Part 10 (1/2)

”There is enough to do,” he said; ”everything is lacking here; there is severe poverty, united to the most scrupulous tenderness and the most tender love on the part of this brother and sister. I stumbled on the case, and will do professionally all that is needed. And I have a friend who would undoubtedly come to the rescue, but she is crowded just now.

I shall be rejoiced to report to her a helper. Do you know Joy Saunders?

Well, I wish you did; she is one whom you could appreciate. She is young, though, and without a husband to guard her, and there are some places to which she cannot come.”

”Has she learned that important fact?” asked Mr. Roberts, with a significant smile. Then some explanation seemed necessary. ”This lady,”

he said, ”tried the alley alone yesterday, and lost her way, and went lower down,--quite near to Burk Street, I imagine.”

”And what happened?” The quick question and the doctor's tone suggested possibilities not pleasant.

”Oh, she met one of her new recruits,--as hard a boy, so one of the policemen on this beat tells me, as there is in the row,--and pressed him into service to escort her back to civilization; and strange to say, the fellow did it without placing any tricks.”

The doctor turned on the small lady a curious glance.

”I think you may be able to do something, even for Dirk Colson,” he said.

”Do you know him?”

He laughed over the eagerness of the question.

”Never heard of him before. I was only thinking of our friend's description of his awfulness. Ah, whom have we here?”

For the door had opened abruptly, and a pair of great blue eyes, set in a frame of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger.

She stood for just a moment, as if transfixed by astonishment at the unwonted sight in the room, then turned and sped away as swiftly and silently as she had come.

”That is Dirk's sister,” Sallie Calkins said, coming forward, her homely face aglow with shame. ”She isn't a bad girl, ma'am, she doesn't mean to be, but she has a dreadful time. Her mother is sickly, and has to go out was.h.i.+ng, times when she isn't able to sit up; and there'll be days when she can't hold up her head; and the father is bad, ma'am, and drinks, and swears, and sells things for drink till there ain't nothing left to sell; and Mart hasn't anything to mend her clothes with, and she doesn't know how, anyway; and she hasn't even got a comb to comb her hair with, her father he took it to sell; and everything there is horrid, and Dirk, he's awful.”

It was strange, she could not herself account for it; but with every added word of misery that set poor Dirk Colson lower and lower in the scale of humanity, there seemed to come into this woman's heart, and s.h.i.+ne in her face, an a.s.surance that he was to be a ”chosen vessel unto G.o.d.”

The doctor was watching her again, curious, apparently, to see how this pitiful appeal for forbearance in judging of poor Mart affected her, and something in his face made her say, speaking low, ”an inheritance among them which are sanctified.”

”Amen!” he said. And there came to Mrs. Roberts a feeling that this earnest prayer, for the second time repeated by two men who prayed, was a sort of seal from the Master.

She turned away from both gentlemen then; the tears were very near the surface. She must do something to tone down the beating of her heart.

Sallie was at hand, and she went with her to another corner of the room, and a low-toned conversation was carried on, sc.r.a.ps of which floated back to the gentlemen in the form of ”sheets,” ”grape jelly,” ”mutton broth,” ”a soft pillow,” and the like.

”I feel my patient growing better,” the doctor said, with satisfaction.

”Is there no father here?” Mr. Roberts asked.

The doctor shook his head, but answered:--

”There is the most pitiful apology for a father that I ever saw,--a mere wreck of a man! Spends his time in a sort of weak drinking, if I may coin a phrase to describe him; he actually uses no energy even in that business. Just staggers around and bemoans his lot; a most unfortunate man, in his own estimation, with whom the world, through no fault of his, has gone wrong. He is never downright intoxicated, and never free from the effects of liquor. He is much like a wilted leaf in the hands of this boy and girl. They could pitch him out of the window without much difficulty, and if the fall did not kill him he would shed tears and say it was a hard world. But now, what do we see, when the name of father is so dishonored,--made a wreck, as it were? Why, the order of nature is reversed, and these children take on the protective. They are father and mother, and he is the weak, sinning child. The way that that boy and girl have worked to keep their miserable father from starving or freezing is something to astonish the very angels. They s.h.i.+eld him, too; n.o.body who wants to reach their hearts must blame him. They are a study!--as different from the other inhabitants of the alley as the sky is different from that mud-hole down there. It isn't a good simile, either. There is no religion in their efforts. They are the veriest heathen.”

”How do you account for the development?”

The doctor shook his head:--