JEAN FORSYTH

NEW YORK THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO. 31 East 17th St. (Union Square)

Copyright, 1895, by THE CASSELL PUBLISHING CO.

All rights reserved.

THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J.

[vii]

PROLOGUE.

A sturdy northeast wind was rattling the doors and windows of a deserted farmhouse in Western Michigan. The building was not old, measured by years, but it had never been painted or repaired, and its wooden face, prematurely lined with weather stains, looked as if it had borne the wear and tear of centuries. The windows, like lidless eyes, stared vacantly at the flat stubble fields and the few spindling trees, a dreary apology for an orchard. There were plenty of shingles off the roof to allow[viii] the inquisitive rain-drops to follow one another through the rafters, and thence to the floor of the room below, where the darkness was creeping out of the corners to take possession.

The house had been but recently vacated, for there was still a "slab" smoldering on the hearth of the wide fireplace in the outer kitchen, and something that looked almost human, wrapped in a ragged bedquilt, was lying much too near it for safety. A friendly gust of wind came down the chimney, bringing back the smoke, and drawing a faint cough from the bundle. Another gust and another cough, and then a sneeze which burst open the quilt, to disclose an ill-clad little girl, six or seven years old.

She gazed about with drowsy blue eyes till terror of the darkness made her draw the tattered comforter over her head again, and crouching nearer to the smolder[ix]ing log, she tried to warm her fingers and toes. More wind down the chimney made more smoke, and sent the child coughing back from the fireplace. She was wide awake now, and stood listening. Sounds there were, indeed, but not one that could be associated with any living thing in the house. She felt her way around the walls to where the candle used to be, but it was gone. There was no furniture to stumble over, and when she came to the side of the wall in the inner room from which the stairway crept up, she mounted it on her hands and knees, trembling, partly with cold, partly with fear at the noise made by the flapping of the sole of one of her old shoes. There was a step missing at the turn of the stairs, but the child knew where the vacancy was, and pulling herself over it, she reached the landing, felt all around the walls there, and made the circuit of the three[x] small rooms in the same fashion.

They were entirely empty.

Cautiously the girl stole down the broken stairs and back to her former place by the smoking slab, where she curled herself up into the old quilt again, as into a mother's arms, and spoke aloud, though there was none to listen but the obstreperous wind:

"Anyhow she won't be here to lick me no more!" That thought seemed to compensate for darkness and loneliness. The voices of wind and rain were apparently more kindly than the human tones to which she had been accustomed, and soothed by their stormy lullaby, the little maid fell asleep.

The sunshine poured freely into the forsaken house next morning, drying up the damp floors, and turning to gold the scrap of yellow hair that showed through a hole in the old quilt. Presently the small girl shook the covering away from her and[xi] stood up, to yawn and stretch herself out of the stiffness from a night spent on the hard floor. She was not a pretty child, unless naturally curling fair hair, that would be fairer when it was washed, could make her so. The long, thin legs that came below her torn dress made her too tall for her age, and what might have been a passable mouth was spoiled by the departure of two of the front "baby" teeth and the tardy arrival of the later contingent.

Part of the day the child seemed satisfied with her new-found liberty. Having discovered a stale crust or two in a cupboard, she wanted no more, for her diet had never been luxurious. Into every corner of the house she intruded her small freckled nose, pulling down from shelves all sorts of odds and ends that had been left behind as worthless at the flitting.

There was an old straw bonnet[xii] with a pair of dirty strings, and therewith the damsel elected to adorn the tousled head, which evidenced but slight acquaintance with comb or brush. She could not find any feminine garments to please her fancy, but there was a boy's jacket, out at elbows and ragged round the edges, which she proudly donned, and as a finishing touch she popped her long slim legs, old shoes and all, into a worn-out pair of man's top-boots that reached to her knees.

"I just wish Mawm Mason had lef' a lookin'-glass behin', so's I could see how I look. My! wouldn't she whack me if she seen me with this bonnet on!" The child smiled broadly as she continued her confidential address to the other valueless things left behind. "I allays knowed she warn't my own mother, an' I'm glad Pete nor Matty aint my own brother nor sister neither. I'd like him to see me in his jacket!"[xiii]

She pulled the coat across her narrow little chest to where it met in the days when there were buttons on it, and marched up and down the room, making as much noise as possible with the big boots.

This killing of time was all very well while the daylight lasted and the sun warmed up the frosty November air, but when the darkness began to assert itself once more the small waif did not feel so contented.

"There aint no use goin' over to Mis' Morgan's. She don't want me no more'n Mis' Mason did. I guess I'll sleep upstairs to-night with some o' them things over me. I'll be warm anyhow."

In the middle of the front bedroom she heaped up all the débris and crawled beneath it. A fantastic pile it seemed to the moon when he looked in after the rain had stopped, the childish head resting on the cover of an old[xiv] bandbox at one side and a pair of man's boots sticking out at the other.

The last scrap of bread was finished next day, and the two potatoes picked up in the yard proved uneatable without the softening influence of fire, so there was nothing for it but Mrs. Morgan's. After sunset, when the rapidly falling temperature and the heavy bank of clouds in the west gave warning of a snow-storm, the little girl, still wearing the old bonnet, boy's jacket, and man's boots, left the only home she could remember, and made her way slowly over the hard rough fields and snake fences to the next farmhouse.

Mrs. Morgan was running in from the barn with a shawl over her head.

"Good sakes alive! Mary Mason! I hardly knowed you. What you got on? I thought you was one o' them scarecrows[xv] out o' the fall wheat. Mis' Mason moved to Californy three days ago. Didn't she take you with her?"

"No, mawm."

"So it 'pears. Wal, she hadn't any call to, I s'pose. You aint none o' hers."

By this time they were in the kitchen of the farmhouse, Mrs. Morgan rubbing her hands above the stove, and Mary Mason also venturing near, stretching out her thin arms to the heat, for the adopted jacket was somewhat short in the sleeves.

"What's that mark on yer wrist?"

"Bruise—but it don't hurt now."

"Who done it?"

"Ma—Mis' Mason. I've lots worse'n that on me," said the small girl with some vanity.

"There, now! I jest knew that Mis' Mason was a hard case, though my man would never hear[xvi] to it. What you going to do now?"

"I dunno." The accent implied that to be a matter of small moment.

"I don't s'pose we can turn you out to-night. There's room in the attic for you to sleep, but don't you go near one o' my girls' beds with that head o' yourn."

As a hostess, Mrs. Morgan was a slight improvement upon Mrs. Mason. She never took stick or strap to the foundling, and if she occasionally gave her a cuff on the ear it was never strong enough to knock the girl down. But the Morgan children bullied Mary Mason, the Morgan father grumbled at an extra mouth to feed, and when she had been about a month in the house the mistress of it told her she must move on.

"There's an old dress of Ellie's you can have, an' a pair of Sue's cast-off boots, and Tom's old cap."[xvii]

"Where am I to go, mawm?"

"You jest go on from one farmhouse to another, till you find a place where they'll keep you all winter. It's comin' on to Christmas, an' people won't be hard on ye. Tell 'em you aint got no folks."

The forlorn little pilgrim took up her march down the snow-covered road.

[xviii]

[1]

CHAPTER I.

My wife is a theosophist. This fact may account for her numerous eccentricities or be simply one of them. I incline to the latter opinion, because she preferred the unbeaten to the beaten track, both in walk and conversation, long before Modern Buddhism was ever heard of in the small Western town of whose chief newspaper (circulation largest in Michigan) I have the honor to be editor and proprietor.

How such a hot-house plant as Theosophy ever took root in the[2] swamps and sands of the Wolverine State may seem surprising at the first glance, but let the second rest upon our environment—the absence of mountain or swift-flowing river, the presence of fever and ague and half-burnt pine woods—and it will be seen that this Eastern lore with its embarrassment of symbols supplies a long-felt want to starving imagination. We of the West are forever reaching beyond our grasp, have intelligence and perception, but lack the culture necessary for discrimination, and therefore the romantic souls among us who rise above the rampant materialism of the majority go to the other extreme, and hail with enthusiasm the new-old religion.

"It's better to believe too much than too little, but you theosophists swallow an awful lot," I say to Belle when she tries to convert me.

I am well aware that many of[3] my fellow-citizens consider me a subject for commiseration because I have lived for twenty years with so erratic a house-mate, for I have not deemed it necessary to explain to them that without the stimulus of her enlivening spirit, without the element of surprise constantly contributed by my wife's love of variety, the daily life, and therefore the daily paper, of their favorite editor would partake of that flatness which is the predominant characteristic of this western part of the State of Michigan.

Our four sons and two daughters enjoy their mother fully as much as I do, for is she not the most fascinating romancer they ever knew? Now that they are all of an age to be attending school and looking out for themselves, after the manner of independent young Americans, they require from her nothing but sympathy, for their grandmother[4] sews their buttons on. Grandma!—Ay, there's the rub.

I have no hesitation in owning that I am Scotch by birth. My mother left her native land to make her home with us entirely too late in life to allow Western ideas regarding Sabbath observance, the rearing of children, or the amount of respect due to the opinion of elders, to become ingrafted upon Scottish prejudice concerning these matters.

Mrs. Gemmell Senior has, however, the national peculiarity of judging "blood thicker than water," and whatever her convictions may be concerning the methods of Mrs. Gemmell Junior, she restricts the expression of them to our family circle—in fact, I may say, to myself. She generally seizes me when I lie at my ease on the well-worn lounge in our sitting room, more properly dubbed the "nursery," for it is Liberty Hall for the youngsters.[5] Two rooms have been knocked into one to accommodate their dolls' houses, bookshelves, toys, and printing machines. Belle had the whole side torn out of the house to build an open fire-place, on purpose to burn slabs, over which the children roast pop-corn to their hearts' content.

"A body wad think," said my mother one cold night five or six years ago, when I lay on the sofa, trying to send my weariness off in smoke, "A body wad think there had been nae cherritable wark dune in the toon ava, till they theossiphies set aboot it. If yer provost and baillies lookit efter things as they ocht, there wad be a dacent puirs-house for the idignant folk, an' a wheen daft leddies like Eesabel needna gang roun' speirin' at yon infeedels for their siller tae build a hoose o' refuse."

"There is a county poorhouse, mother, but it doesn't happen to be located in this city, and they[6] won't take in anybody there that hasn't been a resident of the county for a certain time."

"Aweel! there's plenty o' kirks, though ye never darken the door o' ane. Do they no' leuk efter their ain puir folk?"

"Yes; but after nobody else's. This House of Refuge is to be non-sectarian, non-religious, humanitarian, in the broadest sense of the term. Ah! There's Belle now," and I gave a sigh of relief as I heard my wife's latch-key in the front door.

She came in with an out-of-door breeze, her dark face glowing from the wintry wind, flakes of newly fallen snow resting like diamonds upon her prematurely white hair, and her brown eyes sparkling with the animation of twenty summers rather than of forty-two.

"Children all gone to bed? That's right! Don't go, mother! I'm sure you'll like to hear about[7] the House of Refuge. We've got it fixed at last! Those rich old lumbermen that won't give a cent to a church, or any charity connected with one, have gone to the bottom of their pockets this time. Fancy Peter Wood, Dave—five hundred dollars! And Jeff Henderson, five hundred. I have the list in my bag. Like to see it?"

"No' the nicht, thenk ye," said my mother stiffly, but I added:

"Hand it over to me, and I'll put it in to-morrow's Echo. That's what they want."

"Nothing of the kind, you old cynic! I shan't tell you another thing about it." But still she went on: "We've taken the old Laurence house on the corner of Garfield Avenue and Pine Street, and it's to be fitted up to accommodate any sort of refugees."

"Irrespective of race, creed,[8] sex, or color," I whispered parenthetically.

"No one is ever to be turned from the door without a good square meal, and there's to be a back, outside stair erected, up which a tramp can go at any hour of the night, and find a nice clean bed awaiting him—locked away from the rest of the house, of course."

"Oh, why?" I innocently inquired. "Surely you have enough faith in your brother man to believe that he would not commit any breach of hospitality?"

"I have," replied Belle, squeezing my recumbent form further against the back of the sofa, upon which she had seated herself. "But remember we are not all theosophists on the Board."

In the words of the historic witness against Mrs. Muldoon, "That's the way the row began!" Belle was elected Treasurer of[9] the House of Refuge, but as she knows nothing of figures, I had to keep the books of that unique institution, and was therefore enabled to form a practical estimate of its workings.

I shall not attempt a description of the numerous "cases" in which my advice, if not my pocketbook, was freely drawn upon, but shall leave them, along with the description of the many antecedent fads of my beloved better half, to some historian of longer wind, and shall content myself with recounting the particular "case"—and attachments—which most nearly affected our family life and happiness.

"This is what I call solid comfort," said Belle to me one evening late in September, as we sat in the parlor in a couple of deep, springy armchairs, fronting a huge grate fire, that would be banished[10] by the lighting of the furnace. "Children all in school again, your mother off on a long visit, and plenty of new books on the table."

I looked up from one of the aforesaid new books.

"Just wait! The season's business hasn't begun in the Refuge yet."

"Everything is in good shape for it, though. We've had enough donations of groceries and vegetables to keep us going almost all winter. We've lots of wood for the furnace, and Mack and Hardy have given us some second-hand furniture and——"

The electric door-bell sent out a long, imperative summons.

"Who can that be, Dave, at this time of night? None of the boys locked out?"

"No; they all went up to bed a while ago."

Belle rose and walked to the door. I pulled the tidy from my[11] chair-back over my bald head to protect me from the draught, but that did not prevent me from hearing what went on.

"Are you Mrs. Gemmell?" This from a female voice, breathless with excitement.

"I am."

"Then you are one of the trustees of the House of Refuge?" gasped another feminine speaker.

"Yes. Won't you come in?"

"No, thank you. We've just come to tell you about this young girl who has run to us for protection."

"We're school-teachers, mawm."

"She's in my class, and she hasn't a friend in the city and knew nowhere else to go."

Then followed some hysterical whispers, which roused my curiosity so much that I went to the door and peeped over the shoulder of my tall wife. The two plain, business-like young women were evidently much distressed, but[12] between them was a fair-haired slip of a girl of fifteen or sixteen, the least disturbed of the group. The three older women might have been talking in a foreign tongue, or of someone else, so unconcerned did she appear, present danger being over.

"How did she happen to be with these people?" Belle was asking as I came forward.

"The wife of this brute of a man told us that she was nursemaid with the Ferguson Family Concert Company, but they dropped her here in Lake City without a friend or a cent."

"She took her in to help sell fruit and ice cream evenings, and she let her go to school through the day."

At this juncture the subject under discussion broke into a beaming smile, showing all her fine teeth. Her cheek dimpled and reddened, and her blue eyes, full of fun, looked straight into[13] mine. I became suddenly aware that I had forgotten to remove the tidy, and retired in confusion, but heard Belle's conclusion of the interview:

"Just wait a second till I give you a line to the matron of the House of Refuge. You can leave the girl there till we see what can be done for her. She'll be perfectly safe, and had better keep on going to school as usual."

A week afterward I asked my wife what had become of her latest protégée.

"You mean Mary Mason? She's in the refuge yet, attending school, and we've settled that man's ice-cream saloon."

"How?"

"Boycotted him. We can't reach him any other way."

"That's rather hard on his wife, who seems to be a decent sort of party."

"The innocent often appear to[14] suffer with and for the guilty, but if you understood the law of Karma you would know that all the evil that befalls us is really the result of some wrongdoing of our own in a previous incarnation. Mary Mason herself is an instance."

"What's the matter with her?"

"Poor girl! She's been knocked from pillar to post all her days. She hasn't an idea who her parents are, and there isn't a creature in the world she has any claim upon. She must have gone very far astray last time to have been brought into the world again with such disadvantages."

"It appears to me she has a great many advantages—lovely blue eyes, good teeth, the fashionable golden shade of hair, and the prettiest complexion I've seen for many a day."

"Don't be provoking, Dave! The poor little thing has the[15] marks of some of her beatings on her yet. The Ferguson family were the first who ever treated her decently, or paid her any wages."

"Why did they drop her?"

"One of our Committee took it upon herself to write and ask them. They replied that the girl was of perfectly good character, so far as they knew, but she fell so ridiculously in love with Frank Ferguson, their eldest son, that she was making a nuisance of herself, and so they had to let her go."

I laughed.

"There are generally two sides to that kind of story."

"At the meeting of the trustees to-morrow it is to be decided what's to be done with her, because she says she doesn't want to go to school any more. She's never had much of a chance before to learn anything, and she's in a class with little bits of girls, and she doesn't like it—says she'd rather go to work to earn her own living."[16]