Chapter I: Am Lost (4)

By the end of another week I was driven to such despair by the continued extortions of the Olivers that, seeing an advertisement in the Underground Railway of a Home for children in the country (asking for subscriptions and showing a group of happy little people playing under a chestnut-tree in bloom), I decided to make one more effort.

"They can't all be machines," I thought, "with the founders' hearts crushed out of them."

The day was Friday, when work was apt to heap up at the Jew's, and Mrs. Abramovitch had brought vests enough to my room to cover my bed, but nevertheless I put on my hat and coat and set out for the orphanage.

It was fifteen miles on the north side of London, so it cost me something to get there. But I was encouraged by the homelike appearance of the place when I reached it, and still more by finding that it was conducted by women, for at last, I thought, the woman-soul would speak to me.

But hardly had I told my story to the matron, repeating my request (very timidly this time and with such a humble, humble heart) that I might be allowed to recover my child as soon as I found myself able to provide for her, than she stopped me and said:

"My dear young person, we could have half the orphan children in London on your terms. Before we accept such a child as yours we expect the parent to give us a legal undertaking that she relinquishes all rights in it until it is sixteen years of age."

"Sixteen? Isn't that rather severe on a mother?" I said.

"Justly severe," said the matron. "Such women should be made to maintain their children, and thus realise that the way of transgressors is hard."

How I got back to London, whether by rail or tram or on foot, or what happened on the way (except that darkness was settling down on me, within and without), I do not know. I only know that very late that night, as late as eleven o'clock, I was turning out of Park Lane into Piccadilly, where the poor "public women" with their painted faces, dangling their little hand-bags from their wrists, were promenading in front of the gentlemen's clubs and smiling up at the windows.

These were the scenes which had formerly appalled me; but now I was suddenly surprised by a different feeling, and found myself thinking that among the women who sinned against their womanhood there might be some who sold themselves for bread to keep those they loved and who loved them.

This thought was passing through my mind when I heard a hollow ringing laugh from a woman who was standing at the foot of a flight of steps talking to a group of three gentlemen whose white shirt fronts beneath their overcoats showed that they were in evening dress.

Her laughter was not natural. It had no joy in it, yet she laughed and laughed, and feeling as if I _knew_ (because life had that day trampled on me also), I said to myself:

"That woman's heart is dead."

This caused me to glance at her as I passed, when, catching a side glimpse of her face, I was startled by a memory I could not fix.

"Where and when have I seen that woman's face before?" I thought.

It seemed impossible that I could have seen it anywhere. But the woman's resemblance to somebody I had known, coupled with her joyless laughter, compelled me to stop at the next corner and look back.

By this time the gentlemen, who had been treating her lightly (O God, how men treat such women!), had left her and, coming arm-in-arm in my direction, with their silk hats tilted a little back, were saying:

"Poor old Aggie! She's off!" "Completely off!" "Is it drink, I wonder?"

And then, seeing me, they said:

"Gad, here's a nice little gal, though!" "No rouge, neither!" "By Jove, no! Her face is as white as a waterlily!"

Seeing that they were wheeling round, and fearing they were going to speak to me, I moved back and so came face to face with the woman, who was standing where they had left her, silent now, and looking after the men with fierce eyes under the fair hair that curled over her forehead.

Then in a moment a memory from the far past swept over me, and I cried, almost as if the name had been forced out of me:

"Sister Angela!"

The woman started, and it seemed for a moment as if she were going to run away. Then she laid hold of me by the arm and, looking searchingly into my face, said:

"Who are you? . . . I know. You are Mary O'Neill, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I knew you were. I read about your marriage to that . . . that man. And now you are wondering why I am here. Well, come home with me and see."

It was not until afterwards that I knew by what mistake about my presence in that place Angela thought she must justify herself in my eyes (mine!); but taking me by the hand, just as she used to do when I was a child, she led, almost pulled, me down Piccadilly, and my will was so broken that I did not attempt to resist her.

We crossed Piccadilly Circus, with its white sheet of electric light, and, turning into the darker thoroughfares on the northern side of it, walked on until, in a narrow street of the Italian quarter of Soho, we stopped at a private door by the side of a café that had an Italian name on the window.

"This is where we live. Come in," said Angela, and I followed her through a long empty lobby and up three flights of bare stairs.

While we ascended, there was the deadened sound, as from the café, of men singing (in throbbing voices to mandolines and guitars) one of the Italian songs which I remembered to have heard from the piazza outside the convent on that night when Sister Angela left me in bed while she went off to visit the chaplain:

"_Oh bella Napoli, Oh suol beato
Onde sorridere volle il creato._"

"The Italian Club," said Angela. "Only one flight more. Come!"

ONE HUNDRED AND FIRST CHAPTER

At length Angela opened, with a key from her satchel, a door on the top landing, and we entered a darkened room which was partly in the roof.

As we stepped in I heard rapid breathing, which told me that we were in a sick chamber, and then a man's voice, very husky and weak, saying:

"Is that you, Agnes?"

"It's only me, dear," said Angela..

After a moment she turned up the solitary gas-jet, which had been burning low, and I saw the shadowy form of a man lying in a bed that stood in a corner. He was wasted with consumption, his long bony hands were lying on the counterpane, his dark hair was matted over his forehead as from sweat, but I could not mistake the large, lively grey eyes that looked out of his long thin face. It was Father Giovanni.

Angela went up to him and kissed him, and I could see that his eyes lighted with a smile as he saw her coming into the room.

"There's somebody with you, isn't there?" he said.

"Yes. Who do you think it is?"

"Who?"

"Don't you remember little Margaret Mary at the Sacred Heart?"

"Is this she?"

"Yes," said Angela, and then in a hoarse, angry voice the man said:

"What has she come here for?"

Angela told him that I had seen her on Piccadilly, and being a great lady now, I (Oh heaven!) was one of the people who came out into the streets at midnight to rescue lost ones.

"She looked as if she wondered what had brought me down to that life, so I've fetched her home to see."

I was shocked at Angela's mistake, but before I could gather strength or courage to correct her Giovanni was raising himself in bed and saying, with a defiant air, his eyes blazing like watch-fires:

"She does it for me, if you want to know. I've been eleven months ill--she does it all for me, I tell you."

And then, in one of those outbursts of animation which come to the victims of that fell disease, he gave me a rapid account of what had happened to them since they ran away from Rome--how at first he had earned their living as a teacher of languages; how it became known that he was an unfrocked and excommunicated priest who had broken his vows, and then his pupils had left him; how they had struggled on for some years longer, though pursued by this character as by a malignant curse; and how at length his health had quite broken down, and he would have starved but for Agnes (Angela being her nun's name), who had stuck to him through everything.

While the sick man said this in his husky voice, Angela was sitting on the bed by his side with her arm about his waist, listening to him with a sort of pride and looking at me with a kind of triumph.

"I dare say you wonder why I didn't try to get work," she said. "I _could_ have got it if I had wanted to. I could have got it at the Italian laundry. But what was two shillings a day to a man who was ordered new milk and fresh eggs five times every twenty-four hours, not to speak of the house rent?"

"She ought to have let me die first," said Giovanni, and then, looking at me again with his large, glittering, fierce eyes, he said:

"_You_ think she ought to have let me die, don't you?"

"No, no, no," I said--it was all I _could_ say, for their mistake about myself was choking me.

Perhaps my emotion appeased both of them, for after a moment Angela beat out Giovanni's pillow and straightened his counterpane, and then told him to lie down and be quiet, while she brought a chair for me and took off her things in her own bedroom.

But hardly had she gone into an adjoining chamber when the sick man raised himself again and, reaching over in my direction, told me in a hoarse whisper the story of the first night of her present way of life--how the doctor had said he must be removed to the hospital; how Agnes would not part with him; how the landlord had threatened to turn them out; and how at last, after sitting with her head in her hands the whole evening, Aggie had got up and gone out and, coming back at midnight, had thrown two sovereigns on the table and said, "There you are, Giovanni--that's our rent and your eggs and milk for one week, anyway."

By this time Angela had returned to the room (her paint and rouge washed off, and her gay clothes replaced by a simple woollen jacket over a plain underskirt), and she began to beat up an egg, to boil some milk, to pour out a dose of medicine, and to do, with all a good woman's tact, a good woman's tenderness, the little services of which an invalid stands in need.

Oh heavens, how beautiful it was--fearfully, awfully tragically beautiful!

I was deeply moved as I sat in silence watching her; and when at length Giovanni, who had been holding her hand in his own long, bony ones and sometimes putting it to his lips, dropped off to sleep (tired out, perhaps, by talking to me), and she, drawing up to where I sat by the end of the bed, resumed her self-defence, saying in a whisper that ladies like me could not possibly understand what a woman would do, in spite of herself, when the life of one she loved was threatened, I could bear her mistake no longer, but told her of my real condition--that I was no longer a lady, that I had run away from my husband, that I had a child, and was living as a poor seamstress in the East End of London.

Angela listened to my story in astonishment; and when I had come to an end she was holding my hand and looking into my eyes with just that look which she had when she put me to bed for the first time at school, and, making her voice very low, told me to be a good child of the Infant Jesus.

"It's nearly one o'clock. You can't go back to the East End to-night," she whispered.

"Oh, I must, I must," I said, getting up and making for the door. But before I had reached it my limbs gave way, whether from the strain of emotion or physical weakness, and if it had not been for Angela I should have dropped to the floor.

After that she would hear of no excuses. I must stay until morning. I could sleep in her own bed in the other room, and she could lay a mattress for herself on the floor by the side of Giovanni's. There would be no great sacrifice in that. It was going to be one of Giovanni's bad nights, and she was likely to be up and down all the time anyway.

Half an hour later I was in bed in a little room that was separated by a thin papered partition from the room of the poor consumptive, and Angela, who had brought me a cup of hot milk, was saying in a whisper:

"He's very bad. The doctor says he can't last longer than a week. Sister Veronica (you remember her, she's Mildred Bankes that used to be) tried to get him into a home for the dying. It was all arranged, too, but at the last moment he wouldn't go. He told them that, if they wanted to separate him from Agnes, they had better bring his coffin because he would be dead before they got him to the door."

When she had gone I lay a long time in the dark, listening to the sounds on the other side of the partition.

Giovanni awoke with an alarming fit of coughing, and in the querulous, plaintive, fretful, sometimes angry tones which invalids have, he grumbled at Angela and then cried over her, saying what a burden he was to her, while she, moving about the room in her bare feet, coaxed and caressed him, and persuaded him to take his milk or his medicine.

Through all this I would hear at intervals the drumming noises of the singing downstairs, which sounded in my ears (as the singers were becoming more and more intoxicated) like the swirling and screeching of an ironical requiem for the dying man before he was dead:

"_Oh bella Napoli, Oh suol beato
Onde sorridere volle il creato_."

But somewhere in those dead hours in which London sleeps everything became still, and my mind, which had been questioning the grim darkness on the worst of the world's tragedies (what a woman will do for those she loves), fell back on myself and I thought of the Christian institutions which had turned me from their doors, and then of this "street-walker" who had given up her own bed to me and was now lying in the next room on a mattress on the floor.

I could not help it if I felt a startling reverence for Angela, as a ministering angel faithful unto death, and I remembered that as I fell asleep I was telling myself that we all needed God's mercy, God's pardon, and that, God would forgive her because she had loved much.

But sleep was more tolerant still I dreamt that Angela died, and on reaching the gates of heaven all the saints of God met her, and after they had clothed her in a spotless white robe, one of them--it was the blessed Mary Magdalene--took her hand and said:

"Here is another of the holy martyrs."

I awoke from that dream with beads of perspiration on my forehead. But I dare not say what confused and terrible thoughts came next, except that they were about baby--what I might do myself if driven to the last extremity. When I slept and dreamt again, it was I who was dead, and it was my darling mother who met me and took me to the feet of the Blessed Virgin and said:

"Mother of all Mothers, who knows all that is in a mother's heart, this is my little daughter. She did not intend to do wrong. It was all for the sake of her child."

When I awoke in the morning, with the darkness shivering off through the gloom, this last dream was sitting upon me like a nightmare. It terrified me. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a precipice and some awful forces were trying to push me over it.

The London sparrows were chirping on the skylight over my head, and I could faintly hear the Italian criers in the front street:

"Latte!" "Spazzina!" "Erbaggi freschi!"

In spite of myself (hating myself for it after all the tenderness that had been shown me), I could not overcome a feeling of shame at finding myself lying where I was, and I got up to run away that I might cleanse my soul of the evil thoughts which had come to me while there.

As I dressed I listened for a sound from the adjoining room. All was quiet now. The poor restless ones were at last getting a little rest.

A few minutes afterwards I passed on tiptoe through their room without looking towards the bed, and reaching the door to the staircase I opened it as noiselessly as I could.

Then I closed it softly after me, on so much suffering and so much love.

ONE HUNDRED AND SECOND CHAPTER

The sun was shining in the street. It was one of those clear, clean, frosty mornings when the very air of London, even in the worst places, seems to be washed by the sunlight from the sin and drink of the night before.

I was on my way to that church among the mews of Mayfair to which I had gone so frequently during the early days of my marriage when I was struggling against the mortal sin (as I thought it was) of loving Martin.

Just as I reached the church and was ascending the steps, a gorgeous landau with high-stepping horses and a powdered footman drew up at the bottom of them.

The carriage, which bore a coronet on the door, contained a lady in long furs, a rosy-faced baby-girl in squirrel skins with a large doll in her arms, and a nurse.

I could see that, like myself, the lady (a young mother) had come to confess, for as she rose from her seat she told the child to sit quiet and be good and she would not keep her long.

"Tum out soon, mummy, and dolly will lub you eber and eber," said the child.

The lady stooped and kissed the little one, and then, with a proud and happy look, stepped out of the carriage and passed into the church, while the door-keeper opened the vestibule door for her and bowed deeply.

I stood at the top of the steps for a moment looking back at the carriage, the horses, the footman, the nurse, and, above all, the baby-girl with her doll, and then followed the lady into the church.

Apparently mass was just over. Little spirelets of smoke were rising from the candles on the altar which the sacristan was putting out, a few communicants were still on their knees, and others with light yet echoing footsteps were making for the door.

The lady in furs had already taken her place at one of the confessional boxes, and as there seemed to be no other that was occupied by a priest, I knelt on a chair in the nave and tried to fix my mind on the prayers (once so familiar) for the examination of conscience before confession:

"_Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, dispel the darkness of my heart, that I may bewail my sins and rightly confess them_."

But the labouring of my spirit was like the flight of a bat in the daylight. Though I tried hard to keep my mind from wandering, I could not do so. Again and again it went back to the lady in furs with the coroneted carriage and the high-stepping horses.

She was about my own age, and she began to rise before my tightly closed eyes as a vision of what I might have been myself if I had not given up everything for love--wealth, rank, title, luxury.

God is my witness that down to that moment I had never once thought I had made any sacrifice, but now, as by a flash of cruel lightning, I saw myself as I was--a peeress who had run away from her natural condition and was living in the slums, working like any other work-girl.

Even this did not hurt me much, but when I thought of the rosy-faced child in the carriage, and then of my own darling at Mrs. Oliver's as I had seen her last, so thin and pale, and with her little bib stained by her curdled milk, a feeling I had never had before pierced to my very soul.

I asked myself if this was what God looked down upon and permitted--that because I had obeyed what I still believed to be the purest impulse of my nature, love, my child must be made to suffer.

Then something hard began to form in my heart. I told myself that what I had been taught to believe about God was falsehood and deception.

All this time I was trying to hush down my mind by saying my prayer, which called on the gracious Virgin Mary to intercede for me with my Redeemer, and the holy Saints of God to assist me.

"_Assist me by thy grace, that I may be able to declare my sins to the priest, thy Vicar_."

It was of no use. Every moment my heart was hardening, and what I had intended to confess about my wicked thoughts of the night before was vanishing away. At last I rose to my feet and, lifting my head, looked boldly up at the altar.

Just at that moment the young peeress, having finished her confession, went off with a light step and a cheerful face. Her kneeling-place at the confessional box was now vacant, yet I did not attempt to take it, and some minutes passed in which I stood biting my lips to prevent a cry. Then the priest parted his curtains and beckoned to me, and I moved across and stood stubbornly by the perforated brass grating.

"Father," I said, as firmly as I could, for my throat was fluttering, "I came here to make my confession, but something has come over me since I entered this church, and now I cannot."

"What has come over you, my child?" asked the priest.

"I feel that what is said about God in a place like this, that He is a kind and beneficent Father, who is just and merciful and pities the sufferings of His children, is untrue. It is all wrong and false. _God does not care_."

The priest did not answer me immediately, but after a moment of silence he said in a quivering voice:

"My child, I feel just like that myself sometimes. It is the devil tempting you. He is standing by your side and whispering in your ear, at this moment."

I shuddered, and the priest added:

"I see how it is, my daughter. You are suffering, and those you love are suffering too. But must you surrender your faith on that account? Look round at the pictures on these walls [the Stations of the Cross]. Think of the Great Sufferer, the Great Martyr, who in the hour of His death, at the malicious power of the world, cried, '_Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani_: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'"

I had dropped to my knees by now, my head was down, and my hands were clasped together.

"You are wrong, my child, if you think God does not care for you because He allows you to suffer. Are you rich? Are you prosperous? Have you every earthly blessing? Then beware, for Satan is watching for your soul. But are you poor? Are you going through unmerited trouble? Have you lost some one who was dearer to you than your heart of hearts? Then take courage, for our holy and blessed Saviour has marked you for His own."

I know nothing of that priest except his whispering voice, which, coming through the grating of the confessional, produced the effect of the supernatural, but I thought then, and I think now, that he must have been a great as well as a good man.

I perfectly recollect that, when I left the church and passed into the streets, it seemed as if his spirit went with me and built up in my soul a resolution that was bright with heavenly tears and sunshine.

Work! Work! Work! I should work still harder than before. No matter how mean, ill-paid, and uncongenial my work might be, I should work all day and all night if necessary. And since I had failed to get my child into an orphanage, it was clearly intended that I should keep her with me, for my own charge and care and joy.

This was the mood in which I returned to the house of the Jew.

It was Saturday morning, and though the broader thoroughfares of the East End were crowded and the narrower streets full of life, the Jew's house was silent, for it was the Jewish Sabbath.

As I went hurriedly upstairs I heard the Jew himself, who was dressing for the synagogue, singing his Sabbath hymn: _Lerho daudee likras kollo_--"Come, O friend, let us go forth to meet the Bride, let us receive the Sabbath with joy!"

Then came a shock.

When I reached my room I found, to my dismay, that the pile of vests which I had left on my bed on going out the day before had been removed; and just as I was telling myself that no one else except Mrs. Abramovitch had a key to my door I heard shuffling footsteps on the stair, and knew that her husband was coming up to me.

A moment afterwards the Jew stood in my doorway. He was dressed in his Sabbath suit and, free from the incongruous indications of his homely calling, the patriarchal appearance which had first struck me was even more marked than before. His face was pale, his expression was severe, and if his tongue betrayed the broken English of the Polish Jew, I, in my confusion and fear, did not notice it then.

My first thought was that he had come to reprove me for neglecting my work, and I was prepared to promise to make up for my absence. But at a second glance I saw that something had happened, something had become known, and that he was there to condemn and denounce me.

"You have been out all night," he said. "Can you tell me where you have been?"

I knew I could not, and though it flashed upon me to say that I had slept at the house of a friend, I saw that, if he asked who my friend was, and what, I should be speechless.

The Jew waited for my reply and then said:

"You have given us a name--can you say it is your true and right one?"

Again I made no answer, and after another moment the Jew said:

"Can you deny that you have a child whom you have hidden from our knowledge?"

I felt myself gasping, but still I did not speak.

"Can you say that it was lawfully born according to your Christian marriage?"

I felt the colour flushing into my face but I was still silent; and after a moment in which, as I could see, the stern-natured Jew was summing me up as a woman of double life and evil character, he said:

"Then it is true? . . . Very well, you will understand that from this day you cease to be in my service."

All this time my eyes were down, but I was aware that somebody else had come into the room. It was Miriam, and she was trying to plead for me.

"Father . . ." she began, but, turning hotly upon her, the Jew cried passionately:

"Go away! A true daughter of Israel should know better than to speak for such a woman."

I heard the girl going slowly down the stairs, and then the Jew, stepping up to me and speaking more loudly than before, said:

"Woman, leave my house at once, before you corrupt the conscience of my child."

Again I became aware that some one had come into the room. It was Mrs. Abramovitch, and she, too, was pleading for me.

"Israel! Calm thyself! Do not give way to injustice and anger. On Shobbos morning, too!"

"Hannah," said the Jew, "thou speakest with thy mouth, not thy heart. The Christian doth not deny that she hath given thee a false name, and is the adulterous mother of a misbegotten child. If she were a Jewish woman she would be summoned before the Beth Din, and in better days our law of Moses would have stoned her. Shall she, because she is a Christian, dishonour a good Jewish house? No! The hand of the Lord would go out against me."

"But she is homeless, and she hath been a good servant to thee, Israel. Give her time to find another shelter."

There was a moment of silence after that, and then the Jew said:

"Very well! It shall not be said that Israel Abramovitch knows not to temper justice with mercy."

And then, my face being still down, I heard him saying over my head:

"You may stay here another week. After that I wash my hands of thee."

With these hard words he turned away, and I heard him going heavily down the stairs. His wife stayed a little longer, saying something in a kind voice, which I did not comprehend, and then she followed him.

I do not think I had spoken a word. I continued to stand where the Jew had left me. After a while I heard him closing and locking the door of his own apartment, and knew that he was going off to his synagogue in Brick Lane in his tall silk hat worn on the back of his head like a skull-cap, and with his wife and daughter behind him, carrying his leather-bound prayer-book.

I hardly knew what else was happening. My heart was heaving like a dead body on a billow. All that the priest had said was gone. In its place there was a paralysing despair as if the wheels of life were rolling over me.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My dear, long-suffering, martyred darling!

It makes my blood boil to see how the very powers of darkness, in the name of religion, morality, philanthropy and the judgment of God, were persecuting my poor little woman.

But why speak of myself at all, or interrupt my darling's narrative, except to say what was happening in my efforts to reach her?

While we were swinging along in our big liner over the heaving bosom of the Mediterranean the indefinable sense of her danger never left me day or night.

That old dream of the glacier and the precipice continued to haunt my sleep, with the difference that, instead of the aurora glistening in my dear one's eyes, there was now a blizzard behind her.

The miserable thing so tortured me as we approached Malta (where I expected to receive a reply to the cable I had sent from Port Said to the house of Daniel O'Neill) that I felt physically weak at the thought of the joy or sorrow ahead of me.

Though there was no telegram from my darling at Malta, there was one from the chairman of my committee, saying he was coming to Marseilles to meet our steamer and would sail the rest of the way home with us.

Indirectly this brought me a certain comfort. It reminded me of the letter I had written for my dear one on the day I left Castle Raa. Sixteen months had passed since then, serious things had happened in the interval, and I had never thought of that letter before.

It was not to her father, as she supposed, and certainly not to her husband. It was to my chairman, asking him, in the event of my darling sending it on, to do whatever was necessary to protect her during my absence.

If my chairman had not received that letter, my conclusion would be that my dear little woman had never been reduced to such straits as to require help from any one. If he had in fact received it, he must have done what I wished, and therefore everything would be well.

There was a certain suspense as well as a certain consolation in all this, and before our big ship slowed down at Marseilles I was on deck searching for my chairman among the people waiting for us on the pier.

I saw him immediately, waving his travelling cap with a flourish of joy, and I snatched a little comfort from that.

As soon as the steamer was brought to, he was the first to come aboard, and I scanned his face as he hurried up the gangway. It was beaming.

"It's all right," I thought; "a man could not look as happy as that if he were bringing me bad news."

A moment afterwards he was shaking my hand, clapping me on the shoulder, and saying:

"Splendid! Magnificent! Glorious achievement! Proved your point up to the hilt, my boy!"

And when I said something about not having gone all the way he cried:

"Never mind! You'll do it next time," which made some of my shipmates who were standing round with shining eyes say, "Aye, aye, sir," and then one of them (it was good old O'Sullivan) shouted:

"By the stars of heaven, that's thrue, my lord! And if anybody's after saying that the Commanther was turned back this time by anything less than the almighty power of Nature in her wrath, you may say there's forty-eight of us here to tell him he lies."

"I believe it," said the chairman, and then there were further congratulations, with messages from members of my committee, but never a word from my dear one.

Thinking the chairman might hesitate to speak of a private matter until we were alone, I took him down to my state-room. But he had nothing to say there, either, except about articles to be written, reports to be compiled, and invitations to be accepted.

Several hours passed like this. We were again out at sea, and my longing to know what had happened was consuming me, but I dared not ask from fear of a bad answer.

Before the night was out, however, I had gone to work in a roundabout way. Taking O'Sullivan into my confidence, I told him it had not been my parents that I had been anxious about (God forgive me!), but somebody else whom he had seen and spoken to.

"Do you mean Mal . . . I should say Lady . . ."

"Yes."

"By the holy saints, the way I was thinking that when I brought you the letter at Port Said, and saw the clouds of heaven still hanging on you."

I found that the good fellow had a similar trouble of his own (not yet having heard from his mother), so he fell readily into my plan, which was that of cross-questioning the chairman about my dear one, and I about his, and then meeting secretly and imparting what we had learned.

Anybody may laugh who likes at the thought of two big lumbering fellows afraid to face the truth (scouting round and round it), but it grips me by the throat to this day to see myself taking our chairman into a quiet corner of the smoke-room and saying:

"Poor old O'Sullivan! He hasn't heard from his old mother yet. She was sick when he sailed, and wouldn't have parted with him to go with anybody except myself. You haven't heard of her, have you?"

And then to think of O'Sullivan doing the same for me, with:

"The poor Commanther! Look at him there. Faith, he's keeping a good heart, isn't he? But it's just destroyed he is for want of news of a great friend that was in trouble. It was a girl . . . a lady, I mane. You haven't heard the whisper of a word, sir . . . eh?"

Our chairman had heard nothing. And when (bracing myself at last) I asked point-blank if anything had been sent to him as from me, and he answered "No," I might have been relieved, but I wasn't. Though I did not know then that my darling had burnt my letter, I began to feel that she was the last person in the world to use it, being (God bless her!) of the mettle that makes a woman want to fight her own battles without asking help of any one.

This quite crushed down my heart, for, seeing that she had sent no reply to my cables, I could not find any escape from the conclusion that she was where no word could come from her--she was dead!

Lord God, how I suffered when this phantom got into my mind! I used to walk up and down the promenade deck late into the night, trying and condemning myself as if I had been my own judge and jury.

"She is dead. I have killed her," I thought.

Thank God, the phantom was soon laid by the gladdest sight I ever saw on earth or ever expect to see, and it wouldn't be necessary to speak of it now but for the glorious confidence it brought me.

It was the same with me as with a ship-broken man whom Providence comes to relieve in his last extremity, and I could fix the place of mine as certainly as if I had marked it on a chart. We had called at Gibraltar (where O'Sullivan had received a letter from his mother, saying she was splendid) and were running along the coast of Portugal.

It was a dirty black night, with intervals of rain, I remember. While my shipmates were making cheerful times of it in the smoke-room (O'Sullivan with heart at ease singing the "Minsthrel Boy" to a chorus of noisy cheers) I was walking up and down the deck with my little stock of courage nearly gone, for turn which way I would it was dark, dark, dark, when just as we picked up the lights of Finisterre something said to me, as plainly as words could speak:

"What in the name of thunder are you thinking about? Do you mean to say that you were turned back in the 88th latitude, and have been hurried home without the loss of a moment, only to find everything over at the end of your journey? No, no, no! Your poor, dear, heroic little woman is alive! She may be in danger, and beset by all the powers of the devil, but that's just why you have been brought home to save her, and you _will_ save her, as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow morning."

There are thoughts which, like great notes in music, grip you by the soul and lift you into a world which you don't naturally belong to. This was one of them.

Never after that did I feel one moment's real anxiety. I was my own man once more; and though I continued to walk the deck while our good ship sped along in the night, it was only because there was a kind of wild harmony between the mighty voice of the rolling billows of the Bay and the unheard anthem of boundless hope that was singing in my breast.

I recollect that during my walk a hymn was always haunting me. It was the same that we used to sing in the shuddering darkness of that perpetual night, when we stood (fifty downhearted men) under the shelter of our snow camp, with a ninety mile blizzard shrieking above us:

"_Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on_."

But the light was within me now, and I knew as certainly as that the good ship was under my feet that I was being carried home at the call of the Spirit to rescue my stricken darling.

God keep her on her solitary way! England! England! England! Less than a week and I should be there!

That was early hours on Saturday morning--the very Saturday when my poor little woman, after she had been turned away by those prating philanthropists, was being sheltered by the prostitute.

Let him explain it who can. I cannot.

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

ONE HUNDRED AND THIRD CHAPTER

I must have been sitting a full hour or more on the end of my bed--stunned, stupefied, unable to think--when Miriam, back from the synagogue, came stealthily upstairs to say that a messenger had come for me about six o'clock the night before.

"He said his name was Oliver, and father saw him, and that's how he came to know. 'Tell her that her child is ill, and she is to come immediately,' he said."

I was hardly conscious of what happened next--hardly aware of passing through the streets to Ilford. I had a sense of houses flying by as they seem to do from an express train; of my knees trembling; of my throat tightening; and of my whole soul crying out to God to save the life of my child until I could get to her.

When I reached the house of the Olivers the worst of my fears were relieved. Mrs. Oliver was sitting before the fire with baby on her lap.

At sight of me the woman began to mumble out something about my delay, and how she could not be held responsible if anything happened; but caring nothing about responsibility, hers or mine, I took baby from her without more words.

My child was in a state of deep drowsiness, and when I tried to rouse her I could not do so. I gathered that this condition had lasted twenty-four hours, during which she had taken no nourishment, with the result that she was now very thin.

I knew nothing of children's ailments but a motherly instinct must have come to my aid, for I called for a bath, and bathed baby, and she awoke, and then took a little food.

But again she dropped back into the drowsy condition, and Mrs. Oliver, who was alarmed, called in some of the neighbours to look at her.

Apparently the mission of the good women was to comfort Mrs. Oliver, not me, but they said, "Sleep never did no harm to nobody," and I found a certain consolation in that.

Hours passed. I was barely sensible of anything that happened beyond the narrow circle of my own lap, but at one moment I heard the squirling of a brass band that was going up the street, with the shuffling of an irregular procession.

"It's the strike," said Mrs. Oliver, running to the window. "There's Ted, carrying a banner."

A little later I heard the confused noises of a strike meeting, which was being held on the Green. It was like the croaking of a frog-pond, with now and then a strident voice (the bricklayer's) crying "Buckle your belts tighter, and starve rather than give in, boys." Still later I heard the procession going away, singing with a slashing sound that was like driving wind and pelting rain:

"_The land, the land, the blessed, blessed land,
Gawd gave the land to the people_."

But nothing awakened baby, and towards three in the afternoon (the idea that she was really ill having taken complete possession of me) I asked where I could find the nearest doctor, and being told, I went off in search of him.

The doctor was on his rounds, so I left a written message indicating baby's symptoms and begging him to come to her immediately.

On the way back I passed a number of children's funerals--easily recognisable by the combined coach and hearse, the white linen "weepers" worn by the coachman and his assistant, and the little coffin, sprinkled with cheap flowers, in the glass case behind the driver's seat. These sights, which brought back a memory of the woman who carried my baby down the Mile End Road, almost deprived me of my senses.

I had hardly got back and taken off my coat and warmed my hands and dress by the fire before taking baby in my lap, when the doctor, in his gig, pulled up at the door.

He was a young man, but he seemed to take in the situation in a moment. I was the mother, wasn't I? Yes. And this woman was baby's nurse? Yes.

Then he drew up a chair and looked steadfastly down at baby, and I went through that breathless moment, which most of us know, when we are waiting for the doctor's first word.

"Some acute digestive trouble here apparently," he said, and then something about finding out the cause of it.

But hardly had he put his hands on my child as she lay in my lap than there came a faintly discoloured vomit.

"What have you been giving her?" he said, looking round at Mrs. Oliver.

Mrs. Oliver protested that she had given baby nothing except her milk, but the doctor said sharply:

"Don't talk nonsense, woman. Show me what you've given her."

Then Mrs. Oliver, looking frightened, went upstairs and brought down a bottle of medicine, saying it was a soothing syrup which I had myself bought for baby's cough.

"As I thought!" said the doctor, and going to the door and opening it, he flung the bottle on to the waste ground opposite, saying as he did so:

"If I hear of you giving your babies any more of your soothing syrup I'll see what the Inspector has to say."

After that, ignoring nurse, he asked me some searching and intimate questions--if I had had a great grief or shock or worry while baby was coming, and whether and how long I had nursed her.

I answered as truthfully as I could, though I saw the drift of his inquiries, and was trembling with fear of what he would tell me next.

He said nothing then, however, except to make his recommendations. And remembering my loss of work, my heart sank as he enumerated baby's needs--fresh cow's milk diluted with lime water, small quantities of meat juice, and twenty to thirty drops of the best brandy three or four times a day.

When he rose to go I paid his fee. It was only half-a-crown, but he cannot have known how much that meant to me, for as he was leaving the kitchen he told me to send for him again in the morning if there were a change in the symptoms.

Feeling that I did not yet know the whole truth (though I was trembling in terror of it), I handed baby to Mrs. Oliver and followed the doctor to the door.

"Doctor," I said, "is my baby very ill?"

He hesitated for a moment and then answered, "Yes."

"Dangerously ill?"

Again he hesitated, and then looking closely at me (I felt my lower lip trembling) he said:

"I won't say that. She's suffering from marasmus, provoked by overdoses of the pernicious stuff that is given by ignorant and unscrupulous people to a restless child to keep it quiet. But her real trouble comes of maternal weakness, and the only cure for that is good nourishment and above all fresh air and sunshine."

"Will she get better?"

"If you can take her away, into the country she will, certainly."

"And if . . . if I can't," I asked, the words fluttering up to my lips, "will she . . . _die_?"

The doctor looked steadfastly at me again (I was biting my lip to keep it firm), and said:

"She _may_."

When I returned to the kitchen I knew that I was face to face with another of the great mysteries of a woman's life--Death--the death of my child, which my very love and tenderness had exposed her to.

Meantime Mrs. Oliver, who was as white as a whitewashed wall, was excusing herself in a whining voice that had the sound of a spent wave. She wouldn't have hurt the pore dear precious for worlds, and if it hadn't been for Ted, who was so tired at night and wanted sleep after walking in percession. . . .

Partly to get rid of the woman I sent her out (with almost the last of my money) for some of the things ordered by the doctor. While she was away, and I was looking down at the little silent face on my lap, praying for one more glimpse of my Martin's sea-blue eyes, the bricklayer came lunging into the house.

"Where's Lizer?" he said.

I told him and he cried:

"The baiby again! Allus the baiby!"

With that he took out of his pocket a cake of moist tobacco, cut and rolled some of it in his palm, and then charged his pipe and lit it--filling the air with clouds of rank smoke, which made baby bark and cough without rousing her.

I pointed this out to him and asked him not to smoke.

"Eh?" he said, and then I told him that the doctor had been called and what he had said about fresh air.

"So that's it, is it?" he said. "Good! Just reminds me of something I want to say, so I'll introdooce the matter now, in a manner o' speaking. Last night I 'ad to go to Mile End for you, and here's Lizer out on a sim'lar arrand. If people 'ave got to be 'ospital nurses to a sick baiby they ought to be paid, mind ye. We're only pore, and it may be a sacred dooty walkin' in percession, but it ain't fillin'."

Choking with anger, I said:

"Put out your pipe, please."

"Ma'am to _you_!"

"Put it out this moment, sir, or I'll see if I can't find somebody to make you."

The bricklayer laughed, then pointed with the shank of his pipe to the two photographs over the mantelpiece, and said:

"See them? Them's me, with my dooks up. If any friend o' yourn as is interested in the baiby comes to lay a 'and on me I'll see if I've forgot 'ow to use 'em."

I felt the colour shuddering out of my cheeks, and putting baby into the cot I turned on the man and cried:

"You scoundrel! The doctor has told me what is the immediate cause of my baby's illness and your wife has confessed to giving overdoses of a drug at your direction. If you don't leave this house in one minute I'll go straight to the police-station and charge you with poisoning my child."

The bully in the coward was cowed in a moment.

"Don't get 'uffy, ma'am," he said. "I'm the peaceablest man in the East End, and if I mentioned anything about a friend o' yourn it slipped out in the 'eat of the moment--see?"

"Out you go! Go! Go!" I cried, and, incredible as it may seem, the man went flying before my face as if I had been a fury.

It would be a long tale to tell of what happened the day following, the next and the next and the next--how baby became less drowsy, but more restless; how being unable to retain her food she grew thinner and thinner; how I wished to send for the doctor, but dared not do so from fear of his fee; how the little money I had left was barely sufficient to buy the food and stimulants which were necessary to baby's cure: how I sat for long hours with my little lamb on my lap straining my dry eyes into her face; and how I cried to God for the life of my child, which was everything I had or wanted.

All this time I was still lodging at the Jew's, returning to it late every night, and leaving it early in the morning, but nothing happened there that seemed to me of the smallest consequence. One day Miriam, looking at me with her big black eyes, said:

"You must take more rest, dear, or you will make yourself ill."

"No, no, I am not ill," I answered, and then remembering how necessary my life was to the life of my child, I said, "I must not be ill."