Chapter TWO: I

They thought she had forgotten, because she never mentioned anything of that, never asked a question. But she hadn’t. No! She remembered, and at her worst and loneliest, she longed for the old times. Besides, she had three times heard Miss Amy relating the story when they believed her to be asleep in bed, and each time she had heard it told, the most immeasurable bitterness, the most devastating misery had rushed over her.

“Why ever was I _born_?” she used to cry to herself.

And hadn’t she also heard Miss Amy murmur, not imagining herself overheard, that: You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! What else can you expect from a girl like _that_?

It had hurt and angered her so; it had left her without gratitude, without even justice. She quite hated Miss Amy.

Lying in her bed that night all these feelings flamed in her with fiercest intensity, shame, bitterness, and, above all, a great and unassuaged grief for that incomparable friend whom she had lost, for the kind and sturdy Miss Julie, dead these five long years.

Miss Julie had meant to do a kindness. She intended--and if she had lived she would have succeeded in--benefiting Rosaleen.

“I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Miss Amy had begun her thrice-told tale, “The day that Julie brought her here....”

Well, and didn’t Rosaleen remember it, too? Who better?

II

It had begun ten years ago in the Life Class at the Girls’ Institute of Practical Art where Miss Julie, bravely disregarding her thirty-five years, had commenced to study. Upon the death of their very old father, the three Humberts, brother and two sisters, had left their farm in Maine and had come to New York to live. They were independent now, and in a hurry to leave their old homestead, to be free from that atmosphere, where they had passed a dreary childhood and a youth frightfully oppressed by the old man. Crude, strong people, they were possessed of a strange and pitiful craving for “culture.” Perhaps because they were rather too old and too repressed for pleasure.

Mr. Humbert had found a position in an office, fulfilling a lifelong dream of gentility, and his great hands, worn and roughened with the hard labour of the farm, seized eagerly upon the pen. He had made himself into the likeness of a scholar, without learning, without aptitude; he had covered himself with the shell of a scholar, and he deceived himself and his sisters and all the rest of their little world. Miss Amy had found it hardest to adapt herself. She was by nature the perfect village gossip, the meddlesome and vindictive spinster inflicted upon every community in all corners of this earth. She was cruel, jealous and stupid. Left to herself she had been unable to discover in all the city anything which really interested her. But a casual neighbour had taken her in hand, and under her direction she developed strangely. She became absorbed in Interior Decorating. She had not a vestige of taste; she never dreamt of applying at home any of the principles of which she read, but she dearly loved to see pictures and to read about fine old furniture, about rugs, about Antiques. She used to go to Auction Sales with great pleasure. Also, with mysterious facility, she made a number of friends. In the stores, the markets, in the street cars, she would drop into conversation with strangers, and she would never let them go. She managed so that within a year’s time she was able to go out _somewhere_ nearly every day.

Miss Julie, as we said, began at once to study art, with rapture. No one could imagine how she enjoyed that Life Class--a most refined and earnest class, thoroughly feminine, and inclined to fussiness. There were only twelve members and five of them had scholarships of which they were doggedly determined to take advantage. They came early, so as not to waste a minute, and they carried out every minute suggestion of the teacher. The models were all investigated, and a good reputation was of more avail than a fine body. Respectable women, generally a trifle heavy, “picturesque” old men with white beards, a young man or so who was invariably struggling to study something, and was not to be discouraged by posing all day and amusing himself all evening.

The class was on this particular morning assembled, all ready, sitting before their drawing boards, and a little indignant at the delay. They couldn’t bear to waste time.

“Ten minutes late!” said one of them. “It’s to be a child to-day, isn’t it, Miss Humbert?”

Miss Julie, as monitor, was informed and answered yes.

“I don’t care about doing children,” said the student, “I don’t think they’re interesting. That last little boy was perfectly square.”

Just then in came a fat, smiling woman in black, holding a little girl by the hand. Miss Julie pointed out the dressing screen, and they disappeared behind it. For an unreasonably long time their voices were heard, whispering.

It was Miss Julie who voiced the indignation of the serious class.

“Aren’t you ready to pose yet?” she called out. “We’ve wasted over twenty minutes.”

“Just a moment, please ma’am!” answered the woman’s pleasant voice, and presently she emerged, still leading the child by the hand. Reluctantly the little thing came out from behind the screen, a thin, white body; then suddenly she broke violently away from her mother and disappeared again.

“Saints deliver us!” said the woman with a sigh. “Did you ever see the like?”

And she went after the child, and evidently tried to drag it out, for it began to cry, in a low, hoarse little voice.

“No! No! I can’t! No, Mommer! I can’t!”

“Naughty little thing!” said one of the serious students, with a frown.

But Miss Julie had got up and gone behind the screen.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded, with severity.

“That child!” said the mother. “She’s that obstinate there is no reasoning with her at all. She’s made up her mind she will not stand out there for the young ladies to draw.”

“Why?” demanded Miss Julie.

“Some silly notion,” said the mother.

Miss Julie looked down at the little girl; she had pulled her dress round her shivering little body and was crouched against the wall, with eyes to break your heart, full of terror and anguish. Miss Julie was shocked.

“What’s the matter, pet?” she asked, gently. “Aren’t you well?”

The child couldn’t answer, only shook her head, while tears began to roll slowly down her cheeks. Miss Julie went down on her knees beside her, and tried to put an arm about her, but she cowered away.

“Tell me!” she entreated. “Why don’t you want to pose, my dear?”

With lips trembling so that she could scarcely speak, the child told her.

“I want ... to--get dressed.... I don’t ... want them to see me.”

“Hasn’t she posed before?” Miss Julie asked the mother.

“No, she has not. I’ve done the best I----”

“Do you mean to say you’re trying to force her--when she feels as she does--when she’s _ashamed_?”

The stout woman did not flinch at all before Miss Julie’s stern glance.

“It will do her no harm,” she said. “Only for these young ladies and while she’s so young.”

“It’s very wrong!” cried Miss Julie. “It’s--it shouldn’t be allowed.”

“She’s engaged already. For two hours at fifty cents an hour. She needs the money and she will have to do the work for it,” the mother remarked grimly. “Go on with you, Rosaleen!”

“Get dressed!” said Miss Julie to the child. “You can pose in a costume. I’ll find something.”

She explained as well as she could to her classmates, but received no general sympathy. Most of them thought the child was awfully silly.

“And she’s made us waste half our time,” said one of them. “I’m going to complain in the office.”

Miss Julie devised a costume which she said was a gipsy dress. She went behind the screen again and found the little girl in underwaist and petticoat, buttoning up her poor, scuffed little boots.

“We’ll take those off,” she said. “You won’t mind being bare-legged.”

She dressed the little thing while it stood there like a doll. A beautiful child, too thin and altogether too small for its years, but very charmingly and gracefully built; it had deep-set clear grey eyes and a wistful small face, broad at the brow and tapering to a pointed chin, like a kitten’s. And it had about it something which enslaved Miss Julie, some mystic and adorable quality which she could not name, and which no one else saw.

She unfastened the two scrawny little “pig tails” and let her ill-kept brown hair fall about the neck, pitifully thin, like a bird’s; then she tied a broad scarlet ribbon about her forehead and put on a short spangled jacket over the underwaist. She looked very unlike a gipsy, with her meek glance and her fair skin, but she was undeniably lovely, and the class set to work drawing her without further grumbling. She was quiet as a lamb, quick to obey any suggestion, evidently anxious to atone for her naughtiness. She looked pitifully tired, too.

Miss Julie was quite determined not to let this child vanish. She resolutely stopped the stout woman as she was leaving.

“You won’t make her pose any more, will you?” she said, entreating.

“I’m a poor woman,” said the mother, “and I have to do the best I can.”

“But it’s----”

“It’s fifty cents an hour, Miss, that’s what it is. And I need the money that bad.”

“I’ll find something better for her to do,” said Miss Julie, rashly. “If you’ll give me your name and address, I’ll find something _much_ better. Only--she mustn’t do this. It’s not right, feeling as she does.”

“Only Saturdays and after school,” said the mother. “I do the best I can for her, but ’tis not very much, where there are six and me a widow. She goes regular to the Sisters’ school, and she is doing fine there. She’s not twelve yet and----”

“She’s very small for that age,” said Miss Julie.

“She is small,” her mother agreed, “and childish-like for her age. But she’s smart. Last Christmas didn’t they give her a prize--a book with poetry in it--for elocution.”

Miss Julie had wished to regard this mother as a brute, a fiend; she had not enough experience or subtlety to comprehend lights and shades. Everyone must be good or bad, and no shilly-shallying. So she regarded this note of pride in the woman’s voice as hypocrisy.

She watched them as they went out, the rusty widow with her profoundly cynical red face, the fragile, shabby child clinging to her, stealing sidelong glances at the “young ladies,” who were getting ready to go home. She was determined to save that lovely and abused child.

She had hurried home to “consult” her brother. Not that she had any real regard for his opinion or any desire to know what it was; she knew, in fact, that he probably would advise her to use her own judgment. But she considered it decent to consult the man in the house; so she approached him with her idea.

“A lovely little thing,” she said. “Really beautiful--and so intelligent looking.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Humbert.

“And something really refined about her.... Really, Morton, I should like to adopt her.”

That roused him. A child in the place! Impossible! He tried to argue, but he couldn’t. He was never able to. He had some queer constitutional inability for argument; a fatal lassitude would overwhelm him before he had begun even to express his views. He always ran away, shut himself into his own room and forced himself to forget whatever it was that he had found unpleasant.

“I’d have to see the woman, of course,--investigate...” he said, hoping in this way to push the whole topic away into the distance.

But his sister agreed with alarming promptness.

“Of course!” she said.

Well, then, two days later, when he came home from his office, and as usual put his head in at the kitchen door to announce himself and to see what was going forward, he saw sitting in two chairs side by side a voluminous widow and a thin little girl, drinking cocoa with relish and with elegance, little fingers crooked in the air.

“This is Mrs. Monahan!” said Julie, briefly.

He saw that he was expected to go in and question this stout woman with an amused red face, and he would have preferred death.

“I’ll leave the matter in your hands, Julie,” he said, and hastened into his own room, positively trembling with fright.

It wasn’t long before Julie knocked at his door.

“We’ve come to a temporary arrangement,” she said. “I actually believe that woman’s glad to be rid of her child.”

Forgetting that the forlorn little child was still sitting in the kitchen, and able to hear every word.

III

Quite true that Mrs. Monahan had agreed to abandon her child almost completely. She loved Rosaleen, but she didn’t feel it necessary to have her with her; and anyway, hadn’t she plenty of others? To know that Rosaleen was living in comfort somewhere in God’s world was quite enough. _She_ hadn’t a trace of sentimentality. An excess, even very slight, of whiskey or even of strong boiled tea, could cause Mrs. Monahan to shed tears and to shake her head with delicious melancholy over life and its pains, and she professed to look upon death as a blessed release. But all this in no way affected her actions. She resigned her lovely child to this erratic and sentimental spinster because she saw very clearly the benefits which might be obtained. But she would not even pretend to be grateful.

Later in the evening she returned as she had promised, bringing with her a bundle of Rosaleen’s effects, and she found her child sitting on a sofa in the sitting room, holding before her face a big geography book which Miss Julie had said contained interesting pictures, while behind it the tears were trickling slowly down her cheeks. She rushed at her mother like a whirlwind, and kissed her and embraced her, clinging to her desperately. Mrs. Monahan also wept, but nevertheless went away.

Miss Julie’s heart ached for the deserted little creature.

“There! There!” she said. “You mustn’t cry, dear! Come! We’ll go into your own nice, comfy little room and put your things away, and then you’ll feel more at home.”

She led her into a decent enough little cell, clean and orderly, and opened the little bundle. It did not contain what, according to all proper stories of poor little girls, it should have contained, the traditional clothes, few in number, but neatly patched and darned, and spotlessly clean. Mrs. Monahan had taken it for granted that a new outfit would be bought for Rosaleen, and she hadn’t wasted her time mending things that would certainly be discarded. She had, on the contrary, kept all Rosaleen’s better things at home, for the other children, so that what Miss Julie unwrapped was poor enough.

“A bundle of rags!” she reflected, shocked.

She didn’t quite know what to do with the child that evening. She was very anxious to make her happy, to console and comfort her. She sat down at the piano and played all her small repertory--marches, polkas, mazurkas, and waltzes, all of the brilliant style. But Rosaleen was thoroughly accustomed to piano playing; every family she knew had one piano-playing daughter. Her mother had once had a piano, on “time payments”; it had had to go back whence it came after three months, but she had enjoyed experimenting on it while it lasted.

Then Miss Julie gave her picture books to look at, things insultingly beneath her intelligence. This good lady didn’t realise that Rosaleen had for a long time been treated as an adult; that she sat with her mother and her mother’s friends, listening with profound interest to long tales of illnesses, births, deaths, of bad husbands and good ones, of tragedies beyond the knowledge of this household. Babies scalded in wash tubs, women maltreated by their men, girls who disappeared, lingering illnesses in bleak poverty. So blank and desolate for her was this first evening at the Humberts, that she was glad enough to go to bed at nine o’clock, although her usual time was at least two hours later.

Miss Julie tucked her comfortably into her clean little bed, opened the window, put out the light and kissed her good-night.

“If you want anything, call me!” she said. “Are you quite comfortable, and all right, pet?”

The child answered, “Yes, ma’am!” But almost before the door had closed upon her benefactress, she was weeping bitterly.

Miss Julie let her sleep late the next morning, and when she finally awakened, she was greeted by a new face, beyond words welcome to her, a good wrinkled old Irish face. It was Mrs. Cronin, who came in to wash by the day.

“They’re all out!” she announced to the little girl. “You and me will be keeping house together all the day. How will that suit ye?”

Rosaleen said it would suit her grand; she dressed in great haste and hurried into the kitchen, where Mrs. Cronin gave her some nice bitter black tea which had been sitting on the stove this long while to get the strength out of it. She likewise pilfered a little bacon fat from Miss Amy’s carefully preserved jar, and fried an egg in it.

And in the process muttered of Miss Amy, in uncomplimentary vein.

“Her, with the long nose of her poking into every bit and bite a poor old woman would be eating.... Never a drop of milk does she leave for me, nor meat to taste on the tip of your tongue.... Well, now, then, how do you like all of this, and the fine new home, and all?”

“I do not like it,” said Rosaleen. “I wish....” She choked back a sob. “I wish I was home again.”

“Whist! Ye have no sinse at all!” cried Mrs. Cronin, secretly delighted. “Did ye not sleep in a fine bed last night?”

“The wind did be blowing on me!” she said. “For the window was left open.”

“’Tis one of their notions,” said Mrs. Cronin, scornfully. “They pay for coal to keep up a fire the night long and then lave the windows wide.”

Rosaleen then told her that she wasn’t used to sleeping in a room alone or in the dark.

“There’s a street light shines in our window the night through,” she said, “and there’s the lot of us, my mother and my sister and the baby and myself. ’Tis more sociable like.”

They talked with gusto for hours. They were equals, in spite of the fact that Mrs. Cronin was sixty and Rosaleen eleven. Mrs. Cronin told a deeply interesting story of her sister’s boy who had been sent to a Protectory, for no proper reason at all; a case of flagrant injustice which Rosaleen understood perfectly, one of her own brothers having been threatened. Rosaleen was not downcast now, or tongue tied; she, too, had stories to tell. Modest and gentle she was, as ever, but a citizen of the world, with experience, albeit vicarious.

IV

It had gone on for five years, a life of boredom, of loneliness, mitigated only by the unfailing kindness of Miss Julie. A flat, insipid existence. She found the Humberts’ conversation unfailingly dull, their routine almost intolerably stupid. She longed beyond measure for the comfort and freedom of her old home.

All this had astounded Miss Julie. She was never able really to see how impossible was her task, never realised that she could not mould this fragile and wistful child into a Humbert. Or reach her. Material pleasures made no appeal to that simple soul; she cared next to nothing for good food, good clothes, a soft bed. She was always docile, thoroughly a good child, ready, obedient, sweet-tempered. She didn’t give the least trouble, and never asked for anything. But she nevertheless disappointed Miss Julie. She didn’t seem to change as she should have changed. Their cultured atmosphere didn’t transform her. She sat at their table night after night, meek and clean, with downcast eyes, never speaking unless spoken to, always and forever the poor widow’s child in the stranger’s house.

Miss Julie did her best. She sent her to school; she gave her kind and tactful information about baths and toothbrushes; she saw that she was well fed and nicely dressed. She took her to the circus every spring, and now and then to an entertainment considered suitable. Also she taught her to play a few babyish pieces on the piano, and, what most pleased the little girl, she had begun to teach her to draw. When all those activities were cut short by her death.

Even now, after five years, Rosaleen couldn’t bear to look back upon that. She had been desperate with grief, a little mad thing. She had been brought in to look for the last time at her friend, she had seen her lying there, much the same as usual, a stout, sallow woman with blunt, good-humoured features. And for the first time that face did not smile at her, that voice did not speak to console and to reassure her.

Miss Amy had no comfort to give. She had never liked the child. She consented now to keep her, because “dear Julie would have wished it,” but she kept her as a servant, an unpaid servant, with “privileges.” She sat at the table with them, she was still nicely dressed, she was given a little--a very little--pocket money. And she was permitted to go every Sunday afternoon to see her mother. Miss Amy had no inclination for continuing Miss Julie’s battle. She did not wish to improve Rosaleen. Miss Julie had tried with all her tact, all her ability, to divorce the child from her family, but Miss Amy encouraged intercourse. It helped to keep Rosaleen in her place.