his arms closely wrapped in his
sleigh robe.
This something he put down on the broad, low couch against the wall, and
throwing back the robe, disclosed to view a much battered and bleeding
Zeb. The child’s dress was nearly torn from her body. Her black hair,
discolored and partly drawn over her face, was matted with blood that
had run down from cuts in her head.
“Take scissors and cut it away,” said Dr. Camperdown shortly. “I’ll be
back,” and he hurried from the room. In a very short time he was with
her again, having with quick, impatient fingers, thrown out
Polypharmacy’s weight on the snow, obtained his surgeon’s bag from the
sleigh, and seized the whip from its socket. This latter he smiled
grimly at, as he brought it in and set it in a corner of the room. All
the upper part of it was gone, broken off short, and the heavy handle
was stained with blood.
“Doctor, doctor,” moaned the child, who, when Stargarde touched her,
recovered from her state of insensibility. And “Doctor, doctor,” she
continued to moan all the time they were washing and dressing her wounds
and fitting in place the strips of court-plaster. The cuts and bruises
were all about her head. The little, thin body, a mere skeleton of a
thing, was unhurt, and at last Camperdown ejaculated, “Let her alone
now; she’ll drop off again.”
Stargarde, while there was necessity for action, forbore to ask
questions, and when her attendance of the child was over, still forbore,
for she saw that Camperdown was in a state of furious, repressed temper.
“May I go to the kitchen?” he asked abruptly; and at her murmured,
“Certainly,” he withdrew, taking his whip with him, and making a great
noise and splashing while cleaning it. When he came back into the little
parlor, she was glad to see that his features were less convulsed. She
poured him out a cup of tea, which he drank absently and in silence, and
then sat with knit brows looking at the unconscious child on the sofa.
“How long since you’ve seen her?” he said at last.
“Two days,” replied Stargarde. “She has been avoiding me. Poor child,
she has not been in a good temper. The truant officer found her out, and
being under fourteen, she was obliged to go to school. Some of the girls
told me that she was very angry about it on account of her shabby
clothes. They also said that they feared she wasn’t getting enough to
eat. Think of that, Brian, in this good Christian city of Halifax, where
thousands of citizens sit down daily to comfortable breakfast tables.”
He made some sort of an inarticulate reply, and she continued: “I went
by there the other morning and the little things were singing their
opening song, ‘For daily bread and wholesome food, we thank thee, Lord.’
Think of the mockery of it! The city refuses bread to their children and
puts a song into their mouths.”
“Have you been making up your books?” asked Camperdown, with an abrupt
change of subject, and a glance at the papers on the table.
“Yes; I have just finished collecting this quarter’s rents, and I wanted
to get things in order before Christmas. I wish we had a dozen of these
model tenement houses, Brian. Do you know I am besieged with
applications to enter? And yet some people say that if you build houses
for the poor they won’t go into them.”
“If any man said to me to-night, ‘You’re stripped of what you possess;
you’re a pauper,’ I would commit suicide,” said Dr. Camperdown.
“Why would you do that?” asked the woman gently.
“Because they’re badly used; that is, the paupers.”
“I should make a distinction between paupers and poor people,” returned
Stargarde. “A pauper is a person dependent upon charity. A poor person,
or one who is not as well off with regard to this world’s goods as his
neighbors, should be one of the happiest and most independent of
mortals. When I am coming home these winter evenings I love to look in
our Pavilion windows. What could be more cheerful than the neat little
kitchen, the small supper table, the blazing fire with the wife and
children waiting around it for the father’s return? Those people have no
carking care, no worry as to keeping up appearances, no elbowing each
other in the mad rush for social distinction. Of course they have
worries; they would not be human if they had not; but their very
simplicity of life tends to lessen those worries.”
“But they’re neglected, they’re neglected,” said Camperdown irritably.
“Look at the children of the rich. Suppose the parent leaves them; a
trained servant takes charge. The poor woman goes out; she can’t take
her children. Who’s to look after them?”
“A neighbor, an elder child.”
“A neighbor,” repeated Camperdown, in what would have been accents of
scorn, had he not remembered he was talking to the woman he so much
loved and respected; “a neighbor; and suppose the neighbor a worse
rascal than yourself? Leave the respectable poor and take the vicious
and criminal classes. Wild beasts look after their own; but suppose the
beast is out and the young alone. Who steps in as tender nurse?”
“The city should be a tender nurse to the children of the poor,”
responded Stargarde sadly. “There should be public playgrounds and
playrooms with trusty women in attendance. What a load of anxiety would
be taken from the minds of poor parents who are obliged to go out and
work by the day, leaving their children often to doubtful companionship.
I have known,” in a low voice, “a humble woman who scrubbed floors and
who was not permitted to take her little girl with her. All day long she
was racked by anxiety as to whether that child was in good company. She
could not lock her up, she could not trust her with any one, for she was
in an evil neighborhood.”
“What became of the child?” asked Camperdown, a red and angry light in
his eye.
“She is one of the worst girls in the streets of Montreal.”
“Then a curse upon the city for its neglect,” he said, with a fierce
burst of wrath.
Stargarde looked at him curiously, and with visible satisfaction.
“Brian,” she said gently, “do not waste time in cursing an evil, but set
to work to remedy it. And may I ask what extraordinary thing has
occurred to make you reason from such a change of base?”
“There—there!” he ejaculated, pointing to the sofa. “Never saw it as I
did just now.” Then going on with rapid utterance, “Was driving home
along Brunswick Street—dusky, but still could see a bit. Happened to
look up at old rookery you took me to. One of the top windows open. Just
as I looked, child there,” with a wave of his hand toward the sofa,
“rose up, stared at me like a rat out of a cage—face set, wild
expression, and called, ‘Doctor!’ Then she fell back. I rushed into the
house and upstairs, nearly breaking my neck on loose boards; no one
about the halls, though I could hear them lively enough in rooms. In the
front-attic den—a child there, in hand to hand tussle with a lout of a
shoemaker of this street, Smith by name. You know him?”
“Yes,” replied Stargarde, who was listening in pained attention.
“Brute drunk, beating and tearing at the child; and she, poor brat—the
children of the poor know everything—defending herself as nobly as a
beauteous damsel assailed in her castle.”
“And you, Brian,” said Stargarde, hot tears of shame and sorrow in her
eyes, “what did you do?”
“Knocked him down, of course. Child threw herself at me in a frenzy of
relief. He’d choked her so she couldn’t scream. Don’t take much strength
to stifle a child,” with an angry dilation of nostrils, and an accent of
superb disdain. “I put her aside and addressed shoemaker. May the Lord
forgive me, but I was in a rage. Told him I’d give him his choice; he
could go to the police court and I’d ruin him, or he could take a
beating, and I’d hush the matter up. He took the beating—there’s nothing
like the lash for attempted crimes against women and children—and he lay
there and waited till I went down for the whip. His back’s pretty sore;
you’d better go see him; but don’t let the thing get out, for the
child’s sake,” and his voice softened as he glanced toward the sofa.
“The Lord sent you there, Brian,” said Stargarde, through her tears.
“I got my lesson too,” said the man, twitching uneasily as if his back
too were sore. "Stargarde, the worst is to come. The poor devil turned
on me as he left—the whip had thrashed the liquor out of him—and snarled
at me that I might take my share of the blame. “’Tis you gentlemen that
send us to hell,’ he said. ‘You drink your fine brandies and whiskies in
your hotels and clubs, and license the devils that sell us poor men made
liquors that are half poison and make us run mad at anything we see.’”
“Brian!” exclaimed the woman. “You never touch intoxicants yourself. You
know the evil of them. You do not work actively in any temperance cause,
but surely you would never sign a license for any man to keep a saloon!”
He stood before her like a schoolboy culprit. “I own property in this
ward,” he said shamefacedly. “Old Denver, that keeps a saloon near
Smith’s shop, came to me to sign his license. The man has to get his
living. I didn’t think—and put my name down. That’s what stings now,” he
went on contritely. “Perhaps Smith got his liquor there.”
Stargarde drew herself up to her full height. “Do I understand you to
say that you, a reasonable, intelligent, human being, knowing what would
be the effect of alcoholic poison on your own system, and refusing to
partake of it, would yet sign a paper allowing this poison to be sold to
your fellow-citizens, every one of whom is as precious in the sight of
God as yourself?”
His silence gave the answer to her question, and she went on with
clasped hands and eyes raised to the ceiling in a protest of despair:
“There is no name for this awful traffic—no words to express the
frightful misery of it. With all that has been said and written, no
words have yet been found to fitly characterize it. It is unspeakable,
indescribable, and,” with a swift dropping from the abstract to the
real, “to think that you, Brian, would touch it even with the tip of
your little finger!” She dropped into a seat by the table, laid her head
on her arms, and burst into tears.
She was disappointed in him, and, stung by a thousand furies, he made no
further attempt to justify himself, but rushed from her presence.