Lo Michael! (15 page)

Sam nodded.

“I don't know's I care 'bout it,” he said indifferently, but Michael saw that he intended to come.

“Well, after the kids have gone, I won't keep them late you know, I wonder if you'd like to bring some of the fellows in to see this?”

Michael glanced around the room.

“I've some pictures of alligators I have a fancy they might like to see. I'll bring them down if you say so.”

“Sure!” said Sam trying to hide his pleasure.

“Then to-morrow morning I'm going to let that little woman that lives in the cellar under Aunt Sally's room, bring her sewing here and work all day. She makes buttonholes in vests. It's so dark in her room she can't see and she's almost ruined her eyes working by candle light.”

“She'll mess it all up!” grumbled Sam; “an' she might let other folks in an' they'd pinch the picters an' the posy.”

“No, she won't do that. I've talked to her about it. The room is to be hers for the day, and she's to keep it looking just as nice as it did when she found it. She'll only bring her work over, and go home for her dinner. She's to keep the fire going so it will be warm at night, and she's to try it for a day and see how it goes. I think she'll keep her promise. We'll try her anyway.”

Sam nodded as to a superior officer who nevertheless was awfully foolish.

“Mebbe!” he said.

“Sam, do you think it would be nice to bring Aunt Sally over now a few minutes?”

“No,” said Sam shortly, “she's too dirty. She'd put her fingers on de wall first thing—”

“But Sam, I think she ought to come. And she ought to come first. She's the one that helped me find you—”

Sam looked sharply at Michael and wondered if he suspected how long that same Aunt Sally had frustrated his efforts to find his friends.

“We could tell her not to touch things, perhaps—”

“Wal, you lemme tell her. Here! I'll go fix her up an' bring her now.” And Sam hurried out of the room.

Michael waited, and in a few minutes Sam returned with Aunt Sally. But it was a transformed Aunt Sally. Her face had been painfully scrubbed in a circle out as far as her ears, and her scraggy gray hair was twisted in a tight knot at the back of her neck. Her hands were several shades cleaner than Michael had ever seen them before, and her shoes were tied. She wore a small three-cornered plaid shawl over her shoulders and entered cautiously as if half afraid to come. Her hands were clasped high across her breast. She had evidently been severely threatened against touching anything.

“The saints be praised!” she ejaculated warmly after she had looked around in silence for a moment “To think I should ivver see the loikes uv this in de alley. It lukes loike a palace. Mikky, ye're a Nangel, me b'y! An' a rale kurtin, to be shure! I ain't seen a kurtin in the alley since I cummed. An' will ye luke at the purty posy a blowin' as foine as ye plaze! Me mither had the loike in her cottage window when I was a leetle gal! Aw, me pure auld mither!”

And suddenly to Michael's amazement, and the disgust of Sam, old Sal sat down on the one chair and wept aloud, with the tears streaming down her seamed and sin-scarred face.

Sam was for putting her out at once, but Michael soothed her with his cheery voice, making her tell of her old home in Ireland, and the kind mother whom she had loved, though it was long years since she had thought of her now.

With rare skill he drew from her the picture of the little Irish cottage with its thatched roof, its peat fire, and well-swept hearth; the table with the white cloth, the cat in the rocking chair, the curtain starched stiffly at the window, the bright posy on the deep window ledge; and, lastly, the little girl with clean pinafore and curly hair who kissed her mother every morning and trotted off to school. But that was before the father died, and the potatoes failed. The school days were soon over, and the little girl with her mother came to America. The mother died on the way over, and the child fell into evil hands. That was the story, and as it was told Michael's face grew tender and wistful. Would that he knew even so much of his own history as that!

But Sam stood by struck dumb and trying to fancy that this old woman had ever been the bright rosy child she told about. Sam was passing through a sort of mental and moral earthquake.

“Perhaps some day we'll find another little house in the country where you can go and live,” said Michael, “but meantime, suppose you go and see if you can't make your room look like this one. You scrub it all up and perhaps Sam and I will come over and put some pretty paper on the walls for you. Would you like that? How about it, Sam?”

“Sure!” said Sam rather grudgingly. He hadn't much faith in Aunt Sally and didn't see what Michael wanted with her anyway, but he was loyal to Michael.

Irish blessings mingled with tears and garnished with curses in the most extraordinary way were showered upon Michael and at last when he could stand no more, Sam said:

“Aw, cut it out, Sal. You go home an' scrub. Come on, now!” and he bundled her off in a hurry.

Late as it was, old Sal lit a fire, and by the light of a tallow candle got down on her stiff old knees and began to scrub. It seemed nothing short of a miracle that her room could ever look like that one she had just seen, but if scrubbing could do anything toward it, scrub she would. It was ten years since she had thought of scrubbing her room. She hadn't seemed to care; but to-night as she worked with her trembling old drink-shaken hands the memory of her childhood's home was before her vision, and she worked with all her might.

So the leaven of the little white room in the dark alley began to work. “The Angel's quarters” it was named, and to be called to go within its charmed walls was an honor that all coveted as time went on. And that was how Michael began the salvation of his native alley.

CHAPTER XIV

Michael had been three months with the new law firm and was beginning to get accustomed to the violent contrast between the day spent in the atmosphere of low-voiced, quiet-stepping, earnest men who moved about in their environment of polished floors, oriental rugs, leather chairs and walls lined with leather-covered law books; and the evening down in the alley where his bare, little, white and gold room made the only tolerable spot in the neighborhood.

He was still occupying the fourth floor back at his original boarding house, and had seen Mr. Endicott briefly three or four times, but nothing had been said about his lodgings.

One morning he came to the desk set apart for him in the law office, and found a letter lying there for him.

“Son:” it said, “your board is paid at the address given below, up to the day you are twenty-one. If you don't get the benefit it will go to waste. Mrs. Semple will make you quite comfortable and I desire you to move to her house at once. If you feel any obligation toward me this is the way to discharge it. Hope you are well, Yours, Delevan Endicott.”

Michael's heart beat faster with varied emotions. It was pleasant to have some one care, and of course if Mr. Endicott wished it so much he would manage it somehow—perhaps he could get some night work or copying to do—but he would never let him bear his expenses. That could not be.

He hurried off at the noon hour to find his benefactor and make this plain with due gratitude. He found, however, that it was not so easy to change this man's mind, once made up. Endicott would not hear to any change in arrangements. He had paid the board for the remaining months of Michael's minority and maintained his right to do so if he chose. Neither would he let Michael refund him any of the amount.

So Michael moved, bag and baggage, and found the change good. The regular, well-cooked meals gave zest to his appetite which had been going back on him for some time under his own economical regime, and the larger room with better outlook and more air, to say nothing of a comfortable bed with adjoining bath-room, and plenty of heat and light, made life seem more worth while. Besides there were other boarders with whom he now came in pleasant contact, and there was a large pleasant parlor with easy chairs and an old-fashioned square piano which still retained much of its original sweetness of tone.

Mrs. Semple had a daughter Hester, an earnest, gray-eyed girl with soft brown hair and a firm little chin, who had taken an art course in Cooper Institute and painted very good pictures which, however, did not sell. Hester played the piano—not very well, it is true, but well enough to make it pleasant to a lonely boy who had known no music in his life except the birds or his own whistle. She played hymns on Sunday after church while they waited for the dinner to be ready; and evenings after supper she played other things: old ballads and tender, touching melodies from old masters simplified, for such as she. Michael sometimes lingered a half hour before hurrying away to the alley, and joined his rich natural tenor with her light pretty soprano. Sometimes Will French, a young fellow who was in the same law office and also boarded at Mrs. Semple's, stayed a while and sang bass. It was very pleasant and made it seem more as if he were living in a home.

All this time Michael was carrying on his quiet work in the alley, saying nothing about it to anybody. In the first place he felt shy about it because of his personal connection with the place. Not that he wished to hide his origin from his employers, but he felt he owed it to Mr. Endicott who had recommended him, to be as respectable in their sight as possible; and so long as they neither knew nor cared it did not matter. Then, it never occurred to Michael that he was doing anything remarkable with his little white room in the blackness of the stronghold of sin. Night after night he gathered his newsboys and taught them whittling, basketry, reading, arithmetic and geography, with a little philosophy and botany thrown in unawares. Night after night the older fellows dropped in, one or two at a time, and listened to the stories Michael told; sometimes of college life and games in which they were of course interested; sometimes of Nature and his experiences in finding an alligator, or a serpent, or watching some bird. It was wonderful how interesting he managed to make those talks. He never realized that he was preparing in the school of experience to be a magnificent public speaker. With an audience as difficult as any he could have found in the whole wide city, he managed to hold them every time.

And the favorite theme often was agriculture. He would begin by bringing a new little plant to the room, setting it up and showing it to them; talking about conditions of soil and how plants were being improved. It was usually the
résum
é
of some article on agriculture that he had taken time to read at noon and was reviewing for their benefit.

They heard all about Burbank and his wonderful experiments in making plants grow and develop, and as they listened they went and stood around the blossom that Michael had just brought to them and looked with new wonder at it. A flower was a strange enough sight in that court, but when they heard these stories it became filled with new interest. For a little while they forgot their evil plotting and were lifted above themselves.

Another night the talk would be on fertilizers, and how one crop would sometimes give out something that another crop planted later, needed. Little by little, because he talked about the things in which he himself was interested, he was giving these sons of ignorance a dim knowledge of and interest in the culture of life, and the tilling of the ground; getting them ready for what he had hardly as yet dared to put into words even to himself.

And one day he took Sam down to Old Orchard. It was the week before Christmas. They had made their second visit to Jim the week before and he had spoken of the spring and when he should get out into the world again. He seemed to be planning to get even with those who had confined him for his wrongdoing. Michael's heart was filled with anxiety for him.

There was something about Jim that appealed to Michael from the first.

He had seen him first standing behind the grating of his cell, a great unkempt hulk of a fellow with fiery red hair and brown eyes that roved restlessly, hungrily through the corridor. He would have been handsome but for his weak, girlish chin. Jim had melted almost to tears at sight of the scarlet geranium they had carried him on that first visit, and seemed to care more for the appearance of his old comrade “Mikky” than ever Sam had cared.

Jim was to get out in April. If only there were some place for him to go!

They talked of it on the way down, Sam seemed to think that Jim would find it pretty hard to leave New York. Sam himself wasn't much interested in the continued hints of Michael about going to the country.

“Nothin' doin'” was his constant refrain when Michael tried to tell him how much better it would be if some of the congested part of the city could be spread out into the wide country: especially for the poor people, how much greater opportunity for success in life there would be for them.

But Sam had been duly impressed with the wideness of the landscape, on this his first long trip out of the city, and as Michael unfolded to him the story of the gift of the farm, and his own hopes for it, Sam left off his scorn and began to give replies that showed he really was thinking about the matter.

“Say!” said he suddenly, “ef Buck was to come back would you let him live down to your place an' help do all them things you're plannin'?”

“I surely would,” said Michael happily. “Say, Sam, do you, or do you
not
know where Buck is?”

Sam sat thoughtfully looking out of the window. At this point he turned his gaze down to his feet and slowly, cautiously nodded his head.

“I thought so!” said Michael eagerly. “Sam, is he in hiding for something he has done?”

Still more slowly, cautiously, Sam nodded his head once more.

“Sam, will you send him a message from me?”

Another nod.

“Tell him that I love him,” Michael breathed the words eagerly. His heart remembered kindness from Buck more than any other lighting of his sad childhood. “Tell him that I want him—that I need him! Tell him that I want him to make an appointment to meet me somewhere and let us talk this plan of mine over. I want him to go in with me and help me make that farm into a fit place to take people who haven't the right kind of homes, where they can have honest work and good air and be happy! Will you tell him?”

And Sam nodded his head emphatically.

“An' Jim'll help too ef Buck goes. That's dead sure!” Sam volunteered.

“And Sam, I'm counting on you!”

“Sure thing!” said Sam.

Michael tramped all over the place with Sam, showing him everything and telling all his plans. He was very familiar with his land now. He had planned the bog for a cranberry patch, and had already negotiated for the bushes. He had trimmed up the berry bushes in the garden himself during his various holiday trips, and had arranged with a fisherman to dump a few haulings of shellfish on one field where he thought that kind of fertilizer would be effective. He had determined to use his hundred-dollar graduation present in fertilizer and seed. It would not go far but it would be a beginning. The work he would have to get some other way. He would have but little time to put to it himself until late in the summer probably, and there was a great deal that ought to be done in the early spring. He would have to be contented to go slow of course, and must remember that unskilled labor is always expensive and wasteful; still it would likely be all he could get. Just how he would feed and house even unskilled labor was a problem yet to be solved.

It was a day of many revelations to Sam. For one thing even the bare snowy stretch of wide country had taken on a new interest to him since Michael had been telling all these wonderful things about the earth. Sam's dull brain which up to this time had never busied itself about anything except how to get other men's goods away from them, had suddenly awakened to the wonders of the world.

It was he that recognized a little colony of cocoons on the underside of leaves and twigs and called attention to them.

“Say, ain't dem some o' de critters you was showin' de fellers t'other night?”

And Michael fell upon them eagerly. They happened to be rare specimens, and he knew from college experience that such could be sold to advantage to the museums. He showed Sam how to remove them without injuring them. A little further on they came to a wild growth of holly, crazy with berries and burnished thorny foliage, and near at hand a mistletoe bough loaded with tiny white transparent berries.

“Ain't dem wot dey sell fer Chris'sum greens?” Sam's city eyes picked them out at once.

“Of course,” said Michael delighted. “How stupid of me not to have found them before. We'll take a lot back with us and see if we can get any price for it. Whatever we get we'll devote to making the house livable. Holly and mistletoe ought to have a good market about now. That's another idea! Why not cultivate a lot of this stuff right in this tract of land. It seems to grow without any trouble. See! There are lots of little bushes. We'll encourage them, Sam. And say, Sam, if you hadn't come along I might never have thought of that. You see I needed you.”

Sam grunted in a pleased way.

When they came to the house it looked to Michael still more desolate in the snowy stretch of setting than it had when the grass was about it. His heart sank.

“I don't know as we can ever do anything with the old shack,” he said, shaking his head wistfully. “It looks worse than I thought.”

“'Tain't so bad,” said Sam cheerfully. “Guess it's watertight.” He placed a speculative eye at the dusty window pane he had wiped off with his coat sleeve. “Looks dry inside. 'Twould be a heap better'n sleepin' on de pavement fer some. Dat dere fire hole would take in a big lot o' wood an' I guess dere's a plenty round de place without robbin' de woods none.”

Michael led him to the seashore and bade him look. He wanted to see what effect it would have upon him. The coast swept wild and bleak in the cold December day, and Sam shivered in his thin garments. A look of awe and fear came into his face. He turned his back upon it.

“Too big!” he said sullenly, and Michael understood that the sea in its vastness oppressed him.

“Yes, there's a good deal of it,” he admitted, “but after all it's sort of like the geranium flower.”

Sam turned back and looked.

“H'm! I don't see nothin' like!” he grunted despairingly.

“Why, it's wonderful! It's beyond us! We couldn't make it. Look at that motion! See the white tossing rim of the waves! See that soft green gray! Isn't it just the color of the little down on the geranium leaf? See the silver light playing back and forth, and look how it reaches as far as you can see. Now, doesn't it make you feel a little as it did when you first looked at the geranium?”

Michael looked down at Sam from his greater height almost wistfully. He wanted him to understand, but Sam looked in vain.

“Not fer mine!” he shrugged. “Gimme the posy every time.”

They walked in silence along the beach toward the flowing of the river, and Sam eyed the ocean furtively as if he feared it might run up and engulf them suddenly when they were not looking. He had seen the ocean from wharfs of course; and once stole a ride in a pilot boat out into the deep a little way; but he had never been alone thus with the whole sea at once as this seemed. It was too vast for him to comprehend. Still, in a misty way he knew what Michael was trying to make him understand, and it stirred him uncomfortably.

They hired a little boat for a trifle and Michael with strong strokes rowed them back to the farm, straight into the sunset. The sky was purple and gold that night, and empurpled the golden river, whose ripples blended into pink and lavender and green. Sam sat huddled in the prow of the boat facing it all. Michael had planned it so. The oars dipped very quietly, and Sam's small eyes changed and widened and took it all in. The sun slipped lower in a crimson ball, and a flood of crimson light broke through the purple and gold for a moment and left a thin, clear line of flame behind.