"W. S."
Having folded the letter, he slipped it under the child"s door; then he returned to his room and waited, leaving his own door ajar. After awhile he began to sing some of Meg"s favorite melodies--"Sally in the Alley"
and "Margery Allen." He thought he heard a furtive step. He turned his head away, so as not to frighten by so much as a glance the shy advance, and began softly to sing Meg"s favorite ballad:
"Nellie was a lady-- Last night she died."
He fancied he distinguished the reluctant drawing near of tardy feet.
When the song was ended he looked round. Meg was on the threshold. A glance revealed the change those four days had wrought. Her hair was unkempt, her dress untidy, her cheeks pale; but it was not so much those signs of neglect, the pallor of her cheeks, the drawn lines about her mouth that startled him, as a certain expression of childish recklessness. It was the Meg he had seen wrangling with boys in the street, flying past him lawless and fierce. In her hand she held his letter, and she kept her eyes fixed upon him with a bold stare.
"Is it true what you have written here, or is it a pack of stories?" she asked abruptly.
"It is all true, Meg," said Mr. Standish gently. "She was a lady."
"A real lady, like those that drive about in the carriages?" asked the child with stern cross-examination.
"She was a real lady, Meg; just as you have always pictured her--with soft hands that had never done rough work, and a gentle voice. All about her was beautiful," replied Mr. Standish in slow and convinced tones.
At this a.s.surance Meg gave a little sigh; the tension about her lips relaxed; the fierce brilliancy of her interrogative glance was subdued.
"How do you know?" she asked more softly.
"Mrs. Browne told me. I will take you to her, and she will tell it to you."
"I don"t want her to tell me, you tell me," said Meg quickly.
Mr. Standish hesitated; under the child"s innocent gaze he found it difficult to speak. He told her in simple words some of the story Mrs.
Browne had related. It was a mercy Meg evinced no curiosity concerning her father. Mr. Standish dwelt upon the beauty, the youth, the suffering of the mother; he spoke of the love she had lavished in antic.i.p.ation upon the babe she was never to see.
As he spoke, the thought of that early and lonely death thrust itself before him with a new and piteous force. The thought of the forsaken child moved him, and his voice faltered.
Meg was by his side in a moment; her hand touched his. "You asked me in your letter to forgive you," she whispered. "I forgive you."
He took the little hand. "You must forget also, Meg, that I said your mother had left you poor and uncared for."
"But she did. She left me poor, and with strangers; that"s what you said," replied Meg, with a return of the old fierceness, quoting his words.
"She died," he answered with emphasis, bending forward. "Listen, Meg,"
he continued, as the child remained apparently unsoftened, "will you believe me, even if you do not understand me--will you believe me?"
For a moment Meg remained dogged and silent, then, as she met his troubled glance, the doubt pa.s.sed from hers, the confiding light came back.
"I believe you; I believe you very much," she said.
"Then, when you think of her, Meg, think that some one had done her great injury--had made her suffer, more than you can know. That is why she came here and died. She left you poor because everything had been taken from her."
He paused a moment. Meg was pale, and seemed a little dazed; but the excitement had left her manner.
"Everything," he repeated with emphasis.
The child"s bosom heaved.
"Now that she is dead," resumed the young man, "I believe that dear mother watches over her little daughter."
"You believe it," said Meg slowly.
"I believe it," said Mr. Standish. "But, come; where is that picture?
Let me look at it again."
Meg was off and back again in a moment. The print was torn and besmeared, as if it had gone through rough usage since he had seen it last.
"Halloo! it is falling to bits. It was not so crumpled and torn the other day," he remarked.
"No," Meg confessed; "I hated it the other night, when you said mother was hard-working, like a charwoman. I wanted to tear it up--I did; but I could not." She stopped; for the first time there came a choking in her throat, and a sob, quickly repressed.
Mr. Standish pretended absorption in his occupation, spread out the tattered print, and announced his intention of bestowing to the painting a new lease of life by pasting it upon a pasteboard back. He gathered the necessary implements for the task. Meg, usually so active, watched in silence; but he knew, by the trembling of the little hand resting on the table, by the stiff uprightness of the small figure beside him, the fierce battle the child was waging with herself to suppress all show of emotion.
He took no apparent heed of her, but proceeded with the task of renovation. Perhaps he had intended still to lead the child"s mind to a truer conception of a lady than she could get from worship of this simpering fetish, with a mouth like a cherry, and curled eyelashes; but as he handled the old fashion-plate, the pathos of its smeared and battered condition touched him with a sense of sacredness, and he found himself declaring that her mother might have been like that picture.
There was no doubt about it; it represented a lovely creature, and her mother was a lovely lady.
When the task was completed he was rewarded by the sight of Meg"s radiant countenance. In perfect peace she carried off the restored picture.
CHAPTER II.
TWO YEARS LATER.
Two years had elapsed, and to superficial observers Meg might have appeared to have changed only by some inches added to her length of limb. She still haunted the corner overlooking the stairs on the topmost lobby, but it was not to watch the come and go of the shabby social eddies breaking down below. She read much to herself. Her choice of literature was a queer _melange_ of odds and ends. She was up to all the fires, the accidents, the pageants of a world into which she had never set foot. She knew to what corner of a London daily paper and provincial weekly she was to look to find descriptions of these sensational incidents, and the style in which they were recorded stirred in her an admiration worthy of being lavished on Homeric epics. She knew also a number of ballads by heart that she would recite with an amount of native dramatic vividness.
If the shifting scenes going on downstairs no longer attracted her as in the past, she was intent and absorbed in watching one life. The friendship between her and Mr. Standish had become a tie that drew out peculiarities of the child"s nature. There had been quarrels, coolnesses, reconciliations, but Meg"s usual att.i.tude toward the journalist was one of mingled proprietorship and watchfulness. It was a mixture of motherly solicitude and dog-like faithfulness. She cross-questioned, admonished, and kept vigilant guard over his interests.
Once, having discovered that Mrs. Browne had cheated him of sixpence in the weekly bill, she drew the landlady"s notice to the overcharge; but Mrs. Browne refused to acknowledge or set it right, and Meg cried herself to sleep. Loyalty to the landlady was discarded, and with br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes and quivering lips she told Mr. Standish next day of that fraudulent sixpence. To her dismay he laughed, and vowed that Mrs.
Browne"s name ought to be handed down to posterity as an honest landlady if sixpence covered the amount of a week"s cheating. Meg would not be comforted; to her the landlady seemed remorseless.
A mother could not have detected with quicker apprehension a shade of weariness or pallor on the young man"s face. Her invariable question on such an occasion would be, "What have you had for dinner?" Sometimes he tried to deceive her. He would roll out a dazzling _menu_--turtle soup, turbot, plum-pudding.
She would stop him at once with pathetic and angry remonstrance. "It is not true; you know it is not true. Why do you say it?"
Her earnestness always moved him; he was ashamed of deceiving her.
Their last quarrel had been caused by Mr. Standish"s confession that he had dined off fish.
"Fish!" cried Meg with scorn, tossing her head. "Can you work after a bit of fish? What fish--turbot, salmon, fried soles?" The ladies who occupied the drawing-room floor gave occasional dinner-parties, where such delicacies figured.
As Mr. Standish kept shaking his head, the smile in his eyes growing more amused and tender, a terrible idea dawned upon Meg. She grew pale.