The Angel of the Tenement | Page 3

muddy wather as comes from that hydranth yirselves!"
Mrs. O'Malligan glanced around triumphantly, shook her head and hurried on. "An' agin, there's little Joey. Who was it but the polace as come arristin' the feyther of the boy for batin' of his own wife, and him sint up for a year, an' she a-dyin' along of bein' weakly an' nobody to support her, an' Joey left in this very Tiniment an orphan child! Don't ye be a-callin' in no polace for the loikes of this swate angel choild, Miss Norma darlint, don't ye be doin' it! An' the most of thim once foine Irish gintlemen, bad luck to the loikes of thim!"
Mrs. O'Malligan paused,--she was obliged to,--for breath, whereupon Miss Bonkowski very amiably hastened to declare she meant no harm, having absolutely no knowledge of the class whatever, "except," with arch humor, "as presented on the stage, where, as everybody who had seen them there knew, they were harmless enough, goodness knows!" And the airy chorus lady shrugged her shoulders and smiled at her own bit of pleasantry. "But for the matter of that, I still think something ought to be done, and what other means can we find for restoring the lost innocent?" and Miss Norma tossed her frizzled blonde head, quite enjoying, if the truth be told, the touch of romance about the affair. For once she seemed to be meeting, in real life, a situation worthy of the boards of The Garden Opera House, in whose stage vernacular a missing child was always a "lost innocent." "If we do not call on the police, Mrs. O'Malligan, how are we to ever find the child's mother?"
Here Mary Carew looked up, and there was something like a metallic click about Mary's hard, dry tones as she spoke, for the years she had spent in making jeans pantaloons at one dollar and a half a dozen had not been calculated to sweeten her tones to mellowness, nor to induce her to regard human nature with charity.
"Don't you understand?" she said bluntly, "all the huntin' in the world ain't goin' to find a mother what don't mean to be found?"
"But what makes you so sure she don't?" persisted Miss Bonkowski, letting the child take possession of spoon and cup, and quite revelling in the further touch of the dramatic developing in the situation.
Unconsciously Mary pressed the child to her as she spoke. "It's as plain as everything else that's wrong and hard in this world," she said, and each word clicked itself off with metallic sharpness and decision, "the mother brought the child here late yesterday, waited until it was asleep in the room over there, then went off and left it. Why she chose this here particular Tenement we don't know and likely never will, though I ain't no doubt myself there's a reason. It ain't a pretty story or easy to understand but it's common enough, and you'll find that mother never means to be found, an' in as big a city as this 'n', tain't no use to try."
"I will not--cannot--believe it," murmured Norma--in her best stage tones. Then she turned again to the child. "And how did it come here, dearie? Has baby a papa--where is baby's papa?"
The little one rattled the tin spoon around the sides of the cup. "Papa bye," she returned chasing a solitary crumb intently. "Yosie sick, mamma sick, Tante sick, but Angel, her ain't sick when she come way a way on--on--" a worried look flitted over the flushed little face, and she looked up at Norma expectantly as if expecting her to supply the missing word, "on,--Angel come way a way on--vaisseau--" at last with baby glee she brought the word forth triumphantly, "Papa bye and Angel and mamma and Tante and Yosie come way a way on vaisseau!"
"You see," said Mary Carew, looking at Norma, and the others shook their heads sadly.
Miss Bonkowski accepted the situation. "Though what a vasso is, or a tante either, is beyond me to say," she murmured.
"But what is goin' to be done with her, then?" ventured little Mrs. Tomlin, holding her own baby closer as she spoke.
There was a pause which nobody seemed to care to break, during which more than one of the women saw the child on Mary's knee through dim eyes which turned the golden hair into a halo of dazzling brightness. Then Norma got up and began to clear away the remains of breakfast and to clatter the crockery from stove and table together for washing, while Mary Carew, avoiding the others' glances, busied herself by awkwardly wiping the child's mouth and chin with a corner of her own faded cotton dress.
Submitting as if the process was a matter of course, the baby gazed meanwhile into Mary's colorless, bony and unlovely