"My daughter!" There was a sob in the father"s voice.
Edith stopped.
"My daughter, we must not part yet. Come back; sit down with me, and let us talk more calmly. What is past cannot be changed. It is with the now of this unhappy business that we have to do."
Edith came back and sat down again, her father taking a seat beside her.
"That is just it," she answered, with a steadiness of tone and manner that showed how great was the self-control she was able to exert. "It is with the now of this unhappy affair that we have to do. If I spoke strongly of the past, it was that a higher and intenser life might be given to present duty."
"Let there be no distance between us. Let no wall of separation grow up," said Mr. Dinneford, tenderly. "I cannot bear to think of this.
Confide in me, consult with me. I will help you in all possible ways to solve this mystery. But do not again venture alone into that dreadful place. I will go with you if you think any good will come of it."
"I must see Mr. Paulding in the morning," said Edith, with calm decision.
"Then I will go with you," returned Mr. Dinneford.
"Thank you, father;" and she kissed him. "Until then nothing more can be done." She kissed him again, and then went to her own room. After locking the door she sank on her knees, leaning forward, with her face buried in the cushion of a chair, and did not rise for a long time.
CHAPTER XIV.
_ON_ the next morning, after some persuasion, Edith consented to postpone her visit to Grubb"s court until after her father had seen Mr.
Paulding, the missionary.
"Let me go first and gain what information I can," he urged. "It may save you a fruitless errand."
It was not without a feeling of almost unconquerable repugnance that Mr. Dinneford took his way to the mission-house, in Briar street. His tastes, his habits and his naturally kind and sensitive feelings all made him shrink from personal contact with suffering and degradation.
He gave much time and care to the good work of helping the poor and the wretched, but did his work in boards and on committees, rather than in the presence of the needy and suffering. He was not one of those who would pa.s.s over to the other side and leave a wounded traveler to perish, but he would avoid the road to Jericho, if he thought it likely any such painful incident would meet him in the way and shock his fine sensibilities. He was willing to work for the downcast, the wronged, the suffering and the vile, but preferred doing so at a distance, and not in immediate contact. Thus it happened that, although one of the managers of the Briar street mission and familiar with its work in a general way, he had never been at the mission-house--had never, in fact, set his foot within the morally plague-stricken district in which it stood. He had often been urged to go, but could not overcome his reluctance to meet humanity face to face in its sadder and more degraded aspects.
Now a necessity was upon him, and he had to go. It was about ten o"clock in the morning when, at almost a single step, he pa.s.sed from what seemed paradise to purgatory, the sudden contrast was so great. There were but few persons in the little street; where the mission was situated at that early hour, and most of these were children--poor, half-clothed, dirty, wan-faced, keen-eyed and alert bits of humanity, older by far than their natural years, few of them possessing any higher sense of right and wrong than young savages. The night"s late orgies or crimes had left most of their elders in a heavy morning sleep, from which they did not usually awaken before midday. Here and there one and another came creeping out, impelled by a thirst no water could quench. Now it was a bloated, wild-eyed man, dirty and forlorn beyond description, shambling into sight, but disappearing in a moment or two in one of the dram-shops, whose name was legion, and now it was a woman with the angel all gone out of her face, barefooted, blotched, coa.r.s.e, red-eyed, bruised and awfully disfigured by her vicious, drunken life. Her steps too made haste to the dram-shop.
Such houses for men and women to live in as now stretched before his eyes in long dreary rows Mr. Dinneford had never seen, except in isolated cases of vice and squalor. To say that he was shocked would but faintly express his feelings. Hurrying along, he soon came in sight of the mission. At this moment a jar broke the quiet of the scene. Just beyond the mission-house two women suddenly made their appearance, one of them pushing the other out upon the street. Their angry cries rent the air, filling it with profane and obscene oaths. They struggled together for a little while, and then one of them, a woman with gray hair and not less than sixty years of age, fell across the curb with her head on the cobble-stones.
As if a sorcerer had stamped his foot, a hundred wretched creatures, mostly women and children, seemed to spring up from the ground. It was like a phantasy. They gathered about the prostrate woman, laughing and jeering. A policeman who was standing at the corner a little way off came up leisurely, and pushing the motley crew aside, looked down at the prostrate woman.
"Oh, it"s you again!" he said, in a tone of annoyance, taking hold of one arm and raising her so that she sat on the curb-stone. Mr. Dinneford now saw her face distinctly; it was that of an old woman, but red, swollen and terribly marred. Her thin gray hair had fallen over her shoulders, and gave her a wild and crazy look.
"Come," said the policeman, drawing on the woman"s arm and trying to raise her from the ground. But she would not move.
"Come," he said, more imperatively.
"Nature you going to do with me?" she demanded.
"I"m going to lock you up. So come along. Have had enough of you about here. Always drunk and in a row with somebody."
Her resistance was making the policeman angry.
"It"ll take two like you to do that," returned the woman, in a spiteful voice, swearing foully at the same time.
At this a cheer arose from the crowd. A negro with a push-cart came along at the moment.
"Here! I want you," called the policeman.
The negro pretended not to hear, and the policeman had to threaten him before he would stop.
Seeing the cart, the drunken woman threw herself back upon the pavement and set every muscle to a rigid strain. And now came one of those shocking scenes--too familiar, alas! in portions of our large Christian cities--at which everything pure and merciful and holy in our nature revolts: a gray-haired old woman, so debased by drink and an evil life that all sense of shame and degradation had been extinguished, fighting with a policeman, and for a time showing superior strength, swearing vilely, her face distorted with pa.s.sion, and a crowd made up chiefly of women as vile and degraded as herself, and of all ages, and colors, laughing, shouting and enjoying the scene intensely.
At last, by aid of the negro, the woman was lifted into the cart and thrown down upon the floor, her head striking one of the sides with a sickening _thud_. She still swore and struggled, and had to be held down by the policeman, who stood over her, while the cart was pushed off to the nearest station-house, the excited crowd following with shouts and merry huzzas.
Mr. Dinneford was standing in a maze, shocked and distressed by this little episode, when a man at his side said in a grave, quiet voice,
"I doubt if you could see a sight just like that anywhere else in all Christendom." Then added, as he extended his hand,
"I am glad to see you here, Mr. Dinneford."
"Oh, Mr. Paulding!" and Mr. Dinneford put out his hand and grasped that of the missionary with a nervous grip. "This is awful! I am sixty years old, but anything so shocking my eyes have not before looked upon."
"We see things worse than this every day," said the missionary. "It is only one of the angry boils on the surface, and tells of the corrupt and vicious blood within. But I am right glad to find you here, Mr.
Dinneford. Unless you see these things with your own eyes, it is impossible for you to comprehend the condition of affairs in this by-way to h.e.l.l."
"h.e.l.l, itself, better say," returned Mr. Dinneford. "It is h.e.l.l pushing itself into visible manifestation--h.e.l.l establishing itself on the earth, and organizing its forces for the destruction of human souls, while the churches are too busy enlarging their phylacteries and making broader and more attractive the hems of their garments to take note of this fatal vantage-ground acquired by the enemy."
Mr. Dinneford stood and looked around him in a dazed sort of way.
"Is Grubb"s court near this?" he asked, recollecting the errand upon which he had come.
"Yes."
"A young lady called to see you yesterday afternoon to ask about a child in that court?"
"Oh yes! You know the lady?"
"She is my daughter. One of the poor children in her sewing-cla.s.s told her of a neglected baby in Grubb"s court, and so drew upon her sympathies that she started to go there, but was warned by the child that it would be dangerous for a young lady like her to be seen in that den of thieves and harlots, and so she came to you. And now I am here in her stead to get your report about the baby. I would not consent to her visiting this place again."
Mr. Paulding took his visitor into the mission-house, near which they were standing. After they were seated, he said,
"I have seen the baby about which your daughter wished me to make inquiry. The woman who has the care of it is a vile creature, well known in this region--drunken and vicious. She said at first that it was her own baby, but afterward admitted that she didn"t know who its mother was, and that she was paid for taking care of it. I found out, after a good deal of talking round, and an interview with the mother of the child who is in your daughter"s sewing-cla.s.s, that a girl of notoriously bad character, named Pinky Swett, pays the baby"s board. There"s a mystery about the child, and I am of the opinion that it has been stolen, or is known to be the offcast of some respectable family. The woman who has the care of it was suspicious, and seemed annoyed at my questions."
"Is it a boy?" asked Mr. Dinneford.
"Yes, and has a finely-formed head and a pair of large, clear, hazel eyes. Evidently it is of good parentage. The vicious, the sensual and the depraved mark their offspring with the unmistakable signs of their moral depravity. You cannot mistake them. But this baby has in its poor, wasted, suffering little face, in its well-balanced head and deep, almost spiritual eyes, the signs of a better origin."
"It ought at once to be taken away from the woman," said Mr. Dinneford, in a very decided manner.