Part 13 (2/2)

”A. Cohen. Pressing 25 and 50 cents.”

It was twilight. The tailor had lighted a single flickering gas jet beside the bas.e.m.e.nt window. In the old days the front bas.e.m.e.nt had been the housemaids' sitting room with a channel-coal fire glowing in the grate and a tidy white cloth on the table and neat rows of geraniums in the windows--a cheery sort of place. Not at all like this stuffy, overcrowded, ill ventilated place with the two silent s.h.i.+rt- sleeved men humped over steaming ironing boards and with a dozen more clattering away at noisy sewing machines.

A grizzled man scowled at her through thick gla.s.ses.

”Vell,” he rasped, ”Vat do you vant, madam?”

”I want to stay here.”

”You vant to rent a room? I calls mine missus--” he called stridently, ”I think she gotta room for three dollars, I don' know--”

From the doorway of the once s.h.i.+ning and immaculate kitchen a frowsy head protruded, ”Four we should get,” whined a nasal voice ”it is only that it is on the top floor that we can make it so cheap--”

”This,” announced Felicia to the slatternly woman ”--is my house. How dare you let it get so dirty!”

Her rising anger swept into her heart like a reviving fire. She thought of Zeb, mouthing his scorn of the ”dirty filthy heathen,” she thought of Mademoiselle D'Ormy scolding a housemaid who left so much as a speck of dust on the hall bal.u.s.trades, she did not see the grinning woman gesturing to her husband, touching her forehead to indicate Felicia's lack of wits.

”That ain't my business,” the woman shrugged when she saw Felicia looking at her. ”We pays out rent by a receiver since the Mister Burrel goes avay--I gotta get mine renta in adwance. I gotta nice room if you vant to stay.”

”But it's my house, of course I'll stay.”

”It's a nice room, three dollars a veek--you vant to see it?”

The color blazed in Felicia's cheeks.

”I should like you to take me to it at once,” she announced with dignity. ”You'll carry my bag, please.”

The tailor's wife grumbingly obeyed her, preceding her new lodger with ill concealed temper, her lumpy person almost blocking the ample stairway.

Up they pa.s.sed from the bas.e.m.e.nt to the once stately hallway. Not even the encrusted dirt could hide the beauty of the old tessellated marble floors and arched doorways but where the oval topped doors had once swung hospitably wide their gloomy panels now hid the drawing-rooms, and where the long mirror had once made the hallway bright with reflected light a dingy ill-painted wall made the pa.s.sage so gloomy that one could scarcely see above the first landing. Silently Felicia's weary feet carried her along behind her untidy conductor.

Unconsciously she tiptoed as she pa.s.sed the closed door of her mother's room, tiptoed as gently as though that frail sufferer were still lying listlessly on the ”sleighback” bed. Quietly around the bend of the upper hall she followed, past the upstairs sitting room and up the second flight toward the sleeping chambers, her heart beating from the unwonted climb, her breath coming in quick gasps and her damp hair clinging to her aching forehead.

”Maybe,” she exulted secretly, ”it will be the nursery that I'll have --maybe I left something--” she smiled as she caught herself thinking it on the stairway--”perhaps there will be a little fire in the Peggoty grate and I can shut the door and sit down and think clearly.”

But it wasn't the nursery. As they pa.s.sed its closed door she could hear the wrangle of many voices, a baby's fretful cry and the hurrying whir of other sewing machines. The frowsy woman opened the door at the head of the stairs. The-three-dollar-a-week-room was the hall bedroom.

The small room where Mademoiselle D'Ormy's bed had been wont to stand in the old days--with the door left ajar so that Felicia would not be frightened when she awoke in the night.

With the door to the adjoining room closed it looked twice as narrow as she remembered it. And it was not a nice clean room. It held an old iron bed and a pine table and a cheap wicker rocking chair. Yet Felicia could almost have kissed the dingy walls for they were covered with exactly the same droll paper that had always decorated them--the paper on which the oft repeated group of fat faced shepherdesses danced about their innumerable May poles and alternating with these perpetual merry makers were the methodical flocks of lambs. Spang over the middle of the s.p.a.ce back of the bed was the discolored spot where she had thrown the large and dripping bath sponge.

She felt suddenly very small and very, very helpless--she was utterly spent. But there was something in her wide gray eyes--a dignity and a command--that completely dominated the shrewish wife of the hump- shouldered tailor, something that made the slatternly creature back out of the room, for Felicia Day, with her hand on the battered iron railing of the bed, had said clearly, ”Woman, go at once.”

And when the door was shut she sat down in one chair and put Bab.i.+.c.he carefully on the bed. She untied Louisa's bonnet and dropped it to the floor; she loosed the c.u.mbersome traveling coat. Far out on the river the ferry boats and tugs were signaling; across the water the glamour of a million lights shone toward her. It was quite dark now; she stumbled to the window and looked down into the back yard. The dusk had mercifully blurred out for her the heaps of refuse and ashes that were dumped upon the spot where the narcissus border had been. The great iron pots on the top of the garden wall loomed out of the shadows. She looked straight down on the gate to the rectory yard.

She sunk in a crumpled heap and rested her weary head on the window sill, then groped for the wee doggie as she heard the faint click of its tiny paws coming toward her over the bare floor.

”Oh, Bab.i.+.c.he!” she whispered, ”Bab.i.+.c.he, how happy--we should be--to be home!”

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