Cast Adrift

“That question may be hard to answer. About all I know of her is that she came from the country a few years ago, and has been drifting about here ever since.”

“What is she doing with that baby? and how did she get hold of it?”

“Questions more easily asked than answered.”

“Pshaw! I don’t want any beating about the bush, Mrs. Bray.”

“Mrs. Hoyt,” said the person addressed.

“Oh, well, Mrs. Hoyt, then. We ought to understand each other by this time.”

“I guess we do;” and the little woman arched her brows.

“I don’t want any beating about the bush,” resumed Mrs. Dinneford. “I am here on business.”

“Very well; let’s to business, then;” and Mrs. Hoyt leaned back in her chair.

“Edith knows that this woman has the baby,” said Mrs. Dinneford.

“What!” and Mrs. Hoyt started to her feet.

“The mayor has been seen, and the police are after her.”

“How do you know?”

“Enough that I know. And now, Mrs. Hoyt, this thing must come to an end, and there is not an instant to be lost. Has Pinky Swett, as she is called, been told where the baby came from?”

“Not by me.”

“By anybody?”

“That is more than I can say.”

“What has become of the woman I gave it to?”

“She’s about somewhere.”

“When did you see her?”

Mrs. Hoyt pretended to think for some moments, and then replied:

“Not for a month or two.”

“Had she the baby then?”

“No; she was rid of it long before that.”

“Did she know this Pinky Swett?”

“Yes.”

“Curse the brat! If I’d thought all this trouble was to come, I’d have smothered it before it was half an hour old.”

“Risky business,” remarked Mrs. Hoyt.

“Safer than to have let it live,” said Mrs. Dinneford, a hard, evil expression settling around her mouth. “And now I want the thing done. You understand. Find this Pinky Swett. The police are after her, and may be ahead of you. I am desperate, you see. Anything but the discovery and possession of this child by Edith. It must be got out of the way. If it will not starve, it must drown.”

Mrs. Dinneford’s face was distorted by the strength of her evil passions. Her eyes were full of fire, flashing now, and now glaring like those of a wild animal.

“It might fall out of a window,” said Mrs. Hoyt, in a low, even voice, and with a faint smile on her lips. “Children fall out of windows sometimes.”

“But don’t always get killed,” answered Mrs. Dinneford, coldly.

“Or, it might drop from somebody’s arms into the river—off the deck of a ferryboat, I mean,” added Mrs. Hoyt.

“That’s better. But I don’t care how it’s done, so it’s done.”

“Accidents are safer,” said Mrs. Hoyt.

“I guess you’re right about that. Let it be an accident, then.”

It was half an hour from the time Mrs. Dinneford entered this house before she came away. As she passed from the door, closely veiled, a gentleman whom she knew very well was going by on the opposite side of the street. From something in his manner she felt sure that he had recognized her, and that the recognition had caused him no little surprise. Looking back two or three times as she hurried homeward, she saw, to her consternation, that he was following her, evidently with the purpose of making sure of her identity.

To throw this man off of her track was Mrs. Dinneford’s next concern. This she did by taking a street-car that was going in a direction opposite to the part of the town in which she lived, and riding for a distance of over a mile. An hour afterward she came back to her own neighborhood, but not without a feeling of uneasiness. Just as she was passing up to the door of her residence a gentleman came hurriedly around the nearest corner. She recognized him at a glance. It seemed as if the servant would never answer her ring. On he came, until the sound of his steps was in her ears. He was scarcely ten paces distant when the door opened and she passed in. When she gained her room, she sat down faint and trembling. Here was a new element in the danger and disgrace that were digging her steps so closely.

As we have seen, Edith did not make her appearance at the mission sewing-school on the following Thursday, nor did she go there for many weeks afterward. The wild hope that had taken her to Briar street, the nervous strain and agitation attendant on that visit, and the reaction occasioned by her father’s failure to get possession of the baby, were too much for her strength, and an utter prostration of mind and body was the consequence. There was no fever nor sign of any active disease—only weakness, Nature’s enforced quietude, that life and reason might be saved.

CHAPTER XVII

THE police were at fault. They found Pinky Swett, but were not able to find the baby. Careful as they were in their surveillance, she managed to keep them on the wrong track and to baffle every effort to discover what had been done with the child.

In this uncertainty months went by. Edith came up slowly from her prostrate condition, paler, sadder and quieter, living in a kind of waking dream. Her father tried to hold her back from her mission work among the poor, but she said, “I must go, father; I will die if I do not.”

And so her life lost itself in charities. Now and then her mother made an effort to draw her into society. She had not yet given up her ambition, nor her hope of one day seeing her daughter take social rank among the highest, or what she esteemed the highest. But her power over Edith was entirely gone. She might as well have set herself to turn the wind from its course as to influence her in anything. It was all in vain. Edith had dropped out of society, and did not mean to go back. She had no heart for anything outside of her home, except the Christian work to which she had laid her hands.

The restless, watchful, suspicious manner exhibited for a long time by Mrs. Dinneford, and particularly noticed by Edith, gradually wore off. She grew externally more like her old self, but with something new in the expression of her face when in repose, that gave a chill to the heart of Edith whenever she saw its mysterious record, that seemed in her eyes only an imperfect effort to conceal some guilty secret.

Thus the mother and daughter, though in daily personal contact, stood far apart—were internally as distant from each other as the antipodes.

As for Mr. Dinneford, what he had seen and heard on his first visit to Briar street had aroused him to a new and deeper sense of his duty as a citizen. Against all the reluctance and protests of his natural feelings, he had compelled himself to stand face to face with the appalling degradation and crime that festered and rioted in that almost Heaven-deserted region. He had heard and read much about its evil condition; but when, under the protection of a policeman, he went from house to house, from den to den, through cellar and garret and hovel, comfortless and filthy as dog-kennels and pig-styes, and saw the sick and suffering, the utterly vile and debauched, starving babes and children with faces marred by crime, and the legion of harpies who were among them as birds of prey, he went back to his home sick at heart, and with a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness out of which he found it almost impossible to rise.

We cannot stain our pages with a description of what he saw. It is so vile and terrible, alas, so horrible, that few would credit it. The few imperfect glimpses of life in that region which we have already given are sad enough and painful enough, but they only hint at the real truth.

“What can be done?” asked Mr. Dinneford of the missionary, at their next meeting, in a voice that revealed his utter despair of a remedy. “To me it seems as if nothing but fire could purify this region.”

“The causes that have produced this would soon create another as bad,” was answered.

“What are the causes?”