The House of Armour

He flung it open and rushed out, none too soon, however, for the child was at his heels. Across the veranda and out under the archway they dashed, and Stargarde, hastening to watch them, heard their hurrying footsteps echoing down the frosty street. Used to surprising scenes of all kinds she was not unduly alarmed, and thoughtfully smoothing out the check and murmuring, “Poor little Zeb,” she sat down to write a note of thanks.

After some time there was a cautious knock at the door, then a head was thrust slowly in, which, to her surprise, she saw belonged to Dr. Camperdown.

“Are you alone?” he said. “Has that—that little witch come back? If she has I won’t come in.”

“No, she hasn’t.”

Camperdown advanced into the room making a wry face. “I have been robbed.”

“Brian!”

“Yes; that small darling of yours has made off with my pocket-book.”

“Impossible, Brian!” exclaimed Stargarde clasping her hands.

“Not so,” he retorted coolly. “She has it. I was on my way to the police station, but changed my mind and thought I’d come here first.”

“Brian, I cannot have her arrested.”

“Very well; then get my property from her. There are papers in that book worth a large sum to me. I’ve traveled half over the world and carried a pocket full of notes here, there, and everywhere, and never was robbed before.”

Stargarde suddenly became calm. “Sit down and let us talk it over.”

He gave utterance to his favorite exclamation, “Good—there’s considerable of the detective about you, Stargarde, and you’ve had experience with people of this stripe. Now what shall we do?”

She smiled feebly at him. “Where did you keep your pocket-book, Brian?”

He displayed a well of a pocket in his inside coat situated immediately over his brawny chest. “Impossible to fall out you see. Put your hand in.”

“Oh, I can see; do you always keep it there?”

“Always.”

“When did you have it last?”

“When I took it out to give you the check. I had the book half-way back into my pocket when the young lamb sprang upon me. You remember how she grabbed and dived at me—wanted to tear her way to my heart, I think. Probably she snatched the book and concealed it among her rags.”

She had no rags to conceal it among," said Stargarde reproachfully; “she had on a decent frock.”

“Well, what is your theory?” he said impatiently.

“She was angry and thought only of punishing you. The book must have fallen from your coat as you ran and she picked it up and is keeping it to tease you.”

“I will tease her,” grimly, “if she doesn’t give it up. Come, what shall we do? Get a policeman?”

“No, Brian, I will get it for you,” and she left him and went into her bedroom and put her hand to her head with a swift ejaculation, “O Lord, give me wisdom. They are terrible people—her parents. If they find the book on her they will not give it up.”

She looked around the room as if for inspiration. “I have it,” she said, snatching a little box from her dressing table. “Thank God for putting it into the hearts of kind friends to send me the wherewithal to do good.” Then taking a hat and cloak from a drawer, and rolling Zeb’s cap and shawl in a parcel, she went out to Dr. Camperdown and said quietly, “I am ready.”

He held open the door for her, and looked down approvingly at the large black dog that went silently out with his nose against her skirts.

They went up a street leading to the Citadel Hill, which crouched in the midst of the city like some huge animal turned stiff in the cold, its flanks covered with yellow, tufted, frozen grass, the great crown of the fort resting solidly on its brow. A few lights flashed at the top of the signal staff but the grim fortification sunk in the ground was outwardly dark and gloomy, though within they knew there were lights and fires and soldiers keeping ceaseless watch.

Near the Citadel was a tenement house, inhabited by nearly twenty persons. Stargarde knew them all, knew just which rooms they occupied, and on arriving in front of the building, she refused to allow Camperdown to accompany her within.

Very unwillingly he consented to stay outside, a little comforted to see that the dog slunk in after her like her shadow. Stargarde had requested him not to linger by the door, so he walked up and down the opposite side of the street, where there were no houses, surveying moodily sometimes the frozen glacis on one side of him, and sometimes the gaudy windows of the little eating and drinking shops on the other. A few soldiers in greatcoats passed at intervals up and down the street, but always across from him, and occasionally a man or a gayly dressed girl would swing open a shop door and let a stream of music and a smell of cooking food out on the night air.

While he waited, he mourned angrily and bitterly, as he had done a thousand times before, the passion, or credulity, or madness, or whatever it was, that took his pure, white lily into such houses as these. “Those people are well enough off,” he muttered angrily; “why can’t she let them alone? They live their life, we live ours. She thinks she can raise them up. Pah! as easily as rats from a gutter.”

He grumbled on mercifully unconscious of the fact that could he have seen Stargarde at the time his uneasiness would not have been allayed.

The old tenement house was one of the worst in the city, and when Stargarde entered it, she knew she must step cautiously. Passing through the doorway she found herself in a narrow, unlighted hall, not evil-smelling, for the door had been partly ajar, but as cold as the outer world, and with an uneven floorway, almost covered by an accumulation of ice and snow brought in during many days by many feet, and that would linger till a thaw came to melt it.

At the back of the hall was a sound of running water, where the occupants of the house, with a glorious disregard of the waste, kept their tap running to save it from freezing. Beyond the tap Stargarde knew she must not go, for there was a large hole in the floor utilized as a receptacle for the refuse and garbage of the house, which were thrown through it into the cellar. As for the cellar itself, it was entirely open to the winter winds. The windows had been torn away, part of the foundation wall was crumbling, and over the rickety floor she could hear the rats scampering merrily, busy with their evening feast.

Stargarde avoided the icy sink, the running water, and the crazy steps that led to the cellar, and guiding herself along the hall by touching the wall with the tips of her outstretched fingers, put her foot on the lowest step of the staircase. Carefully she crept up one flight of stairs after another, past walls flecked with ugly sores, where the plaster had fallen off in patches, past empty sockets of windows staring out at the night with glass and sash both gone, and past the snowdrifts lying curled beneath on the floor.

On two flats she passed by doors where threads of light streamed out and lay across the rotten boards, while a sound of laughter and rough merrymaking was heard within.

In the third, the top flat, there was no noise at all. “Foreigners they are, and queer in their ways,” ejaculated Stargarde; and pausing an instant to listen for some sign of life, she lifted up her face to the crazy, moldy roof overhead, where some of the shingles were gone, affording easy ingress to snow and rain, which kept the floor beneath her feet in a state of perpetual dampness.

“Iniquitous!” she murmured; “judgment falls on the city that neglects its poor.” Then bringing down her glance to the doors before her, she sighed heavily and proceeded a little farther along the hall. There were three rooms in this story, and Zeb’s parents lived in the front one. Their door had been broken in some quarrel between the people of the house, and one whole panel was gone. There was a garment clumsily tacked over it, and Stargarde might have pulled it aside if she had been so minded; but she had not come to spy upon her protégés, and contented herself with knocking gently.

The very slight, almost inaudible, sound of voices that she had been able to hear within the room instantly ceased; after a short interval a voice asked her in excellent English who she was and what she wanted.

“Miss Turner,” she replied good-humoredly, “and I should like to see Zeb for a few minutes.”

The door was opened part way, and she was sullenly motioned to enter by a tall woman, who slipped behind it so as to be partly unobserved, giving her visitor as she did so a look which certainly would have attracted Stargarde’s attention could she have seen it, so blended with a curious variety of emotions was it.

They were having a quiet carousal Stargarde saw, when she found herself in the room. There was a tearing fire in the stove, and on its red-hot top foamed and bubbled a kettle of boiling water. The windows were tightly closed and draped with dirty garments; a small table, having on it candles, a pack of cards, and a jug of steaming liquor, stood at one side of the room, and beside it sat two men, both foreigners, judging by their swarthy faces and plentiful supply of silky, black hair.

They were very drunk, but the woman was only partly so. The men eyed Stargarde in insulting, brutish curiosity, hurling interjections, remarks, and questions at her in a gibberish which she fortunately could not understand.

She paid little attention to them. Her eyes leaped beyond to the dirty bed on the floor, and held a pair of glittering orbs that she knew belonged to the child of whom she had come in search. She did not wish Zeb to have one instant to herself in which to secrete the pocket-book. The child had pulled about her some of the rags with which she was surrounded, and was sitting up, looking like a wild animal disturbed in its lair.

Stargarde crossed the room quickly and knelt down beside her. “You ran away from me this evening,” she whispered; “see, darling,” and opening a box she showed the child a layer of sweetmeats daintily wrapped in colored paper.

“Take one, Zeb,” she said, and the child silently submitted to have one put in her mouth. “Now I must go,” said Stargarde; “you keep this pretty box, and will you come and see me to-morrow?”

“Mebbe,” said the child sullenly, and taking another sweetmeat.

Stargarde’s heart beat fast. The girl was an enigma to her in her moody self-possession. Perhaps she had not taken the pocket-book. “Goodbye, Zeb,” she murmured, making as though she would rise from the floor. “Have you no present for me? I thought you might have.”

Zeb flashed her a look, half cunning, half admiring. “You’re a quaint one,” she observed in Italian patois; then she displayed her sharp, white teeth in a mirthless smile: “If you’ll give me a kiss.”

Stargarde leaned over and took the child in a capacious embrace, and as she did so, felt something flat slipped into the bosom of her dress. “Is it all there?” she murmured in Zeb’s ear; “you haven’t taken anything out?”

“Pas si bête,” returned the child. “Not I. Think I want to cool my heels in the little saint? I was goin’ to fetch it in the mornin’; but you take the curlyhead back his sacred. I don’t want it. It danced out of his pocket. Some day,” coolly, “I’ll pick him. He’s a–I’d like to see his grape jam running,” with an oath and sudden darkening of face. Stargarde was familiar with some of the slang of recidivists collected together in large cities, but she had never before the advent of Zeb’s parents heard it in the small city of Halifax. With a sensation of poignant and intense grief she looked at the child who, whether it was due to her environment or not, was talking more of it this evening than she had ever heard from her before.

“Curlyhead,” Stargarde knew, meant Jew; “little saint,” prison; “sacred,” purse; and “grape jam” was blood. Oh, to get the child away from here, from the choking, stifling atmosphere of poverty and vice that was ruining her!

Zeb, as if aware of her distress, had curled herself up sullenly among the rags, and Stargarde rose to her feet and turned to speak to her mother.

In a corner of the room she found an extraordinary scene being enacted. Unknown to her, while she bent over Zeb, the younger of the two men had managed to stagger quietly from his seat and stand behind her, divided between an admiration for her magnificent physique, such a contrast to his own puny strength, and an endeavor to keep on his tottering legs.

The gravely watchful dog that had walked into the room behind his mistress, and lay curled on the floor beside her, saw nothing hostile in the man’s attitude, and beyond keeping an observing eye upon him took no measures to make him retreat.

Not so sensible was the woman behind the door. For some reason or other she was highly displeased with the proceeding of the young man. Springing upon him as silently and as stealthily as a wild beast of the cat tribe would have done, she hissed in his ear, “Not for you to look at, Camaro; back! back!” and she motioned him to his seat.

He had reached the obstinate stage of drunkenness, and though a little fear of her shone out of his black and beady eyes, he shrugged his shoulders carelessly, and said in Italian, “Presently, presently, my lady.”

“Not presently, but now,” said the woman in pure and correct English, and having taken enough of the fiery liquor to be thoroughly quarrelsome, she threw herself upon him, dragged him to a corner where, when Stargarde turned around, she was quietly and persistently beating him with a stick of wood that she had caught from beside the stove.

Her husband sat stupidly watching her from the table, his hand going more and more frequently to the jug; and her victim, making not the slightest effort to withstand her, lay taking his beating as a submissive child might resign itself to deserved punishment from a parent.

“Stop, stop!” exclaimed Stargarde, hurrying to her side. “That’s enough, Zeb’s mother”—and throwing her cloak back over her shoulders she laid her hand on the woman’s club.

“He insulted you,” exclaimed the woman in maudlin fury, “I shall punish him.”

Stargarde towered above her, strong and firm and beautiful, and would not release her. “Who are you?” she said in surprise. “You speak Italian and French, and now good English; I thought you were Zeb’s mother.”

“So I be,” said the woman sulkily, relapsing into inelegant language, and pulling her hair over her eyes so that Stargarde could not see her features distinctly. “Here, give me that stick,” and seeing that Stargarde would not obey her, she began beating the man with her fists.

“Oh, this is dreadful,” gasped Stargarde, holding her back and gazing around the room, half choked by the heat, which was bringing out and developing a dozen different odors, each fouler than the last. “How can I leave Zeb here? Give me the child, won’t you?” she said pleadingly to the woman.

“No, no,” and a stream of foreign ejaculations and asseverations poured from the woman’s lips, in which the man at the table, comprehending dully what was said, hastened to add his quota.

Stargarde turned to look at him, and found that he was fondling tenderly a little monkey that had crept to his bosom. She remembered hearing Zeb say that her father loved his monkey and would feed it if they all had to go hungry.

“Sweet, Pedro, thou art beautiful,” he murmured, and Stargarde seeing that he cared nothing for the friend whom his wife was so unmercifully beating, knew that she must not relax in her protection of the unfortunate one, or there might be broken bones, and possibly loss of life before morning.

“You were kind to want to protect me,” she said, catching the woman’s wrists in her hands and holding them firmly; “but you should not beat the man. He would not have hurt me. I am never afraid of drunken people. See, I will take him away from you,” and sliding her hand under the little man’s shirt collar she slipped him swiftly over the floor to the doorway. Strong and muscular, and a trained athlete though she was a woman, she did easily in cool blood what the other woman had only been able to do in her rage.

Zeb’s mother precipitating herself upon her, hindered her from opening the door, till Zeb sprang from the bed and addressed her unreasoning parent in an eager jargon, in which Stargarde knew she plainly told her of the evil consequences which would arise from the indulgence of her wrath.

The woman, not too far gone to be amenable to reason, came so quickly to her daughter’s view of the matter that she even gave the now insensible man several helping kicks to assist Stargarde in dragging him out into the hall. Stargarde going ahead, slid him down the few steps to the next landing, where she laid his head on a bed of snow, and bound her handkerchief around an ugly cut on his wrist.

Before she finished, the woman exclaimed at the cold wind sweeping through the hall, and went into the room; but Zeb remained, watching and shivering, though she had on all the clothes she had worn through the day.

“Zeb,” exclaimed Stargarde passionately, looking up at her, “how can I leave you here? I shall not sleep to-night for thinking of you.”

The child shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing.

“Will you not come with me, darling?” said Stargarde. “I think your mother would give you up.”

“Yer’ll marry that–” Zeb scorned to bestow a name upon him; “then where’ll I find myself?”

“My present plan is to live always in the Pavilion,” said Stargarde firmly; “and Zeb, I want you with me.”

Zeb relented a little. “I’ll see yer to-morrer,” she observed at length. “I’m tired o’ this kind o’ thing,” pointing contemptuously at the prostrate man.

“And Zeb,” continued Stargarde, as the girl showed signs of leaving her, “do open a window in there; the air is stifling.”

Zeb chuckled. “So I does, every night. In an hour them,” with a jerk of her finger over her shoulder, “will be sound off. Then I jumps up and opens both winders, ’cause I likes fresh air. Goodnight to ye,” and with a farewell glance at Stargarde she slammed the crazy door behind her and went into the room.

CHAPTER XV

A LOST MOTHER

Stargarde, lifting up her eyes and seeing that she was alone, hurried down the steps to the next floor, to a room belonging to a boys’ club.

“Password,” muttered a sepulchral voice when she tapped lightly on the door panels.

“Good boys,” she returned with a laugh. It was not the password. “Death to the traitor,” was the signal for the night; but they knew her voice, and a boy opened the door and slipped out.

“How do you do, Mike?” she said cheerfully; “can’t you let me in?” He hesitated and she went on, “I want to see how your club room looks. Don’t you want a new stove, and some chairs and pictures? I know where you could get some, if you do.”

The boy’s pale face brightened. “Hold on,” he ejaculated; “I’ll tell ’em.”

He insinuated himself back into the room through the very narrowest possible space; there was a sound of shuffling of furniture, and quickly moving feet, then he told her she might enter. The atmosphere of the room was thick with smoke; they could not clear that away, though a window had been hastily opened, and the pure, cold air streamed in through the dusky atmosphere.

Boys’ heads shone out of the cloud—not big boys, but half-grown ones, boys who drove small coal carts about the city—all noticeable by their universal blackness of hair and whiteness of faces recently washed. There was a good fire in the stove; poor people will go hungry before they will go cold, she knew that. Of books, games, anything to amuse the lads, she saw nothing. A few empty boxes for seats were set about the stove. On one of them a forgotten knave of clubs lay on his back ruefully staring in the direction his fellows had gone, marked by a suspicious bulge in the pocket of one of the oldest lads present.

“Good-evening, Harry, Jim, Joe, Will,” said Stargarde, nodding gayly, and mentioning all of the boys in the room by name. “What about the act respecting the use of tobacco by minors?” and she began to quote in a lugubrious tone of voice, “‘Any person who either directly or indirectly sells or gives or furnishes to a minor under eighteen years of age, cigarettes, cigars, or tobacco in any form, shall in summary conviction thereof be subject to a penalty of not less than ten dollars.’” She broke off there, for the boys were all smiling at her.

“Aren’t you glad I’m not a policeman?” she said. “Come now, boys, let us make a bargain. Pipes in the fire, and I’ll furnish the room. I was just speaking to Mike about it.”

The president, a lad rather more respectably dressed than the others, stepped forward. “Will you give us your terms in writing?” he said.

Stargarde smiled. “Too much red-tapeism,” laying her hand on his shoulder. “You all hear, boys; I’ll make this the nicest boys’ club in Halifax if you’ll throw away your tobacco, pipes, cigars, etc.”

“For how long?” asked the president cautiously.

“Say for a year. Then if you’re not healthier, happier boys, I’ll be greatly mistaken. Try it for a year, and if you are worse off without tobacco than with it, go back to it by all means.”

“A year isn’t long,” he replied, turning to his associates. “What is the opinion of the club?”

“Hurrah for Miss Turner!” said a lad, pressing forward enthusiastically.

“Make me an honorary member, Mike,” said Stargarde so quickly in the ear of the boy who let her in that he thought it was his own suggestion, and immediately proposed her. There was a show of hands, and the thing was done.

Stargarde thanked them, promised a supply of books and papers, then said earnestly: “There’s a little matter I wish to mention, boys. In the hall out here lies a man with some bruises that want attending to. Can some of you look after him for a few days? Keep him here and come to me for whatever you want, and take good care of him, for he’s a friend of mine.”

She had scarcely finished when two lads were detailed for duty and were stealing up the steps. Her friends were pretty well known, and when she had one in trouble, others of her friends were always willing to assist her.

When the boys found that the man was a foreigner and unknown to them, they were filled with an important sense of mystery. A course of blood-and-thunder novel reading had prepared them for just such an event as this, and for some days they took turns in guarding the unfortunate man, who had received even a worse pounding than Stargarde had imagined, nursing him secretly, and feasting him on the daintiest morsels that the Pavilion restaurant afforded.

“Oh, how good the poor are to each other; how good they are!” murmured Stargarde, as she languidly descended from the club room and rejoined her patient lover. “Yes, I am tired, Brian,” she said wearily, as she slipped her hand through his arm; “tired, but not with bodily fatigue. I am tired of the temptations to sin. It seems as if the Evil One is perpetually casting a net about our feet. No one is exempt. But the poor! oh, the poor! it is hardest for them. How can they be good when they are ground down by the perpetual struggle for bread in miserable surroundings, and worse than that, worse than that,” and her voice sank to a low wail, “the temptation that is always before them—nay, forced upon them—to drink deep and forget their misery.”

They were passing the old Clock Tower, situated on the Citadel Hill. Camperdown looked up at its impenetrable face. “Sin and misery have been in the world ever since it began,” he said hopelessly; “always will be till it ends.”

“Ah, but what a grand thing to put a stop to a little of the sin and iniquity!” exclaimed the woman, turning up to the stars her bright and eager face. “That is one’s only consolation.”

“I wish you would not walk along the street with your face turned up in that way,” was Camperdown’s unexpected and jealous reply. They had just passed two soldiers who stared curiously at the beautiful woman on his arm, and just as he spoke a girl standing in a near doorway with an apron flung over her head made a saucy remark with regard to Stargarde to a broad-shouldered workman standing by her.

“Hist,” said the man angrily; “you’re new here, or you’d know who that is,” and he took off his cap as Stargarde passed by. “There’s hands as’ll be raised to slap your mouth, woman as you be,” he continued half apologetically to the girl as the two people went by, “if you dares to pass a word agin her. She’s the poor man’s friend. She’s always with ’em, sick an’ dyin’ and dead. She put my old mother in a handsome coffin–” and he broke off abruptly.