Chapter XX: Owlet’s Great Peril

“W’at be yer sniffing at, young un?” demanded the horrible creature, as she drew the child along, hurrying as fast as she could down a narrow, crowded street leading out of East Broadway into, perhaps, the most poverty stricken, squalid, Heaven-forsaken quarter of the city. “W’at be yer sniffing at?”

“You,” quietly answered truthful Owlet, without a moment’s hesitation, yet without meaning offense.

“Oh! Me! I’m not nice enough for you, ain’t I, my fine little Feather?” inquired the crone.

Owlet looked at her.

She was a tall, large-boned, strong old woman, with harsh features, small, deep-set, pale gray eyes, dark, leathery skin, and straggling, iron-gray hair. She was clothed in a petticoat and sack, dark and thick of material, darker and thicker with accumulations of dirt, and half in rags. Over her head and shoulders she wore a very ragged old plaid shawl, with the pattern obliterated by dirt. On her shoulders she bore a huge bundle of rags—a ragpicker by trade, evidently, very poor probably, though some of her sort have been known to save and hoard large sums of money; very wicked, possibly, yet, in any case, to be more pitied than blamed, certainly. Who are we, who have received sane mental and moral natures from our forefathers, and have been trained amid favorable circumstances, to judge our less fortunate brothers and sisters of this world? We know so little. We can but have faith in the Lord and charity for them, and with all humility in ourselves.

“Not nice enough for you, eh?” repeated the woman, as they turned another corner and dived down another narrow, wretched street.

“Why don’t you take a bath and put on clean clothes?” inquired Owlet.

“Why don’t I take a bath and put on clean clothes? Oh, the innocent arsks me why I don’t take a bath and put on clean clothes! Oh, he, he, he!” chuckled the ragpicker.

“Lady bathes and changes her clothes every blessed day. And so do I. Why don’t you?” persisted Owlet, in the interests of health and cleanliness and—of her own nose.

“She and you is rich belike, and I be poor,” replied the crone.

“But water is cheap enough. Everybody can get as much water as they want to wash with. Why don’t you?”

“Well, then, Fine Feathers, I ain’t the time to waste in washing. I has to work for my living, I has.”

“Oh!” said the child, accepting the excuse and trying to understand it.

But she turned her head away from the ragpicker to try to catch a whiff of fresh air from the end of the street, that ran to the river.

“A-sniffing ag’in,” said the hag.

“I can’t help it, ma’am,” Owlet said, in apology.

“Oh, she can’t help sniffing! Fine Feathers can’t help sniffing! He, he, he! If she can’t ’elp sniffing out here in the hopen air, ’ow will she stand it in the ’ouse? Oh, deary me!” muttered the crone to nobody in particular, as she turned the last corner in their progress through this hell and entered a dark and narrow alley more poverty stricken, squalid and Heaven-forsaken than any thoroughfare they had yet passed.

The alley ran through the middle of an old city square, and was flanked on each side by dilapidated brick buildings that had once been the stables, coach houses, etc., of the rich dwellers in the mansions fronting on the streets of the square. But as these mansions had long been turned into stores, saloons and workshops, so the outhouses had been converted into tenements of the most objectionable description. But if there were no street lamps in this alley, neither was there a “dive” or a “bucket shop,” which might account for the quietness as well as the darkness of the place.

The sun had so long set that even the twilight had faded away. No light reached the alley except from the distant lamps of the two streets upon which it opened, and from an occasional lamp in a few of the buildings.

So at this hour there was not much to be seen, but very much too much to be smelt, for a fetid gutter ran, or rather stagnated, through the middle of the alley, and seemed to be the receptacle of all the slops from all the wretched tenements on either side of the way.

These buildings were all in the last stages of dilapidation in which it was possible for human beings to find shelter with safety. Walls were moldering away; doors and window shutters broken off their hinges or hanging by one hinge, or by a leather substitute; sashes without glass, and the place of it supplied with foul and pestilential rags.

It was a thickly crowded yet not a noisy place. In fact, it was so quiet and almost deserted that it was safe to suppose the wretched inhabitants who were not in the tumbling tenements were off to those favorite resorts, the “dives” and “bucket shops” of the neighboring streets.

Some very few miserable children, and fewer still of more miserable women, might be dimly seen, here and there, squatting on the falling front steps of the buildings, or loitering about them.

“I don’t like this place,” said Owlet, as soon as they had turned into the alley; “I don’t like this place one bit. I wouldn’t live here for a dollar. I didn’t know we had to come through this place to get to Lady’s house.”

“Oh, yes, dearie little Fine Feathers. This is the way from where you came to where Lady lives—the only way, too. You can’t go no other way not at all,” said the crone, in a conciliating tone.

“Oh, then I am so sorry. Oh, do let’s get out of here as fast as we can—Oh, phew! what makes people live in such a nasty place as this when there is ever so much big, beautiful country in the world?” said Owlet, holding her nose between thumb and finger.

“Oh, the blooming innocent! she arsks why people live in such a nasty place as this? Lord, I wonder if she thinks they choose?” inquired the ragpicker of the universe at large. Then looking in contemptuous pity on the ignorance of her little companion, she answered to the point: “’Cause they can’t ’elp it. They’s too blooming poor to be let live anywhere else.”

“Oh, I am so sorry for them! But, please hurry! I can walk faster if I try. This place does make me so sick!—sick at my stomach! I—I’m afraid I shall throw up presently,” said Owlet, beginning to gag.

“Hold on, Feathers! Oh, hold on! We’ll soon get there now! Here, smell this ’bacco,” said the ragpicker, drawing from her bosom a quid of “Old Pig” and offering it to the child.

“Oh, no!—Oh, I can’t!—It—I can’t!—Oh, please hurry!” panted the child, in great bodily distress.

“Well, now, if as ’ow yer can’t ’bide this one minnit, ’ow do yer think the poor souls as ’ave to live here all the blooming days of their lives—day in and day out, night in and night out—can a-bear it?” demanded, and not without reason, the animated mass of rags and filth by Owlet’s side.

“Oh, the poor people! Oh, I am so awful sorry for them! I will ask Lady as soon as ever I get home to take them out of this horrid place, and give them lovely houses and sweet gardens in the beautiful country. Lady is awful rich, you know! And good! Oh, so good! You don’t know—oh, you don’t know how good she is!” said Owlet, with a philanthropist’s enthusiasm, forgetting her disgust in her ardor.

“And she’ll do it!” exclaimed the crone, with a harsh laugh of scornful incredulity—“Oh, she’ll do it! You may depend she’ll do it! I never seed her face to face, but I know as she’ll do every bit of it.”

“Yes, indeed, she will!” replied ignorant and confident Owlet; but she faltered as she spoke, and began to totter as she walked, for the stench of that pest place was penetrating, acrid, insistent. Owlet was again overpowered.

“Oh, please—go fast—hurry—hurry—out of this—or I shall—drop down—dead!” she gasped.

“Yes, my pretty little Fine Feathers; in one minute. You see, I live here, dearie—I——”

“You!” exclaimed the child, momentarily revived by her astonishment, and interrupting the hag’s speech; but the next instant wondering at herself for being the least surprised, for it seemed so natural that this creature should live in just this place.

“Yes,” said the ragpicker, “I bide here, dearie, and I just want to step inter my place one minnit to get my bunnit to put on my head, to dress myself up in it, you know, so as to be decent to go afore genteel folks like your lady is.”

She stopped before the very worst of all the rookeries in that alley, if that could be said of a house in a place where all houses were as bad as bad could be, and every one worse than the other—so to speak.

“Come along o’ me, Fine Feathers,” said the hag, leading the unfortunate child up a short flight of rickety, shaking steps, and through a front door that stood wide open, into a hall that was even a little more filthy than the alley from which they had entered.

The only light within it gleamed through partly open doors of tenement rooms on either side, with interiors indescribably squalid, and from which came odors insupportably nauseous. The tenement, in fact, seemed to be a colony of ragpickers.

The dim, gleaming light from the doors ajar showed a narrow, moldering, broken staircase that led to the floor above.

“Come along o’ me now, dearie,” said the crone, in a coaxing tone, as she took a faster hold on the child’s hand and began to draw her up the stairs.

“Oh!—if you please—do take me—out of this—I—I—am dy—dy——”

And here Owlet fainted away, succumbing to the weakness of an imperfect convalescence, to great weariness, and, finally, to the deadly fetor of the pestilential house.

“There! by jingo!” exclaimed the crone, as she picked up the child, still very thin and light from her recent illness, and easily carried her up the rickety stairs, that creaked and bent under her footsteps, to the upper hall, which was flanked each side by tenement rooms, through whose partly open doors gleamed flickering lights and streamed foul odors.

“This here is better nor I could ’oped. Saves a desprit deal o’ trouble,” said the ragpicker, as she bore the unconscious child to the rear of the hall, and paused at a door on the lefthand side, which she pushed open with her foot.

It gave into a very small room, no bigger than a good-sized closet. It had but one window, a small, rear window, partly lighted by a distant lamp that stood in line with it on a cross street. The only furniture consisted of a huge pile of inconceivably foul rags that lay on the floor in one corner, reached halfway up to the low ceiling, and spread more than halfway over the floor.

The woman laid the child down on the edge of the pile of rags, and found a match and an end of candle, which she lighted and stuck into the neck of an empty beer bottle.

“I must make haste and git rid on her afore she comes to, and then she won’t give no trouble to nobody. Lor’, ’ow lucky she swooned hoff in this here way! Lor’, to think as ’ow I have been ’elped this day in this onexpected manner! First, I comes upon this here fine bird, with fine feathers, lost into the streets, and with waluable jewelry onto her neck, and a waluable bundle into her hand—and where is that bundle, by the same token? ’Opes it never dropped on the stairs. No! Lor’, there it is, hanging onto Fine Feathers’ arm still. Never dropped hoff when she fainted, and I picked her up! Oh! w’at luck this is! And to find the fortin in the street! And to bring her here! And jest as I were a-thinking how on airth I could get the clothes offen her back ’thout her raising the whole alley, she jest faints away like a angel, so quiet and comfortable! It do seem like a providence, it do, indeed it do! I wonder what’s in that bundle? But I ain’t got time to look now. Lor’, no. I must get Fine Feathers outen this afore she comes to, or there’ll be trouble. Lor’, yes,” concluded the crone, as she hastily drew Owlet’s bundle off her arm and hid it far under the pile of rags.

She need not have been in such haste. The swooning child was not likely to recover in that deadly room. She was much more likely to die as people die in the fumes of escaping gas or burning charcoal in an airtight place.

The ragpicker sat down flat upon the floor, and drew the unconscious child gently across her lap, and proceeded to divest her of her costly trinkets and rich clothing, all of which she made into a bundle and thrust it far under the pile of rags.

Then she looked at the beautiful, nude statue of a child that lay upon the floor, and considered:

“’Twon’t do to take her out that-a-way. But w’at shall I put onto her? Not a child’s garment in all that pile. Oh! I know,” she suddenly mumbled. “I roll her in my shawl. I can get another one to-morrow outen the fortin I have come inter. Them there jew’ls and frock and things’ll fetch a pile, I know.”

Saying this, she took off her own ragged shawl, laid it over her knees, drew the nude and senseless form of the child upon it, and rolled her up in it, securing it here and there by scraps of strings drawn from the pile, and run through the holes of the wrap.

“That’ll do,” she said, as she took little Owlet in her arms, laid her head over her shoulder and left the room, on this occasion taking the precaution to lock the door and put the key in her bosom.

“I never do lock my door, except when I’m gwine to bed; but I guess I’ll do it now, fear of accidents. Though nobody’ll never guess nothing ’bout the fortin as I’ve got locked up in there. Lor’, no! They’ll only think, if any on ’em come and try my door, as I’ve turned in airlier, and some on ’em liars’ll say drunker nor usual. They’ll never think of the fortin. Lor’, no! If they did, it wouldn’t be there long. Lor’, no! So I reckon as I had better hurry and get back’s soon as I can, anyhow,” she concluded, as she went down the stairs, dark or only dimly lighted by the gleam of candles, or kerosene lamps, from the partly open doors of the tenement rooms.

She passed downstairs without being questioned, or even observed, until she reached the front door, where a woman sat on the steps, smoking a short, clay pipe.

“Umphe—humphe! There’s Kit, as us’al, filling up the door,” muttered the ragpicker, as she came upon the smoker.

The latter took the pipe from between her lips, looked up, and said:

“Evenin’! What’s that you’ve got there, Muck?” calling the crone by the nickname that had been given her in recognition of her pre-eminent attainments in squalor.

At any other time the Malebolge of her poor, obscene and profane soul would have been turned upon the questioner and deluged her with abuse. But it was now her cue to be conciliating.

“Oh, jest one of my Soph’s young uns as has been spending of the hevening and taking tea along of me. And I’m a-carrying of her home to her mammy,” she answered, quite civilly.

“I ain’t seen Soph since she come from the island. Where is she now?” inquired the younger woman.

“Got a room in Rose Street.”

“Bloomin’ Rose Street that one is. He-he! Where is Soph’s man?”

“W’ere he ought to be. W’ere I ’ope he’ll stay.”

“Sent up?”

“Yes.”

“Drinking?”

“Yes, and beating of his wife. Wish I’d caught him at it. Better not let me catch him when he comes out, either. There’ll be a foot race or a fun’al. More like the fun’al. And me sent furder up nor him, I reckon—for manslaughter it mought be, and serve him right. But, here! Let me pass. It’s arfter nine, and I want to get along with Soph’s kid, ’fear she’ll be oneasy ’bout her. ’Cause, yer see, she don’ know w’ere she is. I picked her up in the streets, and fetched her home to take tea ’long of me,” the ragpicker explained.

“Oh! to take tea long of you?” Kit questioned, with a dry laugh.

“Yes, why not?” demanded the crone.

“Oh, nothing. Only I was wondering what stood for tea, and what on earth it was made in and drunk out of. That’s all.”

The ragpicker would have liked to strangle the young woman then and there, but she dared not even quarrel with her, so she answered, with a forced laugh:

“Oh, yer will have your jokes, Kit. Well, to be sure the tea were only a bottle of ginger beer, drunk outen the bottle, and a bun eat outen the hand. I forgive yer yer little joke, Kit, my lass. But I haven’t got time to stop now. I must take the child home.”

Kit laughed, replaced the pipe in her mouth, and moved aside.

The ragpicker passed out to the alley with Owlet in her arms, the child’s head over the woman’s shoulder.

The crone would have been made anxious by the child’s long swoon, but that she felt the gentle motion of the little one’s lungs against her own breast.

She walked down to the end of the alley, and turned the corner into a crowded street leading down to the East River.

The fresh night breeze from the sea began to revive the fainting child, who moved and sighed.

“There, there, dearie, it’s all right. Don’t be afeared, my pretty little Lady Fine Feathers. It’s only me toting of you home to your dear Lady. Yes, dearie,” whispered the thief.

The exhausted child, scarcely cognizant of herself—not at all of her surroundings—heaved a deep sigh of weariness, and subsided into quietness.

The ragpicker walked on, watching her opportunity to drop and leave the child when she could feel sure of doing so without being observed.

She met and passed, jostled and was jostled by many foot passengers on the sidewalks, and she saw and was seen by several policemen, any one of whom would have stopped and “run her in” had he had the slightest suspicion of the crime she was committing. But the sight of a ragged woman with a ragged child in her arms was a sight too common to draw remark, much less to excite suspicion.

The ragpicker, however, soon left the more crowded and busier street, and turned into a less frequented and quieter one.

She knew all the mazes in the labyrinth of that quarter, and she turned and wound among them like the crawling serpent that might have been her type.

At length she found what she had been seeking from the time she had set out on her walk with the child in her arms—a narrow, quiet street that seemed at this hour to be deserted of all pedestrian life. Lights gleamed from the windows of the tall tenements on either side; but no one seemed to be abroad.

Here she looked up and down the street, and then sat down on a cellar door, against the front wall of one of the tallest houses, shifted the position of the child from her shoulder to her knees, and took another survey of her surroundings.

One solitary pedestrian came down the same sidewalk where she sat with the child on the cellar door, and passed by within two feet of her without perceiving her in the deep shadows.

When he was gone the thoroughfare was vacant. The stage was waiting, so to speak.

The old wretch seized the opportunity. She raised the sleeping child and stood up, looked about, and prepared to lay her under the steps of the front stoop beside the cellar door, when, to her confusion, Owlet moved, awoke, lifted her head and inquired:

“Are we almost there?”

The woman knew now that she must soothe and deceive the child with some plausible pretext for leaving her alone for a minute—a minute in which she should make her retreat. Else, if she did not do this, the child would be frightened, would cry, and—though she saw no policeman—there might be one not too far off. So she answered:

“Yes, dearie. Pretty little Lucky Fine Feathers, we is almost there. In fact, almost at the door. But will you jest bide quiet here a minnit while I go over there and ask that boy which is the best way to get ’round to the house?”

“Is it a black boy?” Owlet inquired, unconsciously asking a leading question.

“Yes, dearie, werry black,” answered the ragpicker, intelligently following the lead.

“Then that is Puck—poor, dear, old Puck! But he’s not a boy really, though they call him so, because he’s so little, I s’pose, or because they forgot to call him anything else. But he is a man grown, a married man, too, and Ducky Darling’s uncle,” said Owlet, brightly.

“Oh! is he? Then I’ll go and speak to him directly,” said the ragpicker.

“Oh, do! And tell him you have found me. And tell him I want to see them all awful bad, and I’m coming home directly. And, oh! won’t he be glad? And won’t Lady and Ducky Darling and all of them be glad? Just as glad as I shall be. For, oh! I know they have all been grieving about me as much as I have been about them. Now we shall be so glad! And you shall be glad, too. And the poor people in that horrid place—I must have gone dead again. How did you get me out of it?” suddenly inquired Owlet, trying to piece together the broken threads of her memory.

“Brung you out of it, dearie, while you was in a dead faint,” said the woman, impatient to be off.

“That—must—have—been so,” said the child, very solemnly—then she added: “Oh, the poor people what have to live there all the time! I don’t believe Lady knows about it, or she wouldn’t let them. But I’ll tell her. And she will take them out of it, and you, too, and everybody shall be glad. Lady is like an angel in heaven in her lovely home and garden. She don’t know anything about such——”

“Hells!” added the crone. “And now I’ll go and fetch the black boy to tote you home.”

“Oh, yes; go,” said Owlet, eagerly.

The crone turned away, muttering to herself:

“She’ll do. ’Tain’t a cold night for the last of April. And she’s well wrapped up in my ole shawl, too. Lor’, yes. And the perlice’ll find her presently, and then she’ll be took to the station and took care on. And, Lor’, it’s little account she can give of herself to they. It’s little account she could give to me, as was like a gran’mother to her, toting her in my arms as if she’d been one of Soph’s own kids. And, after all, the Ventures of Cruelty will care on her till her own people turn up. Lor’, yes. She’ll be all right. No fear for her; them rich allers falls onto their feet, somehows,” concluded the ragpicker.

And with this “flattering unction” laid to her paralyzed but not quite deadened conscience, she turned the next corner and wound in and out through the labyrinth of streets and alleys that lay between the spot on which she had left the desolate child and the den which she called her home.

She reached the room at length, opened the door, lighted her stump of tallow candle, and searched for her stolen booty in the pile of rags.

She found them safe. She drew them out and gloated over them.

Finally she selected the coral necklace for immediate investment and replaced all the other treasures under the malodorous pile of rags.

Then she went forth again, and on this occasion to the nearest pawnbroker’s shop.

Here she pledged the necklace for two dollars, with which she bought, at the next groggery, a half gallon of uncommonly poisonous whisky, even as whisky goes, and then she went back to her den with joyful anticipations to lock herself in and have what she called “a glorious drunk” all to herself.

Meanwhile Owlet, hidden under the front steps of that tall house, waited fearlessly and patiently, without the slightest idea that she had been left to her fate.

But now the change in her clothing, which in her intense interest in the prospect of getting home to “Lady’s house” she had scarcely noticed before, began to trouble her. It irritated her skin and offended her nose. Still the foul envelope did not suggest foul play to the unsuspicious child.

“It must have rained while I was gone dead,” she said to herself, “and that poor, ragged woman took off my wet clothes and hung them up to dry, and wrapped me in her poor old shawl. It was all she had, too, poor thing. And it was very good of her. Still, I do wish she hadn’t. I would rather be soaked to the skin than be so very, very nasty.”

Just then a policeman passed on his beat. Owlet saw him on the lighted sidewalk, but she did not know him for a policeman, and he did not see her, all in the deep shadow of the stoop.

Still she waited patiently, almost stupidly. It was strange that she felt no fear, for she did not; strange, also, that she was growing indifferent, almost unconscious of her noisome change of clothes, for she was. She was becoming dazed and stupefied by her present state and by all that she had gone through since her flight, and even before she was driven to that flight which was so desperate a venture for a child only six years old.

Sometimes she dozed and started, waked up suddenly, and tried to gather her scattered thoughts, and wondered why it took so long a time for her new friend to fetch Puck.

“Oh, I reckon they have gone on to the house to tell Lady I am found, and to fetch the carriage to take me home, for, after all, the house must be a good way off from here for me to walk, or for Puck to carry me. And Lady will come herself, I know.”

With this thought in her mind, the weary child sank to sleep, and dreamed of being in “Lady’s” garden of delight, among the glorious flowers, or down the gooseberry walk, or beside the coop where the bantam “chickies” ran in and out, with Ducky Darling cooing to them. So passed the hours of that April night.