Mabel Osgood Wright

The arrest of Tom O’More threw the matter of little Billy’s leg into the background for a time. When the father had gone to the court where his son was arraigned, he found that not only was there another charge against him, but that all unknown to his family he had committed petty thefts in other places, and had already what the police call “a record,” so that he had to go to the penitentiary for a year, and John O’More, feeling his disgrace keenly, for though he was a rough man and coarse in many ways he was as honest as the day, turned doubly to little Billy, and could not bear to have him out of his sight when he was at home.

The doctor’s orders concerning Billy had been short and clear, but it was fully a week after the visit before his mother could pull herself together or even think of carrying them out, and then when O’More took a day at home and had leisure to ask for details, she began by saying that what the doctor had ordered to get the child in condition for treatment was nonsense, and only to be had by rich folks.

“Well, well, woman, let’s hear and get to the core o’ the matter,” said John O’More, tired of the continual word warfare.

“He’s to have a real bed and no shake-down, so’s he can stretch out and roll about, and it’s to be in a room opening to the light where he can lie quieter by himself an hour or so every day. Then he’s to get a full bath every morning and a light meal, and fresh meat at noon, and a bite and sup between that at supper, and the between times filled in with air and a bottle o’ tonic, and the saints knows what else.

“‘Do yer think I keep a ’ospital to do all them things,’ sez I to the doctor.

“‘No,’ he answers quick like, ‘and for that reason I think it will pay you best to send him to the ’ospital to get him built up.’

“‘His father will not hear to it,’ I said.

“‘Very well, then,’ said he, ‘you know what I think; go home and talk it over.’”

So John O’More sat and thought and blinked at the ground, and thought some more, but it was Bird who first spoke, though very hesitatingly, for her aunt resented almost everything she said, and in her ignorance and prejudice seemed to owe poor Bird a grudge as being partially responsible for Tom’s arrest, rather than showing any gratitude toward her for trying to prevent the theft of the money.

“Couldn’t Billy have a bed in the little room that was—that is shut up?” she asked finally. “The door is close to the kitchen window, and a good deal of air would come in.”

“It’s packed solid full, and besides the room is off from me, so’s I couldn’t hear the child to tend him in the night if needs,” objected Mrs. O’More, somewhat hotly.

“Couldn’t the things be put in the attic or somewhere?” persisted Bird, seeing a flash of approval cross her uncle’s face, “and then there would be room for two beds, and I could stay with Billy and give him his bath every morning.”

“Attic! do you hear her?” mocked the aunt, “and a fine slop there’d be in me kitchen, and a nice place for folks to eat breakfast, with the bath.”

“If the things were taken out of the bath-tub we could use that,” continued Bird, waxing bold at the prospects, “and I’m sure, Aunt Rose, it would be much nicer for you to have the parlour to yourself, and not have to make me a bed there every night.”

“That last is true; I’ve been greatly put out these days when company called,” the company being the slipshod factory girls for whom she did sewing, but, as often happened, Bird had unconsciously said the one thing that could have appeased her aunt, for only when something was suggested that would benefit herself was she willing to have others considered.

“The tub is full of holes, and the agent he won’t mend it, saying that I made them with the ice-pick, when for convenience I used that same tub for an ice-box, me own givin’ out.”

“If that’s all, a bit o’ solder is cheap,” said O’More, springing to his feet, and preparing to take action.

“I’ve the day on me hands, and a few extry dollars in me pocket, and if something can’t be worked out o’ this, ’twon’t be my fault; and while I recommember it, I think you’d be the better of a new hat, Rosie, and while yer out buyin’ it, jest step in the store, round on Third Avenue and get two o’ them light-lookin’, white iron beds; they’re cheap, for I saw yesterday when passin’ that they be havin’ a bargain sale of them,” and John, with the quick-witted diplomacy of his race, handed his wife some money which she took, and, half mollified, at once prepared to go out, instructing Bird to “do up the rooms” while she was gone.

The door had not fairly closed when O’More gave a shout that almost frightened Bird, and said: “Now we’ll do some hustlin’; there’s no attic, me girl, but there’s the coal-closet in the cellar which is empty, now that we use gas in the range. Half the stuff is but fit for the ashman, and the rest I’ll bundle down there quick as I get a man from the stable to help. Now watch sharp whilst I put the truck out and see if there’s aught yer can use.”

When the room was finally cleared, a mirror, a chair, and a small chest of drawers were the only useful assets, and these Bird pulled into the kitchen, while she dusted and wiped away at them until they looked clean, even if somewhat shabby.

Returning from the cellar O’More (in his youth a handy man in a stable) attacked the dust in the little room with broom, mop, and finally a scrubbing-brush to such good purpose that in an hour it was quite another place, for the walls fortunately had been painted a light cream and were in fairly good condition.

If John O’More had been asked to go down on his knees and scrub a room, he would have resented the work as an insult to his manhood, but love had set the task. Little Billy, sitting there in his chair, his face all eagerness, needed the room, and so he did the work as nonchalantly as he would have stepped into the stable and curried a horse in a hurry time. It was only when Bird clapped her hands in admiration and said, “Why, uncle, how nice and quick you did that; Dinah Lucky would have taken a whole day,” that he became embarrassed, and, giving her an apologetic wink, said with lowered voice, “It’s a job well done, but whist! ’tis not for the good of my health to be repeated,” and Bird understood and wondered, as she did a hundred times during that long summer, why she always understood her uncle and he her, while life with her aunt seemed one long misunderstanding.

A plumber, living in the flat below, came up in the noon hour and soldered the holes in the tub, which O’More declared to be too black even for a pig’s trough, so he sped out around one of those many “corners,” of which at first Bird thought the city must be made, for a quart of boat paint and a brush.

“Yer aunt must be havin’ a hard time with her tradin’,” he remarked on his return, seeing that his wife had not come back to prepare dinner. But just as Bird had spread the table with various articles of cold food, whose abiding-places she very well knew, and was making Billy some little sandwiches to coax him to eat meat for which he had a distaste, Mrs. O’More came in, talkative and almost pleasant as the result of her morning’s bargaining.

Before night two narrow beds were carefully fitted into opposite sides of the little room, with the chest of drawers set between, in front of the now-closed door that led to the boys’ room, with the looking-glass hung above it. It was only a bit of a place and still very close and stuffy, but Billy and Bird had at least beds of their very own, if only in a niche apart, and Bird’s heart took fresh courage.

The next step was to coax her uncle to fill some long boxes with earth and set them inside the outer railing of the fire-escape. There is a law against filling up these little balconies with boxes or furniture of any kind, but Bird knew nothing about it, and her uncle regarded it as a sort of tyranny that he, a free-born citizen, should disregard. All Bird thought of was that she might plant morning-glory seeds in the earth so they would climb up the strings she fastened to the next story, and later on there was, in truth, a little bower blooming above that arid waste of bricks and ashes.

Bird and Billy on the Fire-escape.

After the new room was arranged, and permission given to Bird to see that Billy had what the doctor ordered that he should eat, and to take him out whenever he wanted to go, everything began to move more regularly and in some respects more comfortably, then Bird, to her dismay, saw the city summer, like a long roadway without a tree or bit of shade, stretching out before her.

There was not a book in the house and no one to tell her of the free library where she might get them, and school, where she hoped to find a sympathetic teacher for a friend, belonged to September three months away. No one who has always lived in the city can possibly understand what this change, with its confinement and lack of refined surroundings, meant to this young soul. To be poor, in the sense of having little to spend and plain food, she was accustomed,—in fact, she had much more to eat now, and through her uncle’s careless kindness she was seldom without dimes for the trolley rides to Battery Park “where the fishes lived,” or Central Park with the swan-boats that were to “make a man” of Billy. But to be shut away from the woods, the sky, the beauty of the sunsets, to have no flowers to gather and love, and to be brought face to face daily with all the ugliness of the life that is merely of the body, was almost too much for her courage.

How could she keep her head above the street level, how remember what her father had taught her?—already the memory of the past was becoming confused. Sometimes she was on the verge of ceasing to try and settling down into a silent drudge, content to take what came, and falling into the habits and commonplace pleasures of the girls of her cousins’ acquaintance with whom she was thrown in the parks and on the stoop and streets. It would have been much easier in some respects,—her aunt would have been better pleased to see her go off with the others, to some noisy if harmless excursion, arrayed in a cheap, flower-wreathed hat and gay waist, shrieking with laughter, and chewing gum, than to see her always neat amid disorderly surroundings and ever willing to do the endless little tasks that her own mismanagement piled up, and Ladybird—Jack’s name for her—strangely enough seemed a term of reproach, not compliment.

At first Bird had hoped that Sunday might bring better things; but no, Sunday in the quiet, peaceful, Protestant sense that Bird understood it,—there was none. The family straggled to early mass one by one, for Mrs. O’More and her sons were Romanists, though O’More was not, being from the north of Ireland, and the rest of the day was spent by the men either lying in bed and smoking, or standing in groups about the street.

In these hard days little Billy was Bird’s only ray of light. The two, being of equally sensitive natures, clung together, and the child was so happy in his new-found friend and ceased his incessant fretting whenever he was with her, that Mrs. O’More at last gave him completely to Bird’s charge with a sigh of relief, for her youngest child was as much a puzzle to her as her niece, and she felt that he also was of a different breed, as it were, and it annoyed her.

All the fierce scorching summer days Bird and Billy wandered about together, sometimes going over to Madison Square, sometimes riding in the trolley to Central Park, but more often down to the Battery where the air tasted salt and good, where the wonderful fishes lived in the round house and the big ships went past out to that unknown sea of which Bird was so fond of telling Billy stories.

Bird, too, soon learned to find her way about, for six-year-old Billy had all the New York gamin’s knowledge of his whereabouts coupled with a cripple’s acute senses. He hopped along with his crutch quite well, and many a lesson in human nature and life did Bird learn these days in the treeless streets of poorer New York.

After a time she found that her uncle had seemed to forget his hatred of anything like drawing or painting, so one day she ventured to buy a good-sized pad and pencil, and then watching Bird “make pictures” became Billy’s great joy, while she to her surprise found that she could draw other things besides flowers.

Oftentimes the children would go down to sit on the steps and watch the horses from the great sales stable being exercised up and down the street. Bird tried to draw these too, and one day succeeded so well that her uncle, passing in at the door, stopped and looked down, and then said, “Bully! any one would know it for a horse, sure!” After that she worked at every odd minute.

She loved horses dearly, but she and Billy were forbidden to go into the stables, which were almost underneath the flat, and Bird really had no wish to, for the men there were so rough and there was so much noise and confusion; but a few doors away was a fire-engine house where lived three great, gentle, gray horses that ran abreast, and had soft noses that quivered responsively when they saw their driver even in the distance. Bird made friends with these, taking them bits of bread or green stuff, until the firemen came to expect the daily visit and “Bird” and “Billy” became familiar names in the engine-house; and there was a little dog there that ran with the engine and reminded her of Twinkle.

Dan was the heaviest of the three horses and Bird’s favourite, and one day, after many attempts, seated on the stoop of the next house, she succeeded in drawing a small head of him that was really a good likeness, at least so the firemen thought, for they put it in a frame and hung it in the engine-house, and the next day big Dave Murray, Dan’s driver, gave her a small box of paints “with the boys’ compliments.”

Ah, if the big, bluff fellow only knew what the gift meant to poor little Ladybird struggling not to forget and to still keep the heavenly vision in sight.

Bird had written a short note to Mrs. Lane telling of her safe arrival in the city, and giving her address, but more than that she could not say. If she said that she was happy and gilded the account of her surroundings, it would have been false. If she told the truth, her Laurelville friends would be distressed, and it would seem like begging them to take her back when it evidently was not convenient, for she did not know that her Uncle John had refused to let her stay with Mrs. Lane unless she was legally adopted.

Neither was Bird worldly wise enough to act a part and simply write of her visits to the park and the little excursions with Billy which in themselves were pleasant enough. She was crystal clear, and knew of but two ways, either to speak the whole truth or keep silent. She was too loyal to those whose bread she was eating to do the first, and so she did not write.

In due time a long letter came from Lammy written with great pains and all the copy-book flourishes he could master, telling of Aunt Jimmy’s strange will, of how he was going to work all summer at the fruit farm, and ended up by telling her of the preparations he had made for the Fourth, never dreaming it possible that, the matter of tickets disposed of, Bird should refuse his invitation.

At first the thought of getting away from the city, and being among friends again quite overcame her. She began to wonder if Twinkle would be glad to see her, and if the ferns met over the brook as they did last year, and if Mrs. Lane would have the white quilt on the best-room bed, or the blue-and-white patch with the rosebuds. Then she realized that if she met the Laurelville people face to face, she would surely break down, while the saying “good-by” again would be harder than not going. Then, too, there was little Billy. How could she leave him at the very time when, in spite of continued hot weather, he seemed to be gaining?

No—she sat down resolutely and wrote a short note that wrung her heart and kissed it passionately before she mailed it, for was it not going to the place that now seemed like heaven to her?

But the letter that arrived as the Lanes sat on porch after supper said no word of all this, and seemed but a stiff, offish little note to warm-hearted Mrs. Lane and Lammy who, having now quite earned the ticket money, was cut to the quick when he found that it was all in vain.

“She’s gone to the city and forgotten us,” he gulped in a quavering voice, as he read the letter, coming as near to letting a tear run down his nose as a sturdy New England boy of fourteen could without losing his self-respect.

“It doos appear that way,” said Mrs. Lane, who was gazing straight before her out of the window with an abstracted air; “but, after all, what’s in appearances, Lammy Lane? Don’t your copy-book say that they are deceitful? Well, that’s what I think of ’em. Likely ’nough it appears to Bird that I didn’t want to keep her, ’cause owing to this other mix-up, I couldn’t divide the share of you boys without thinking it over, and ’dopt her then and there. But my intentions and them appearances is teetotally different.

“No, Lammy, I’m goin’ straight on lovin’ Bird and trustin’ her and keepin’ a place in my heart for her, besides havin’ the best-room bed always aired and ready, and jest you keep on lovin’ and trustin’ her, too, and like as not the Lord will let her know it somehow, for I do believe kind feelings is as well able to travel without wires to slide on as this here telegram lightnin’ that hollers to the ships that’s passin’ by in the dark. ‘Think well and most things ’ll come well,’ say I.”

“How about Aunt Jimmy’s will? Yer always thought well enough o’ her,” said Joshua, who had laid down his paper and folded his spectacles to listen to the reading of the letter.

“An’ I do still,” Mrs. Lane averred stoutly; “it doos appear disappointing, but I allers allowed that if we was only able to read her meanin’, ’twould be a fair and kindly one.”