“Where does that get in with the Meanest Man?” inquired Cyrus the Gaunt.
“He doesn't hate anything except giving up money,” added the Little Red Doctor.
“He hates cruelty,” retorted the Bonnie Lassie. “And he's brave. Two points to his credit. I believe you could do anything with the Meanest Man if you could get him mad enough.”
“Well, my dearest,” said Cyrus the Gaunt with that condescending surrender which is one of his few faults as a husband, “since you have so good an opinion of Mr. Morse, suppose you tackle him for a contribution.”
“I will,” said the Bonnie Lassie. “I'll go now.”
She went. Presently she returned. It was not the return of a victress.
“How much?” asked the Little Red Doctor.
The Bonnie Lassie threw out empty and eloquent hands.
“And what did he say?” inquired Cyrus the Gaunt.
“He indicated that he'd see me in Hades first.”
“Then I'll go over and knock his head off,” declared her husband, reddening. “I've always wanted to do it anyway.”
“Nothing of the sort—goose! I didn't say he said it. I said he indicated it. It was his manner. Verbally he was polite enough. Said he didn't believe in charity.” Cyrus the Gaunt snorted.
“Gave his reasons too. He said he doesn't believe in charity because it makes the recipient think too ill of himself, which is bad, and the giver think too well of himself, which is worse.”
“Something in that,” grudged the Little Red Doctor.
“Isn't there! I tried to explain the usefulness of the Legal Aid Society, but he said that people who got into court were fools and people who hired lawyers to lie for them were knaves. Then”—the Bonnie Lassie dimpled—“he caught me sniffing at his musty old house and asked me what was the matter, and I asked him if it had ever been dusted and aired, and he said that he was afraid he'd have to get a housekeeper and if I'd get him one—the right kind of a one—an old, respectable, honest woman who'd do all the work while he was away so that he'd never have to see her, he'd contribute to our fund”—the Bonnie Lassie paused for effect—“ten dollars.”
When the assembled council had finished expressing its various emotions the speaker continued:—“I've got a month to do it in. So I made him make out the check and hold it, unsigned.”
“What's the idea, Lassie?” asked MacLachan the Tailor.
“The leak-in-the-dike principle,” she explained profoundly. “The ten dollars is just the first trickle. If we ever get him started, Heaven help him before we let him stop. I'm going to get that ten dollars if I have to take the position myself.” But she was not driven to that length. It is a recognized fact in Our Square that when the Bonnie Lassie determines to get anything done, Providence, with rank favoritism, invariably steps in and does it for her. This powerful and unfailing ally it was that brought Molly Dunstan to Our Square, white-faced, hot-eyed, and with a gnawing fire of despair at her heart, plunging blindly against the onset of a furious March wind, until the lights of Schoenkind's drug store guided her to harbor. In the absence of Schoenkind, who was dining late at the Elite Restaurant, young Irvy Levinson was keeping shop, and as Young Irvy is of a cheerful, carefree, and undiscriminating disposition he made no bones of selling the wind-beaten customer a bottle of a certain potent drug which has various properties and virtues back of its skull-and-crossbones label, one of the latter being that it is prompt though painful. With her purchase, Molly plunged back into the storm, turned toward the dim park space, and bumped violently into the Little Red Doctor. Gently releasing her, he caught a glimpse of her face. Its aspect was not reassuring. Young women who come blundering out of drug stores with that expression and make for the nearest quiet spot not infrequently cause needless trouble to the busy authorities. Opening Schoenkind's door, the Little Red Doctor thrust into the aperture his earnest face and this no less earnest query: “What did that last customer buy?”
“Carbolic,” replied Young Irvy light-heartedly. “For a dog. Ast if it hurt much.”
The door slammed with much the effect of an oath, and the questioner sprinted for the park. Being wise in the way of human misery, he knew that mysterious instinct of suicides which guides them, no matter what their chosen method of self-destruction, toward water. Therefore he took the shortest route for Our Fountain.
Young Irvy's customer sat huddled on a bench at the water's edge. The bottle was in her hand, uncorked. She had just made a trial of the liquid on her hand, and was crying softly because it burned. As the Little Red Doctor's grip closed on her wrist, she gasped and sought to raise the drug to her lips.
“Drop it!” said her captor in the voice of authority.
She obeyed. But she misinterpreted the authority. “Is it to jail ye'll be taking me?” she asked despairingly.
The soft appeal of the voice, with its faint touch of the brogue, shook the Little Red Doctor. One glance at the piteously lined young face conquered him. He formulated his program on the spot.
“Jail?” he echoed in affected surprise. “What for?”
She glanced mutely at the shattered bottle.
“Oh, that's foolish stuff to use for warts,” he observed carelessly, lifting the hand, which was as soft and smooth and free from blemish as a moth's wing. “Now, you come with me to a friend of mine, and she'll fix that burnt finger.”
Many men there are in whom dogs confide instinctively; fewer who win offhand the confidence of children, and a rare few whom women trust at sight. Of this few is the Little Red Doctor. His captive followed him without protest to the nestling little house with the quaint old door and the broad, friendly vestibule which had been her husband's wedding gift to the Bonnie Lassie. There, without fuss or query, Molly Dunstan was accepted as a guest, and presently, too worn out even to wonder, she was deep in healing sleep, in the spare room over the studio.
In the morning she presented herself to her hostess's unobtrusive but keen observation: a wistful slip of a woman of perhaps twenty-five, with hollow cheeks, deep-brown, frightened eyes, a softly drooping mouth, and a satiny skin from which the color had ebbed; a woman whose dainty prettiness had been overlaid but not impaired by privation and some stress of existence only to be guessed at. For all her simple and worn dress (all black) and the echo of brogue in her speech, she bore herself with a certain native dignity and confidence.
“It's good ye've been to me, and I'll not know how to thank you, now that I'll be going,” she said, and the silken-soft voice with its touch of accent won the Bonnie Lassie's soft and wise heart from the first.
“But you're not to go yet,” protested the latter. “You must stay until you're well. And then I want to sculp you, if you'll let me. I'm an artist, and I think you would make a wonderful model.”
“It's kind ye are,” returned the other. “But how can I be beholden?”
“You won't be. It's you that will be doing the favor. As soon as you're well enough—”
“I'm well enough now. There's nothing the matter with me.” But her voice was without life or hope.
So, in many slow sittings, the Bonnie Lassie sculped Molly Dunstan; and from those sittings grew the heart-moving bronze, “The Broken Wing,” a figure of a quaintly, pitifully birdlike woman in the foreground of a group in a hospital clinic, with the verdict of science written in her face, looking out upon life in the dread realization of helplessness. As the work progressed the heart of Molly Dunstan opened little by little, and her story came out.
While a young girl in a good Irish school she had met a traveling American, Henry Dunstan, and, half for love and half in the elfin Irish spirit of adventurousness, had run away with him. He was a good husband to her, and they were happy in a little country place which he had bought and which she turned to skillful account, raising ducks and chickens for the market to eke out his income—“until the drink took him.” It took him the full length of its well-beaten path, from debt to ruin; from ruin to broken will and health, and presently to death. When his debts were cleared up the place was gone, and the little widow had a scant two thousand dollars of his life insurance in the bank. Being sturdy, able, and courageous, she had come to New York, had found some fine sewing to do, and had maintained herself, always with the idea of getting back into the country and to her poultry raising, which she loved. Here the simple story came to a full stop with the words: “So I bought a bit of a place, and they took it away from me.”
“Who took it away from you?” asked the Bonnie Lassie.
“Mr. Wiggett,” replied Molly, and fell into such a fit of shuddering that the Bonnie Lassie forebore to question her further concerning the transaction.
Little by little, however, there came out bits of information which the Bonnie Lassie deftly wove together, with the eventual result that Cyrus the Gaunt looked up an advertisement in a certain newspaper famous for its traps and pitfalls, and paid a visit to the office, on St. Mark's Place, of “D. Wiggett & Co., City and Suburban Real Estate.” He returned much depressed, declaring that the laws against homicide ought to provide for exceptions in the case of such persons as D. Wiggett.
“There he sat and grinned, a great, plump, pink, powerful, smirking gorilla; and said that the transaction with Mrs. Dunstan was perfectly legal—perfectly—and there wasn't anything further to be said.”
“Did you say it?” inquired the Bonnie Lassie, who knew her Cyrus.
“I did. And he threatened to have me arrested for defamatory language. But he's right—legally. He's got your little widow's two thousand dollars, every cent of it, and she's got a piece of stamped paper.”
“Why isn't it a case for our Legal Aid?”
“I've just been to Merrivale. There isn't a thing to be done.” Following the “Legal Aid” line, Cyrus's mind took a sudden but logical jump. “I never expected to meet a meaner cuss than the Meanest Man in Our Square,” he observed. “But I have.”
“The very thing!” cried the Bonnie Lassie. “How clever of you, Cyrus! I mean, how clever of me! Molly wants a place. She's all over that foolish suicide notion. She shall be Mr. Miles Morse's housekeeper.”
“But he wanted an old woman,” objected Cyrus.
“How is he to tell if he never sees her? I'll manage that,” retorted his wife confidently. “The only thing is, will she take a place that is almost like domestic service?”
As to this Molly made not the slightest difficulty. She had regained her courage and her Irish fighting spirit, and she was now ready to face life and make it give her an honest return for honest work again; ready for anything, indeed, except an attempt to get her money back which might involve her seeing Mr. D. Wiggett. At the mere mention of his name she fell into a cold and shuddering silence.
With brief preliminaries, and on the Bonnie Lassie's guarantee of “old Mrs. Dunstan's” reliability, that semi-mythical person was installed as Miles Morse's housekeeper and general factotum, having taken the informal triple oath of her employment: industry, senility, and invisibility. Six dollars a week was the wage which the Goddess from the Machine had wrung from the Meanest Man's violent protests, with a warning that it would have to be increased later on. The instructions given to the new employee were that she was to keep out of her employer's sight; or if he should arrive at an untimely hour she was to huddle into a shawl or handkerchief and conceal her age behind a toothache.
For six weeks all went well and simply. Miles Morse was obliged to confess, grudgingly, that his house was more livable and comfortable. Dust disappeared. The furniture took to arranging itself with less stiffness and more amiability. When he gave a whist party of an evening, the cigars were in place, the ash trays ready, the rooms aired and fresh, and the ice box stocked, all by invisible hands. Orders were issued and requisitions made through the Bonnie Lassie. Meeting her neighbor in Our Square one day, the Bonnie Lassie hinted at the ten-dollar check for the Legal Aid Society. “When I'm sure I'm satisfied,” said the Meanest Man, bending frowning brows from above his owlish glasses upon her. “D' you know what that old hag has been up to?”
“What old hag?” inquired the Bonnie Lassie unguardedly.
“The Dunstan woman.”
“Oh, you've seen her, then?”
“Not to speak of. She was curled up like a worm, and had her face swathed up like a harem, and talked like the croak of a frog. And she's been putting flowers on my breakfast table,” he concluded with the accents of one detailing an intolerable outrage.
“What of it?” inquired the surprised agent.
“What of it! Flowers cost money, don't they?”
“Have you received any bill for flowers yet?”
“I've received bills for brooms, mops, pails, towels, cups, plates, nails, tacks, picture hangers, baking tins, soap, and God knows what all,” replied Mr. Morse in a breathless and ferocious voice.
“Yes? And which of those do you find in the floral catalogues?” queried the Bonnie Lassie interestedly. “If you want to know,” she added as the Meanest Man struggled for competent utterance, “those flowers came from your own back yard. Look at it some time. You'll be pleased.”
The Meanest Man was pleased when he looked, so pleased that one fresh and glorious June day when he should by the known regimen of his life have been at the Y. M. C. A. (supposedly reading) he came home early to putter about among the pansies. At the moment of his arrival Molly Dunstan, her work finished and her shawl laid aside, was standing in her neat, close-fitting black dress, inside the area railing, brooding with deep eyes over the glad flush of summer which glorified Our Square, and thinking, if the unromantic truth must be told, of the little place up near White Plains where her ducks and chickens would have been so happy and productive if D. Wiggett (she shivered) hadn't kept the place and her money too. The owner of the house stood regarding her with surprise and disfavor. “What are you doing here?” he barked.
With a startled jump, Molly came out of her brown study and returned the natural but undiplomatic answer: “I'm the housekeeper.”
“You! What has become of Mrs. Dun-stan?”
“I'm Mrs. Dunstan.” Realization of her self-betrayal came to her. The soft tears welled up into her soft eyes. “Oh, dear; oh, dear!” she mourned.
“Don't make that noise,” he ordered testily; “what's the matter with the woman!”
“Ye'll not—not be wanting me here any more.”
“Oh, I don't say that,” returned the cautious Mr. Morse. “You're not wholly unsatisfactory. But what does that mummery of an old woman mean?”
In vain Molly tried to penetrate the blue glasses which masked his expression. Anyway, his voice had mollified. “I'll tell ye it all, if ye'll listen,” she said wistfully.
Miles Morse surprised himself by promptly saying: “I'll listen.”
No one could have wished a more intent listener. Molly told it all, including the deal whereby D. Wiggett had secured her money. At the conclusion her employer suggested that Molly bring him the deed, or other documents in the case, on the morrow. She did so. He read the principal document with a queer tightening of the lips which Molly couldn't understand at all, but which the Bonnie Lassie, had she been present, would have interpreted readily enough since she had seen it on another occasion, when the spare and arid man had set out to trail the horse-flaying teamster to justice.
“This isn't a deed at all,” said he.
“That's what Mr. Wiggett was telling me.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He told me if I'd pay him the two thousand dollars and would go out there he'd see I got enough embroidery work so that I could easily make the twenty-dollar-a-month payments till I owned it all.”
“He didn't tell you that if you failed in a payment you'd lose it all?”
“Not till after.”
“It's here in the agreement to sell. That's all this paper is”;—he flecked the document with a contemptuous finger—“an agreement to sell; not a deed. You've bought nothing but empty print. Did you never read this?”
She shook her head. “I trusted Mr. Wiggett. He seemed so kind and helpful at first.”
“Until the fly was in his web. You signed that paper without knowing what you were undertaking,” he accused. “Did you know that you were promising to pay taxes, interest, and insurance on the buildings?”
“No,” said Molly Dunstan meekly.
“And to keep the buildings in good repair and painted? What buildings were they?”
“A house and a barn. They leaked.”
“Naturally. Also”—Miles Morse referred to the document in his hand—“'to plant a good, live California privet hedge and to entertain the same.' What's your notion of a California privet hedge and entertaining the same? Could you do that?”
Into Molly Dunstan's Irish-brown eyes there crept a little Irish devil of a twinkle. “Could I not!” said she. “Can ye not see me, of a moonlight night, taking me foot in me hand, and going out to entertain me dull and lonely hedge with a turn of Kilkenny jigging!” Her sole tapped the ground as she spoke.
“Don't do it here,” he interposed hastily. “How you can joke about it is beyond me, with your two thousand dollars in the pocket of D. Wiggett. And what makes you look sick at the name of him?” he concluded sharply.
“That's a terrible man,” she answered with a catch of the breath. “When I went to him to ask for a bit more time he swore at me. He threatened me with jail. He said he'd ruin my reputation. He said if I sent a lawyer there he'd hammer him to pulp. He could do it, for he's a terrible, big, strong, angry man. I came away sick to live in the same world with him. And that's why I got the carbolic,” she finished in a low, shamed tone.
“Carbolic! You were going to kill yourself?”
“Didn't Mrs. Staten tell ye?”
“She told me nothing—but lies.”
Miles Morse spoke harshly because he was experiencing within himself a stir of strange and wrathful and protective emotion. Abruptly he changed the subject. “Would you,” he said hesitantly, “for a raise of wa—ahem —-salary, come a little earlier and get me my breakfast?”
“I'll not wait on table,” she returned with a flash of color.
“It was not my idea,” he said quite humbly. “But if you would have a coffee machine and a toaster and sit opposite at the table, and—and—it would save me money as against the restaurant,” he added lamely.
“I'll consult my manager,” returned his housekeeper with a twinkle.
The gist of her consultation with the Bonnie Lassie bore upon the point as to whether Our Square, which was already adopting her since she had rented a little room there, would regard the new basis as proper.
“That old thing!” said the arbitress of destinies scornfully. “He's a hundred years old, and he'll be two hundred, I'm afraid,” she added ruefully, “before I get that check out of him.”
Molly looked dubious. “I'm not sure he's so old,” she said. “And I'm sure he's not so mean as people think him. But I do need the money.”
Behold, then, Mrs. Molly Dunstan, housekeeper, seated opposite Miles Morse, the Meanest Man in Our Square, with a coffee apparatus, a toaster, and a little centerpiece bright with flowers, both of them breakfasting in a dim and painful silence. But food is a great solvent of embarrassment, and breakfast coffee has powers beyond the spirit of grape, corn, or rye, to break down the barriers between human and human. So that, by the end of a week, Molly was chattering like a cheery bird with just enough instigation from her employer to keep her going. One subject was tacitly tabooed as a kill-joy; to wit, the devil as embodied by Mr. D. Wiggett and all his works.
Not that Miles Morse had forgotten. Quite the contrary. But he was a calculating, careful, and meticulous person, prone to plan out every step before taking it. On a Monday morning some six weeks after Molly's installation as a breakfast fixture he spoke abruptly: “I've been up there.”
“Where?” she asked.
“To the place you thought you'd bought. It's a trap.”
“I'm out of it, at least with my life.”
“You are not the only one that's been caught. He's fleeced four others that I know of on that plant—all perfectly legal. I have a notion,” said Miles Morse with an effect of choosing his words, “that D. Wiggett & Co. was incorporated in hell, and the silent partner is his Satanic Majesty.”
“Why did ye go up there?”
“Curiosity.”
“Not kindness—just a little bit?”
“I wanted to see the work of a man meaner than the Meanest Man in Our Square,” he said with a sour grin.
Molly Dunstan flushed.
“I'd not be letting them call me that!” she declared. “And I'll not believe it true of ye.” This was, indeed, an advance upon the dim realm of personal relationship, but Molly's loyal Irish blood was up. “What ails ye at the world, at all!” she demanded.
“I'll tell you since you ask,” he replied defiantly. “I'm getting even with it for treating me like a dog.”
“So that's it.” There was a pause. “Would ye tell me about it!” she asked shyly.
Much to his astonishment, Miles Morse discovered that he wanted to tell her about it. Quite to his chagrin, he found that it didn't seem a very convincing indictment, when he tried to formulate it. However, he did his best.
“A man that I thought my friend cheated me out of the first ten thousand dollars that I made.”
“Whish! Ye made more, didn't ye?” she replied calmly. “I wouldn't be hating the world for that.”
“Then there was a woman,” he said with more difficulty. “I thought—she made me believe she cared for me. I was young. She got me into a fake stock proposition with some confederates, and they fleeced me.”
“Whoof!” Molly blew an imaginary thistledown from her dainty fingers. “She was a light thing.'T was your bank account she hurt, not your heart.”
Suddenly Miles Morse realized that this was so. It wasn't wholly pleasant, however, to have his cherished grudges thus lightly dismissed.
“There's nothing else worth speaking of,” he said, a bit sullenly, “except a bit of boy's silliness that you'd laugh at.”
“Tell it to me.”
“It was when I was seven years old and we lived in the country. My father was a hard sort of man; he saw no sense in play or such nonsense, and when Fourth of July came he'd give me no fireworks nor let me draw any of my little money out of the bank. All the other boys had firecrackers but me. So I got a spool and filled it with sand and put a bit of string in it and I lighted the end. When it didn't go off I ran away and hid and felt pretty bad. I've always laid that up against things. Foolish, isn't it!”
The little woman opposite lifted eyes which had grown suddenly bright and soft with a disturbing hint of tears. “Ye poor lamb!” she said.
“Tut-tut!” gruffly retorted the Meanest Man in Our Square, who had never before been called a poor lamb. He spoke without conviction.
“But that shouldn't make ye hate the world,” argued Molly earnestly. “It should only make ye hate what's mean and unfair in the world.”
“Well, there's D. Wiggett,” replied the other hopefully. “I think I could learn to hate him. In fact, I think I'll make a trial of it by calling on him to-day.”
“Oh, don't do that,” she implored tremulously. “He'll do ye harm. He's a terrible man, and twice the size of ye!”
“This will be a strictly peaceable errand,” he averred, meaning what he said.
By no means reassured, Molly Dunstan made her way, at the hour when she thought that her employer would call upon D. Wiggett & Co., to a spot in St. Mark's Square which gave her a good view of the real-estate office. After an hour's wait, devoted to the most dismal forebodings, she saw her employer stride around the corner and enter the door. Had she actually summoned the nerve to interpose, as she had vaguely designed to do, there was no time. Her brief and alarmed glimpse of Miles Morse had oppressed her with a quality hitherto unknown in him. He was clad in his accustomed neat and complete black, even to the black string tie. His big blue glasses were set as solemnly level as usual upon his ample nose. His spare figure was held stiffly erect, in its characteristic attitude. But there was something about the way he walked which suggested an arrow going to keep an important engagement with a bull's-eye.
Three minutes later Mr. Miles Morse emerged.
He emerged by force and arms; a great deal of the former and a large number of the latter. To the terrified watcher there seemed to be at least half a dozen tangled persons engaged in the eviction of Mr. Morse, of whom D. Wiggett was not one. Having propelled the unwelcome guest out upon the stoop, the persons withdrew in pell-mell haste, and the sound of a door being violently barred after them eloquently testified to their distaste for any more of Mr. Morse's society. That gentleman descended the steps as one who walks upon the clouds, albeit with a considerable limp.
Molly ran to meet him. Five yards away she stopped dead, lifting dismayed hands to heaven. Mr. Morse was a strange and moving sight. A small stream of blood was trickling from the corner of his mouth, which was expanded in an astounding and joyous smile. His sober black string necktie was festooned over his left ear. Half of his large, solemn blue spectacles was jammed down his neck inside a dislocated collar; the other half presented a scandalous and sightless appearance, having lost its lens. His coat was split in three places and torn in one. His hat simply was not; it could be identified as a hat solely from the circumstance that it was jammed inextricably down upon his head. From his right cheek bone there had already sprouted a “hickey” fit to hang a bucket on. But these were minor injuries compared to the condition of Mr. Morse's hands. Bruised and cut, scarified, scalped, and swelling, the “grand pair of hands” which Terry the Cop so admired, testified unmistakably to having come into violent and repeated contact with some heavy and hard object. Horror-stricken, Molly turned her eyes from them to the real-estate office of D. Wiggett & Co. A front window flew up. The countenance of D. Wiggett appeared therein, and Molly at once identified it as the heavy and hard object to which her employer's manual plight was due. The countenance opened, somewhat slantwise, and sent forth a gasping and melancholy bellow: “Police!”
Without a word, Molly seized one of the battered hands and ran. Perforce, her employer ran with her. A taxi was prowling up Second Avenue. Mollie hailed it.
On the trip Mr. Miles Morse exhibited silent but alarming symptoms. Arrived at home, he flatly refused to enter. “Air and space,” he said, were his special and immediate needs. He made his way to the most secluded bench in the park, followed by his dismayed housekeeper, sat down, and began to chuckle. The chuckle grew into a laugh, the laugh into a series of chokes, the chokes into a protracted convulsion of mirth. When at length it had passed, leaving him spent and gasping, Molly Dunstan spoke seriously to him.
“Are ye finished?”
“I am.”
“Have ye been drinking?”
“I have not.”
“What did ye do to him?”
“I did everything,” said Mr. Miles Morse with a long reminiscent sigh of utter satisfaction, “but bite him.”
“Ye told me,” accused Molly with heaving bosom, “that it would be a strictly peaceable errand.”
“So it would,” replied the other calmly, “if he hadn't said something about you.” Molly's brown eyes widened and brightened with amazement. Her lips parted. “About me!” she said. Then she committed what the lawyers call a non sequitur. “Mother of all the Saints!” cried Molly. “How old are ye?”
“Thirty-seven years and four months,” replied the Meanest Man in Our Square gravely.
“And me thinking—” He never found out what she was thinking, for she broke off abruptly, and said: “Clap a bit of raw beef to that cheek,” and vanished from his sight.
No Molly appeared for breakfast in the morning. In her stead arrived a court officer with a warrant in which the term “feloniously” played a conspicuous and dispiriting part. At court Miles Morse, prisoner, found a delegation from Our Square awaiting him, including Molly, Cyrus the Gaunt, the Bonnie Lassie, Terry the Cop, and Inky Mike, the tipster disguised in a clean collar and taking copious notes with an absorbed and ferocious expression, with a view to daunting wrongdoers by the prospective fierce white light of the Press. This was part of the Bonnie Lassie's strategy. So also was the presence of Merrivale, the young lawyer of the Legal Aid branch, for the Bonnie Lassie had correctly guessed that the accused would disdain to spend money on a lawyer. As he awaited his turn at the bar of judgment (before Wolf Tone Hanrahan, the Human Judge, his friends remarked with satisfaction) Terry the Cop caught sight of his damaged knuckles. “I always said he had a grand pair of hands,” murmured Terry to the Bonnie Lassie.
“And here they are in court, where you said they were at their best,” she commented.
An expression of bewilderment gave place to a grin on Terry's handsome face. “The court,” I said, “the hand-ball court at the Y. M. C. A. He packs a wallop in either hand'ud kill a bull.”
Then the plaintiff came in, and there was no further need of explanations.
D. Wiggett was a horrid sight. He would have been a horrider sight if he hadn't been almost totally obscured by bandages. The gist of his testimony was comprised in the frequently repeated word “murder.” The accused put in no defense. In the Human Judge's eye were doubt and indecision. Obviously there was something behind this case. As he hesitated, the Legal Aid lawyer came forward with the light-pink document of D. Wiggett & Co., and handed it to the judge with a few words. D. Wiggett's lawyer entered vehement objections. Stilling his protests with a waving hand, Magistrate Hanrahan read the “Agreement to Sell.” Then he called for Mrs. Molly Dunstan. More objections. Overruled. At the conclusion of Molly's testimony he turned to the protesting lawyer. “Did ye drah up this dockyment?”
“I did, your honor.”
“It's as full of holes as the witch's cullender. Y'otta be disbarred fer it!”
The lawyer hastily receded. The remains of D. Wiggett were led forward to listen to a few brief but pointed dicta by the court, while Inky Mike (under promptings) edged up and took copious notes in a book such as no reporter ever carried except upon the stage. At the end of the ordeal, D. Wiggett, in broken and terrified accents, disclosed that his motives were of spotless purity, that his document was a harmless joke, and that Mrs. Dunstan could have the place and a deed thereto if she'd just make the payments.
“I'll guarantee that,” put in Cyrus the Gaunt.
“And I'll see that she gets work to keep going on,” added the Bonnie Lassie.
Whereupon both D. Wiggett, the party of the first part (in the document) and Mrs. M. Dunstan, the party of the second part, dissolved in tears, though for very different reasons. The court then proceeded to the sentence of the defendant. Judgment was delivered in two mediums; full-voiced for the proper judicial process, and sotto voice for the benefit of those most concerned.
“Prisoner at the Bar-r-r: Ye have brootally assaulted a peaceful citizen (not more than half-agin as big as yerself). Ye have bate him to a poolp (an' him but a scant tin years younger, an with a repitation for bein' a roughneck—with women and childer). Ye have haff murdered him (an' take shame to yerself ye didn't do th' other haff). Because of yer youth an' inexperience (I mane yer age an the wallop ye carry) I will let ye off light with a fine of fifty dollars (an if ye'll sind me word when yer goin' to operate again I'll remit the fine). Nixt Ca-ase!”
For a culprit who had got off easy, Mr. Miles Morse presented far from a cheerful appearance when Molly Dunstan presented herself on the following morning. Molly exhibited strange and inexplicable symptoms, flushing and paling, finding no place for her regard to rest, until she discovered that Miles Morse was much worse confused than herself. Thereupon, after the manner of women, she became quite composed and easy. Through breakfast he was very silent. After lingering over his coffee to an unwonted degree, he finally arose, with an air of great determination, said “Well” in what was meant to be a businesslike tone, walked briskly to the door, then turned and stood in the most awkward unease.
“The house won't be like a home without you,” said he desolately.
“Won't it?” said Molly.
“You'll be going out to your own place very soon now?”
“Suppose I don't want to.”
“It's all arranged. I've been talking to Mr. and Mrs. Staten.”
“Have ye now!” said Molly with a mutinous uptilt of the chin.
“She's arranged for you to get your own kind of work out there.”
“I like my own job here.”
“It's all arranged,” said Miles Morse with dismal iteration.
“Does that mean I'm discharged?”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“And I'm to go up there to the country—alone—and entertain my California privet hedge?”
Her little foot tapped the ground as it had on the unforgettable occasion of that first interview. The Meanest Man in Our Square winced. Molly saw it, and her eyes grew, tender, but her tone was still uncompromising. “What am I discharged for?”
Silence.
“For not being old enough to be your housekeeper?” She looked the merest wisp of a girl with her color coming and going as she spoke.
He muttered something undistinguish-able.
“For not being ugly enough?” And she contrived to look bewilderingly pretty.
“Why do you plague me, Molly?” he burst out.
She pointed a finger at his chin. “I dare ye, Miles Morse,” she said, her voice fluttering in her throat, for all her audacious words; “I dare ye to discharge me. For all ye're called the Meanest Man in Our Square, ye wouldn't be that mean as to send me away from ye!”
And, with the finger still leveled, she walked' straight to him and was caught and held close to the sober and respectable black coat.
“I'd never dared have asked you, Molly,” said Miles Morse in the voice of one who walks ecstatic amid the wonders of a dream.
“Don't I know that!” she retorted. And then, with a quiver: “Oh, Miles, it's I will make it up to you for that sand-and-spool firecracker!”
Opening her morning mail on the following day, the Bonnie Lassie (for whose schemes and stratagems the stars in their courses fight) gave a little cry and let a bit of paper slip through her fingers. Quickly retrieving it, she turned it over to Cyrus the Gaunt. It was the promised check of Mr. Miles Morse to the Legal Aid Society. Between the words “ten” and “dollars” was a caret, and, above, the added word “hundred” with an indorsement. The signature had also undergone an addendum. It now read: “Miles Morse, per Mrs. M. M. M.”
The Meanest Man in Our Square had abdicated.
WHAT first struck you about the house was that it frowned. Not angrily, but with a kind of dull scorn. Perhaps this was its way of emphasizing its superior aloofness from the other houses in Our Square which had gone down in the social scale while it maintained its aristocracy untainted. It was squat and broad and drab, like the first Varick who had built it, and the succeeding Varicks who had inherited and dwelt in it even to the sixth and seventh generations. Being numbered 13, it would naturally have a sinister repute; and this was not improved by the two suicides which had marked its occupancy; suicides not of despair or remorse or fury, but of cold, grim disgust. Then there was the episode of old Vernam Varick, who dabbled in diabolical mixtures in his secret room on the third floor front under the tutelage of no less an instructor than the Devil, and, having quarreled with Old Nick over a moot point in alchemy, chased him out of the window and followed, himself, to the accompaniment of a loud and sulphurous detonation. What became of His Satanic Majesty has never been properly determined, but old Ver-nam arrived upon the pavement in due time, crumpled up, and thereafter circulated in a wheeled chair, sniffing about after real-estate investments to pass the time. He it was whose purchases of uptown property (when anything above Forty-second Street was “uptown”) severely reprehended by the rest of the clan, subsequently reestablished the Varick fortunes, piling up riches beyond the imagination of Our Square. Except that he had more imagination, he was a pattern of all the Varicks, each broad and squat of architecture like the house they dwelt in; each, if possible, more crabbed and pigheaded and stupidly haughty than his predecessor. In time, his son, heritor of the qualities of the breed, grew up and married. And then the dull generations burst into flower in Paula Varick. So the Varicks put her in a cage.
Old Vernam built the cage out of gas pipe and thick-meshed wire and established it on the roof. From my front window, looking diagonally across Our Square, I command a view of it. How well I remember the day that little Paula was put into it! A black-and-white-banded nurse led her in by the hand, held up an admonitory finger for half a minute of directions, and disappeared down the scuttle door, leaving her alone in a remote world. One might have expected the little girl to cry. She didn't. She set about playing, like a happy little squirrel. Presently there floated across the tree-tops a strange and alien sound for that grim mansion to be making—a sweet, light, joyous, childish piping. The little Paula was singing.
Her song disturbed young Carlo and me at our lesson. Carlo was my one educational luxury. An assistant professor of a forgotten branch of learning, already in middle age, as I was then, who ekes out his income by tutoring, cannot well afford to take pupils for love. But Carlo's father had paid in the beginning, and, when he could no longer pay, the boy's vivid, leaping imagination and his passionate love for all that was fine and true in reading had captivated me. I could not let him go. So we kept up the lessons, and ranged the field of the classics, Greek and Latin, English, French, and German, together. He was to be a poet, I foresaw, or perhaps a dramatist, and I believe I bragged of him unconscionably to my associates. Well, they are kindly souls and have forborne to taunt the prophet! Carlo's father was a Northern Italian, the second son of a noble family, who quarreled with the head of the clan and came to this country and a top floor in Our Square to paint masterpieces, and subsequently died at three o'clock one winter morning, pressing another man's coat. MacLachan the Tailor, then just starting his Home of Fashion, had given him the work to save the pair from being evicted, after their money gave out. At the last the elder Trentano took to drink. Then Carlo got jobs as a model, for he was strong and beautiful like a young woods creature. But he let nothing interfere with our lessons.
Paula, the happy singer, did interfere, however. From time to time my pupil's eyes wandered from his book to fix themselves with a puzzled gaze on the roof beyond the tree-tops. Curiosity proved too much for him at length.
“Dominie!” he said.
“Well?”
“Why do they put the little girl in a cage?”
“To keep her from falling off the roof.”
“Why do they put her on the roof?”
“To play.”
“Why doesn't she play in Our Square?”
“She is not allowed to play with the children in Our Square.”
Carlo pondered this. A theory born of temporary local conditions occurred to him. “Has she got measles?”
This was an easy way out. To enlighten Carlo as to the reasons why the descendant of all the Varicks was not permitted to take part in the degenerated social activities of Our Square, would be to undermine my carefully instilled doctrine of the blessings of democracy where all are free and equal. Therefore with mendacious, though worthy, intent I answered:—
“Not measles, exactly.”
“Oh!” said Carlo. “She must get lonesome.”
“Doubtless.”
The cheery singing had ceased now, and the child was busy with some other concern. Carlo's sharper vision identified it.
“She's setting a tea-table.”
“Is she?”
“And nobody will come to tea at it, will they?”
“Perhaps her dolls.”
“I don't see any dolls.” His lustrous eyes brooded on the lonely little hostess. “Dominie, do you think she'd like it if I came?”
“Are you thinking of storming the house?” I asked, amused.
“That's our roof there.” He pointed to a shabby structure overtopping the squat Varick domicile by some ten feet, and separated from it by a well, four or five feet broad. “I could lean over and speak to her, couldn't I?”
“I hardly think her family would approve.”
“Her family are mean,” declared Carlo heatedly, “to shut her up in a cage.”
“Come back from the realms of romance,” I bade him sternly, “and attend to the lesson.”
Before it was over the black-and-white-banded nurse had retrieved her charge and taken her below.
Three days later I beheld two small figures on the Varick roof. One was inside the cage; one outside. They appeared to be engaged in amicable discourse. The caged figure was little Paula. As to the free one, I could scarcely believe my eyes which tried to assure me that it was Carlo Trentano. It had come about in this way: For two days rain had kept the little prisoner from the roof. She was swaying to and fro on a rocking-horse, crooning to herself, and this was the burden of her improvised chant:—