Part 25 (1/2)
”So perhaps by my officiousness I converted an innocent prank into something more serious,” she concluded.
”If it was the price of it only, I'd give double that, and land knows I've no stockingful, like some that go to the city for help, for I'd rather rub my knuckles off than beg,” said the good woman.
There was a piece of old carpet stuffed in one window-pane, adequate in summer, no doubt, but hardly impregnable to the winter winds--and Emily judged from the table before her that more than once the mother and son had sat down to a Barmecide feast, in which the imagination had to be called on to help appease the palate. So it was by inheritance that the Whistler came by his aversion to s.h.a.garach's charity.
”I think it strange Walter and I have never become acquainted.”
”Indeed he knows all your goodness to me.”
”Is he still at school?”
”Graduated this year, and his masters recommend him for the best-tempered boy and as innocent--but full of the old Harry, like his father, that would always be dancing, even with seven children between him and his youth.”
”What a pity if he should turn out bad now after you've made so many sacrifices for him.”
”Oh, for the sacrifices, Walter's willing to take his share. With his paper route he would bring me in sometimes $2 a week, and there was nothing he wouldn't do, distribute handbills, deliver baskets in the meat-market on Sat.u.r.day nights. Look, here's the s...o...b..ack's kit he just bought. Come in, Miss Barlow.”
Emily entered the small side room which completed Mrs. Riley's suite.
”There's the blacking-box. Bought it himself with his own savings.”
”But he was too changeable. I should think he would have done better to stick to one thing.”
”That's what I told him. But you know how a boy is fickle-minded. 'Get me something good, mother,' says he. There's the little cradle I rocked him in that I kept all these years--” Emily herself could hardly check her tears at thought of the mother rocking this empty memento.
”His Aunt Mary gave it to me--not that we couldn't afford it--plenty and to spare I had when my husband was alive, but it wasn't lucky to buy a cradle for your first baby, she said, and so I rocked them all in hers, and now six of them are in heaven with their father, G.o.d ha' mercy, and Walter, all that was left me, is in the lockup this night with the bad people.”
Walter's little room was bare but not squalid. A knockabout suit hung on pegs at one side, and a washbowl stood on a cheap commode, like a prophecy of cleanliness in the occupant.
”Don't worry, Mrs. Riley. Since I helped Walter into this sc.r.a.pe, I am bound to help him out of it.”
”Heaven bless you, if you can save my Walter--and I know you would try if you knew him. The lovingest boy, full of mischief like his father, but he'd give the blood out of his heart to a soul in trouble. Oh, well I knew he had something on his mind all these weeks. For he wouldn't run up stairs two steps at a time, as he used to, and whistle so that it was sweeter and louder than a cage full of canaries. When I heard him whistle low I knew it was something troubling his mind. 'Yes, mother, it is,' says he, but that was all I could get out of him.”
”Suppose I bring a very great lawyer to be his counsel,” said Emily, deeply moved by the lonely mother's sorrow, and haunted, too, by a dim remembrance of the central face among the three gamins--a frank boy-face, with red lips and cheeks. ”Wouldn't he stand a better chance of getting off?”
”Just as you say, Miss Barlow,” answered the sad woman, brightening a little.
”He is very busy, but I feel sure that he will attend to this if I ask him. I'll see him to-night. Don't brood over it too much and never mind about the was.h.i.+ng. I will have Mr. s.h.a.garach call at the station and talk with Walter, and then let you know. Good-night.”
”Good-night and bless you,” said Mrs. Riley, holding the little candlestick high at the landing. Emily picked her way down two crazy flights of stairs and a doorway barred with sprawling children on to the sidewalk. ”While we wink, the lightning may have flashed,” was a motto she had copied out of an old book of maxims and embroidered into her life; so, without taking time even for a wink, she hailed a pa.s.sing car that would carry her near s.h.a.garach's house.
Not all that Mrs. Riley had said of her boy, the Whistler, should be set down to a mother's partiality. Mischievous Walter was, if the unquenchable avidity for excitement which reigns at fourteen ent.i.tles a boy to such an aspersion. The five hours' rigid confinement at a school desk especially provoked him to perpetual fidget, and no teacher had yet been found who could make him buckle to his books so long. Yet he was a favorite with one and all, less because of his deft hand at the drawing lesson than because of the real salubrity of his nature, which made him exceptional among the slum children who were his fellow-pupils.
To these very schoolmates Walter figured as a hero, an Admirable Crichton, invincible at all games and master of most things worth knowing for boys. There was no swimmer of his age could equal him in grace or speed, and his dive from the top of the railroad dock was famous in local annals. So was his successful set-to in the brewery yard with Lefty Dinan, the Tenth street c.o.c.k-of-the walk.
Yet for all his proficiency in the art of give, take and avoid, Walter was the least combative of boys, being, as his mother said, ”loving” in disposition. The great gray Percherons with s.h.a.ggy fetlocks, that drew the fire-engines, knew this, and admitted him to a brotherly comrades.h.i.+p, bowing with delight when he patted and stroked them. Mechanics found him handy beyond his years, and often employed him at odd jobs. For he had a carpenter's eye for short distances and a surveyor's for long, and there was no tool that did not fit his fingers. If he had run away to join the circus last summer, that was not the unpardonable sin.
s.h.a.garach heard Emily gravely.
”An important witness for our cause,” he answered, when she had finished. ”We surely cannot suffer him to be thrust into prison.” Emily knew that it was unnecessary for her to press the matter further, so she spent a brief evening in conversation with the quaint, affectionate mother, rarely alluding to the Floyd case or the mysterious oaf who had so alarmed her in that oriental room.
The following noon she ran down to the jail to see Robert, half-expecting to hear him playing the violin which she had sent him the day before. Robert's own Stradivarius, with all his other personal effects, had been destroyed at the fire, so Emily, having begged the sheriff's permission, had pinched herself to buy him a new one as richly toned as her slender means could purchase. Her own instrument was the piano, whose keys turned to silver beneath her touch, and it had been in the ensemble cla.s.ses of the conservatory that she and Robert (through Beulah Ware) first met. When Dr. Silsby, the botanist, who had just come home from the west, called yesterday, she had insisted on his taking the violin to Robert, without betraying the giver's name. However, Robert's corridor (murderers' row, the name made her indignant) was silent when she approached it, and she searched his cell vainly for a violin box.
”Dr. Silsby has been to see you, Robert?” she asked, after the greetings due from sweetheart to sweetheart.
”He came in yesterday to cheer me.”
”His usual method of cheering, I suppose.”
”Oh, yes, said he had never expected me to outlive uncle; I always acted so much older than he did,” laughed Robert.
”He is such a droll tease,” said Emily, who never could be brought to admit that Robert was overserious for his years.
”But I made myself even with him before he went. He promised to read an article I had written while in prison, and took the ma.n.u.script under his arm, little suspecting what was in store for him. You know how he abhors my social heresies.”
”And the article was----”
”My 'Modest Proposal for a Consumers' Trust,' socialistic from kappa to kappa. How Jonas will writhe! The last words he spoke were a thrust at my 'fad.' Yet every letter-carrier and uniformed employe I meet,” added Robert, returning to his natural gravity, ”contented and useful, convinces me more and more that the world is moving toward co-operation.”
”But the reading will be torture to Dr. Silsby.”
”It ought to do him good. How hard that lumper works!” Several negroes were staggering down the corridor, shouldering huge sides of beef for the jail cuisine. ”And in fifty offices within a radius of a mile men are receiving large salaries for dawdling at elegant desks two or three hours a day.”
”There are no sinecures at $10 a week,” sighed Emily, drawing upon experience for this generalization. ”But did Dr. Silsby have nothing with him when he called?”
”I believe he had--a violin box.”
”Just so,” said a cheerful voice behind them; ”a violin-box, and forgot to leave it. You see I had the jacketing of that birch tree so much on my mind,” it was Dr. Silsby himself, ”everything else slipped out. You remember my speaking of the birch tree, Rob?”
”At least seven times,” answered Robert.
”Cruelty, Miss Barlow, positive cruelty. That fine silver-birch in the jailyard--you saw it, I suppose, coming in--all peeled and naked from the ground as high as my reach. Wanton cruelty. Think of the winter nights. It will die. It will die.”
One of Jonas Silsby's eccentricities was his keen sympathy for arboreal life, to which his rugged nature yearned even more than to the delicate products of the flower garden.
”I complained to the sheriff. There ought to be an ordinance severely punis.h.i.+ng the barking of trees.”
”Don't they fine the boys who mutilate foliage in the parks?” asked Emily.
”Fine! Horsewhip them! Rattan their knuckles! I'd teach them a lesson or two! The young barbarians! Well, cut it short, thinking of the trees, I forgot your violin. So last night I ordered a jacket made, good canvas cloth, that'll interest you, Rob, if you haven't forgotten all your botany in your wild----”
”How did you like my essay, Jonas?” asked Robert, mischievously.