CHAPTER VIII
A GREAT DEAL HAPPENS
There was a mystery about the pale lady, and a mystery delighted Carolyn May just as it delights something like nine-tenths of the human race. The mystery of the fourth dimension, or perpetual motion, or the problems of alchemy thrill the scientific mind no more than do their neighbours' secrets interest the ordinary person.
The little girl wanted very much to know why the pale lady's husband was so poor. Even if she had been poor, Laird, as the pale lady called him, must have come of wealthy people; or how had she met him at the party given by her friends?
Now, this was rather an involved thought for a little girl to work out in her mind; but Carolyn May's was not an ordinary child's mind. She was no prodigy. However, she had spent most of her time with grown folk. She had few playmates of her own age. And her father made Carolyn May much his companion.
"Now, think it out for yourself, Snuggy," was often his answer when the little girl came to him with a question. If she sometimes came to a conclusion more astonishing than illuminating, Mr. Cameron merely chuckled and told her mother that the exercise of Carolyn's imagination was good for her.
"I really do not think it needs exercising, Lewis," Hannah Cameron once said seriously. "She was playing 'having visitors' the other day when it rained and she was kept in, and I allowed her to 'receive' in the parlour. But when I went in myself after a while there really wasn't a chair I could sit on. She had filled them all with her imaginary friends and objected strenuously to my sitting in their laps!"
"Ha! ha!" laughed her husband. "Why didn't you try holding one of her callers in your lap?"
"I never thought of that," answered Mrs. Cameron. "It is plain to be seen from which side of the family Carolyn May gets her gift of imagination."
The little girl exercised this trait much on the affairs of the pale lady during the next few weeks. She saw the bald poverty of the young couple and yet realized that they were people to whom one could not offer charity of any description.
"Of course, Mamma," she said, "we can give papa's old clothes to Mrs. Dorgan and even some of my outgrown frocks to Mrs. O'Harrity, in the basement, for little Elsie. But somehow—I guess—it wouldn't be nice to offer Mrs. Laird one of your dresses that you could spare."
"I appreciate the fact that your friend cannot be very well helped in that way," mused Mrs. Cameron. "Her refusing the twenty-dollar bill for a new baby go-cart showed that."
There were a multitude of interests in Carolyn May's busy life just now. The end of the school term was in close view. And preparations for the long outing away from the city greatly delighted the child.
"I wish you and the baby were going with us," she said to the pale lady one day, just before the school graduating exercises. It was probably the last time Carolyn May and Prince would be able to call on the pale lady until their return to the city in the autumn.
"I sincerely wish we were, Carolyn May," said the young woman, with a tired sigh.
She had just laid her baby on the bed and spread a fly net over him. She was more pale than ever today and her head seemed so heavy with its red-gold hair piled so high, that it drooped like a broken-stemmed flower.
"You know," said the little girl, "our house is lots cooler than this; yet we are going away and you—you, I s'pose, can't go?"
"Oh, no!" murmured her friend. "Laird cannot compass it this summer, I fear. There are too many bills. We must catch up—"
She stopped. Carolyn looked up suddenly, for the pale lady did not speak again. She saw her sinking slowly sideways from her chair to the floor.
"Oh!" screamed the little girl, and then muffled the cry behind her palm for fear of waking the baby.
She sprang from her own chair to lean above her friend who had sunk to the floor in a heap, her hair tumbling down and straying all about her head and shoulders.
"Oh! Oh! Don't!" gasped the little girl.
She ventured to touch the pale lady's arm. Then she tried to shake her by it, and the lax body of the young woman slipped down further from its leaning posture against the chair. Oh! It seemed, dreadful to Carolyn May.
She had never seen anybody faint before. The pale lady might be dead!
And whom should she tell? Whom ask for help? The little girl had not the least idea what to do in this emergency. It seemed just as though her friend were dead and she was left alone with her.
There was nobody near to whom Carolyn could speak. She was actually afraid of the rough people in the house. She knew that the pale lady had absolutely nothing to do with her neighbours. Whether this was a wise way to do or not, Mrs. Laird never even replied when spoken to by the people in the house.
Carolyn began quietly to sob herself. That was her nervousness. But she did not lose her self-control.
She knew that some help must be brought to the pale lady. A doctor ought to come. Carolyn knew no doctor save the Camerons' own family physician and he lived far over on the West Side.
The poor woman lay so white and helpless that the child's heart was torn with pity for her. Somebody must come—and "somebody" meant Mamma Cameron! There was nobody else in the world, she thought, who would know so well what to do for the pale lady in this event.
She started for the door, and of course Prince followed her. He had been snuffing questioningly at the fallen young woman.
"No, Prince," sobbed little Carolyn May. "You can't come. You must stay here while I run for Mamma. Watch her, Prince! Wait—that's a good dog—till I come back with Mamma Cameron."
She unlocked the door and withdrew the key from the lock. She knew the pale lady always kept herself locked in and she could not leave her now, even with Prince on guard, with the door unfastened.
Slipping out into the half-darkened, ill-smelling hall, the child quickly inserted the key in the lock again and turned it. Then she pocketed the key and ran lightly to the head of the stairway. Without Prince she really was afraid of the children who flocked about the house; but the venture must be made alone for the pale lady's sake.
Fortunately the stairway to the street door chanced to be clear. She stole down it and had almost reached the lower floor when a door there opened. She had a glimpse of a tawdry interior, and a slovenly woman holding the door open for a caller to pass out.
Carolyn May stopped, shivering. The man coming out of the apartment was very well dressed—a sharp-featured, dark man with eyebrows that met above his aquiline nose, and the eyes beneath them so keen and threatening in their glance that when they were turned on Carolyn May she could not for the moment move from where she stood.
"There's a young one that goes up to see 'em frequent, sir," shrilled the woman. "He an' she goes in an' out without a word to us—like we was the dirt under their feet. But that kid knows 'em."
The man looked at Carolyn May with more curiosity. "She doesn't seem to belong around here," he said.
"No more than them. She's all that ever's come to see 'em, since they lived here, so fur as I know."
The man turned his back upon the child, and Carolyn May hurried down the few remaining steps and out of the door of the tenement house. The shrieking, dirty children were playing on other steps. She got away without further delay.
She was still sobbing and tears were trickling down Carolyn May's face as she ran through the streets toward home. She pictured to herself all the time the pale lady, senseless and helpless upon the floor of the hot kitchen, with her beautiful hair flowing about her. The very worst that could happen to her friend the little girl believed to have occurred.
So when she arrived at home at last she was scarcely able to explain the trouble. As it chanced, it was Papa Cameron's afternoon at home—he had one partial holiday each week—and it was he who met Carolyn and caught her up in his arms when she sank, sobbing and moaning, at the entrance to their apartment.
"My little Snuggy!" he cried, "what is the matter?"
"Where is Prince?" asked Carolyn's mother. "What has become of the dog, do you suppose, Lewis?"
"Prince—Prince—is—is—watching her!" sobbed the child.
"Watching who?" demanded the man anxiously.
Carolyn was able to tell them in broken sentences what had happened—how she had left the pale lady and her baby with Prince on guard. She showed them the key to the apartment.
"And the poor woman locked in there all alone!" exclaimed Hannah Cameron, hurrying to put on her street things. "I must go over there at once. Probably she should have a doctor, too. It may be no ordinary faint. Of course her husband will not be at home at this hour."
"What does he do?" asked Mr. Cameron, curiously. "Do you know?"
His wife glanced at him rather oddly. "I can guess," she said. "And I am pretty sure my guess is right." But that did not explain the matter in the least, as far as Mr. Cameron could see.
"Well, you and Carolyn go on," he said, "and I'll bring a doctor with me. If she is as frail and delicate a woman as Snuggy intimates she shouldn't be living in such a place, anyway. I wonder what sort of chap her husband is and what he is thinking of to keep her and her baby in that place."
"Oh, Papa!" said Carolyn, with another sob, "they can't help it. Mr. Laird don't earn enough to send them away for the summer, and they have lots of bills to pay. My pale lady told me so."
"'Mr. Laird'!" repeated Mrs. Cameron, in a peculiar tone. "I shouldn't wonder. Come, Carolyn May. Can you show me the nearest way to your friend's house, do you think?"
The little girl had recovered from her fright now. She was so anxious about the pale lady that she would have run all the way back as fast as she had run home; only Mamma Cameron held her by the hand and restrained her.
Although the sun was going down it was a stifling day. What air was stirring seemed to blow from a red hot furnace lying somewhere to the west of the panting city. In the shade the unfortunate occupants of the close tenements sought relief on steps and even on the sidewalks.
Crying babies, quarrelling children, chattering women of several races, raised a clatter to deafen one. Hawkers peddled the remains of vegetables and fruit that had once been fresh, but were now over-ripe, and fast decaying. Vendors of the tempting if not too cleanly made
clanged their bells at every corner. Penny slices of red watermelon wilting under fly nets adorned every fruit stand. The cheap drinks of soda-water and other so-called "temperance beverages" flaunted their colourings and flavours at tiny stands; and the lemonade that never knew a lemon or any other citrus fruit was everywhere present.
Left to themselves the ignorant would breed pestilence as they did in the Middle Ages. But the better informed have learned to defend their own health by forcing some rules of sanitation on the slums. The most refreshing and grateful attempt to counteract heat and disease were the "White Wings," flushing down the streets with fire hose, while the half-naked children danced, screaming, in the way of the flood.
Carolyn May and her mother reached the house where the pale lady lived. The slovenly woman whom the child had seen bidding the sharp-faced man good-bye at her door, now sat upon the steps. She stared impudently at Mrs. Cameron as she and the child mounted past her and went up to the second floor.
As the key rattled in the lock of the pale lady's door Prince barked. Then he whined a welcome to his little mistress and to Mrs. Cameron.
"What a place!" gasped Carolyn's mother. "It is worse than I thought. I never should have let you come here, Carolyn May."
But the baby had begun to whimper from the bed and Carolyn ran to soothe him. Her mother was immediately stricken by the appearance of the young woman, lying unconscious and forlorn on the kitchen floor. She noted the cleanliness of the room and the neatness of the woman's dress; but the sun streaming into the kitchen windows, and the flies and the smells from out of doors, horrified Hannah Cameron.
She brought water and knelt beside the young woman to lave her face and hands. But the pale lady was not to be so easily roused. Her heart merely fluttered. Her lips were colourless. Her eyes remained closed.
Mrs. Cameron was anxious for her husband to come with the doctor. And she desired Mr. Cameron's presence for another reason. She looked about the apartment for something that might identify this young couple—that might prove her suspicions true; suspicions that she had felt from the very first. She found the evidence she looked for.
Carolyn May was playing with the baby and keeping him quiet when her father and a neighbouring doctor came. She brought the baby out into the kitchen and sat down with him in her lap while Prince crouched beside her. He knew that something had gone altogether wrong with his little mistress' friend.
They raised the pale lady and placed her on the bed. Mrs. Cameron helped the physician loosen and remove her clothing.
But first she showed Mr. Cameron the marriage certificate she had found in a Bible on a side table.
"My goodness! will wonders never cease?" murmured Carolyn's father. "And I never suspected it!"
"It is what I believed must be the fact ever since you told me how Mr. Bassett acted regarding his first assignment on the Beacon. Now go out and telephone to the office, Lewis, and have him come up here at once."
She went back to the bedside where the physician was some time in bringing the patient to her senses.
"A very nervous and frail person, Mrs. Cameron," the medical man said. "No more fit to live in a place like this than a butterfly is fit to live in a cage."
"And you know, Prince," murmured Carolyn May who overheard this professional statement, "butterflies aren't even like birds. Of course, butterflies would just pine away, like Aunty Rose Kennedy's babies, if they were caged up."