"That is precisely what I wish to find out," she responded. "She has changed her address, and I thought it possible you might know something of her whereabouts."
"I have not seen her since the morning when she came into your studio.
Doesn"t Herman know?"
"The truth is," Helen said slowly, weighing her words with regard to their effect upon Edith, "that she has run away, and we do not know what has become of her. She went off in a rage, and I am troubled about her."
"Is she the Italian you spoke of, Arthur?" interrupted Mrs. Fenton in her soft voice. "What is she like?"
"Yes; a black-haired, splendidly shaped girl with piercing black eyes."
"I think I know where she is," Edith said quietly.
"You?" the others asked in one breath.
"You see," Mrs. Fenton explained, turning towards Helen, "I have made rather a plunge into charity work. Of course I meant to do something, but I hardly expected to begin quite so soon. But Mr. Candish is my rector, and he came for me yesterday to go to an Italian family that cannot speak English well. The children have just been put into our schools, but they have not advanced very far as yet. Their teacher asked Mr. Candish to do something for them; they are wretchedly poor. I wish you could see the place, Mrs. Greyson. Eight people in a room not so large as this, and such poverty as you could hardly imagine. Yet these people had taken in another. The mother goes about selling fruit, and she happened to speak to this girl that I think is Ninitta in her own language one night. The girl had been wandering about in the cold, not knowing where to go, and I suppose the sound of her own tongue touched her heart. Poor thing; she would not speak a word to me. How strange that I should chance to find her."
"Thank heaven she is safe," was Helen"s inward exclamation. Aloud she said: "But what is she doing?"
"Nothing," Edith answered. "She seems to have had a little money, so that she can pay the family something, and she has helped to take care of the children. They are Catholics, naturally, and not in Mr.
Candish"s parish; but they do not seem to have much religion of any kind, and keep clear of the priest for some reason."
"My wife will know more of the North End in a month," Arthur observed with an effort at good humor which did not wholly conceal from Helen a trace of annoyance, "than I should in six years. I wonder she can bear to go into such dirty places. Of course philanthropy is all very well, but I"d rather take it after it has been disinfected."
The bitterness in his tone jarred upon Helen. She felt a pang at his evident dissatisfaction with his wife"s views, his want of harmony with his new surroundings.
"Arthur must be disciplined," Mrs. Fenton said, smiling fondly. "If he once learns that the secret of being happy lies in helping others, he"ll be unselfish from mere selfishness, if from nothing else."
"Happy!" Helen exclaimed involuntarily. "Does one ever expect to be happy nowadays? Happiness went out of fashion with our grandmothers"
bonnets."
"In this world," Edith answered, without any trace in her voice of the reproof which Helen half expected, "perhaps you are right. The age is too restless and skeptical for happiness here; but that makes me long the more for it hereafter."
"But even in a future life," returned Helen, "I can hardly expect to be happy, since I shall still be myself."
"Happiness," was Mrs. Fenton"s reply, "is a question of harmony with surroundings, is it not? And your surroundings in the other life may be such that you cannot but be happy."
"No more theology, please," interposed Arthur. "You forget, Edith, that I have been to church to-day, and too much piety at once might impair my spiritual digestion forever."
A perception that the flippancy of his tone shocked his wife, made Helen turn the conversation again to Ninitta, arranging to go with Mrs.
Fenton in the morning to find the missing girl.
They fell into silence after this, the twilight deepening until only the glow of the fire lighted the room. Edith went to the piano and played a bit of Mozart, wandering off then into the hymn-tunes which she loved and which were familiar in all orthodox homes of the last generation: plaintive _Olmutz_ and stately _Geneva_, aspiring _Amsterdam_ and resonant _St. Martin"s_, placid _Boylston_ and grand _Hamburg, Nuremburg, Benevento, Turner_ and _Old Hundred_; the tunes of our fathers, the melodies which embody the spirit of the old time New England Sabbath, a day heavy, constrained and narrow, it may be; but, too, a day calm, unworldly and pure.
Arthur"s cigar was finished, and he had fallen into a deep reverie, looking into the coals. He recalled his conversations with Helen before his marriage. He wondered whether his acquiescence in the limitations of his present condition, his yielding to his wife"s social and religious views, was an advance or a deterioration. These pious tunes jarred upon his mood, and he was glad when his wife left the instrument. His Bohemian instinct stirred within him, and taunted the ease-loving quality of his nature which put him in subjection to that which he believed no more now than in the days when he was the most sharp-spoken of the Pagans. A wave of disgust and self-loathing swept over him. He turned abruptly in the dusk toward Helen.
"Sing to us," he said. "Edith has never heard you."
But Helen had been moved by the melodies, which came to her as an echo from her childhood. She understood the half-peremptory accent in Arthur"s voice to which she had so often yielded, but to which she would not now submit.
"No," she answered. "How can you ask me. My barbaric chant would be wholly out of keeping here. Some other time I shall be glad to sing for Mrs. Fenton; now I must go home."
XXIV.
IN PLACE AND IN ACCOUNT NOTHING.
I. Henry IV.; v.--I.
Notwithstanding her previous visit, Mrs. Fenton found it no easy matter to guide Helen to the place where Ninitta had taken refuge.
The poorer cla.s.ses of foreigners in any city are led by similarity of language and occupations to gather into neighborhoods according to their nationality, and the Italians are especially clannish. The fruit-venders and organ-grinders form separate colonies, each distinguished by the peculiarities incident to the calling of its inhabitants, the crooked courts in the fruit-sellers" neighborhood being chiefly marked to outward observance by the number of two-wheeled hand-carts which, out of business hours, are crowded together there.
Ninitta was found in a room tolerably clean for that portion of the city, the old fruit woman who was its mistress having retained more of the tidiness of thrifty peasant ancestors than most of her cla.s.s. One room was made to accommodate the mother and seven children, and during the absence of the former from home the premises were left in charge of a girl just entering her teens, who, when Helen and Edith reached the place, was engaged in preparing the family dinner of maccaroni. The younger members of the family had just returned from school, and were noisily clamoring for their share, and all together relating the incidents of the day.
Upon a bed in one corner lay the object of their search, her face flushed, her hair disordered, her eyes wild and vacant. To all appearances she was in a high fever, and she took no heed of Edith, who approached the bed and spoke to her. At the sound of Mrs. Greyson"s voice, however, the sick girl gave a cry and raised herself into a sitting posture.
"No, no!" she exclaimed in Italian, excitedly, "I will not! I will not!"
Helen drew off her gloves and sat down upon the dingy bed beside Ninitta, regarding her with pitying eyes.
"You shall not," she answered, in the girl"s own language. "You need do nothing but what you choose."
The soft tone seemed to calm Ninitta. She allowed Helen to arrange the soiled and crumpled pillows, and yielded when her self-const.i.tuted nurse wished her to lie down again. The latter procured a bowl of water, and with her handkerchief bathed the sick girl"s face, soothing her with womanly touches which waked in Edith a new feeling of sympathy and tenderness. Mrs. Greyson"s white fingers, contrasting strongly with the Italian"s clear dark skin, smoothed the tangled hair from the hot forehead, and all the while her rich, pure voice murmured comforting words, of little meaning in themselves, perhaps, but sweet with the sympathy and womanhood which spoke through them.
Edith meanwhile was not idle. She applied herself to hushing the boisterous children, and to bringing something like quiet out of the tumult of the crowded room. She a.s.sisted the girl with her maccaroni, gravely listening to the principles which governed its equitable distribution, with her own hands giving the grimy little children the share belonging to each. An air of comfort seemed to come over the frowsy room after Edith had quietly set a chair straight here, picked up something from the floor there, and arranged the ragged shade at the window. Even the little Italians, half barbarians as they were, felt the change, and were more subdued.
Ninitta, too, was calmed and soothed, and, with Helen"s cool hand upon her hot brow, she sank presently into a drowse.
"Mrs. Fenton," Helen whispered, fanning her sleeping patient, "Ninitta cannot remain here. I must take her home with me. I think she had better run the risk of being moved than to be ill in this crowded room."
"But," remonstrated Edith, somewhat aghast at this summary procedure, "you do not even know what is the matter with her."
"No," Helen returned lightly, "but I shall probably discover."
"Not by finding it something contagious, I hope," her friend said, laying her hand upon Mrs. Greyson"s forehead with a slight, caressing touch.
"Can you get me a hack?" Helen asked of the girl who kept the house.
But the girl had no idea how to obtain one of those vehicles, which she had been accustomed to see driving about with a certain awe, but without the hope of ever being able to do more than admire them from a distance, unless, indeed, she should have the great good fortune of going to a funeral, when perhaps she might even ride in one, as did little Sally McMann of the next court, when her mother died. Mrs.
Fenton therefore went herself for the carriage, finding remonstrance in vain to change her companion"s decision.
During her absence Ninitta awakened, and, while seeming more rational, was less quiet than before. She repulsed her visitor with angry looks and muttered defiance. Knowing perfectly well the cause of the girl"s agitation, Helen knew, also, that it was best to go directly to the root of the matter, and she did so unshrinkingly.
"You are wrong," she said in Ninitta"s ear. "It is you he loves. You are to go home with me because he wishes it."
At first the sick girl seemed to gather no meaning from these words, but as Helen repeated the a.s.surance again and again, in different phrases and with Herman"s name, she became pa.s.sive, as if she at least caught the spirit if not the actual significance.