It was such a strange, sad, old face to be on such a young, slight form, that you could not help looking at it again and again. Otherwise there was nothing remarkable about her. She was just a girl sweeping a crossing, in a bustling, dirty street, on a muddy, sloppy March day.
She was thinly clothed, but not more so than others of her class; and there was nothing in particular to make me notice her except this queer, expressive, melancholy, unyouthful countenance. She wore a worsted hood which left the whole face visible. You could see the forehead, broad and low, and lined with puzzled thinking; the dusky, tumbled hair; the wishful, pathetic mouth with its drooping corners; and the great, strange, olive-colored eyes, which looked[Pg 192] as if they had asked for something they could never find for such a weary while that now they would never ask again,—eyes dark with despair, and yet with a suggestion of something else in them which set you questioning.
Patiently she swept on. Sometimes she had to spring aside from the rapid passage of cart or carriage, sometimes she made clean the way of some dainty foot passenger, who rewarded her with a penny; but all the time the hopeless, unchildlike visage never betrayed the slightest gleam of interest. I was dabbling in art a little, just then; and I stood in the window of a picture store and watched her, thinking that her strange, impassive face ought to fit, somewhere, in the illustrations I was making for a book of ballads, but not knowing quite how to use it.
All at once, as I watched, I saw a singular change pass over her. She held her broom motionless, her lips parted, a light as if at midnight the sun should rise, lighted the darkness of her eyes, her whole expression kindled with something,—interest, surprise, expectation,—I hardly[Pg 193] knew what, but something that transformed it as by a spell. I stepped to the door then, and followed her eyes up the street.
It takes ten times as long to tell this as it was in happening. It all came in an instant,—the change in her face, my going out to look for its cause, and the sight which, following her eyes, I saw,—a carriage coming swiftly down street, an elegant open barouche, in which sat a lady dressed in furs and velvet, and a wonderfully beautiful, golden-haired child. It was at the child that my little crossing-sweeper was looking, with a gaze which seemed to me to say,—
"So this, then, is childhood? This is what we ought to be when we are young; and how beautiful it is!"
She looked so intently that she forgot she was standing in the way, until the coachman shouted out to her, while he tried with all his strength to pull up his horses. She had looked one moment too long. Somehow the pole knocked her down, and the horses stepped over or on her, which I could not see; but in another moment[Pg 194] they were drawn up a rod farther on, the lady was getting out of her carriage, and I myself was in the heart of the crowd which gathered at once, as usual. "Her arm is broken," one cried. "She has fainted," said another.
"Where is her home; can any one tell?" asked the lady in the furs and the velvet, standing now beside her.
A ragged little newsboy stepped from the ranks and pulled at some ghost of a cap. "Please, ma'am, I know," he said. "It's down here in Moonstone Court, with old Sally."
"Hey for Sally, in our alley," sang another little limb of evil, vexed that he had not been the one who knew the local habitation aforesaid.
Newsboy No. 1 was elevated to the coachman's box, and was desired to show the way. The lady got into the carriage herself, and received the injured and swooning girl, whom there were strong arms enough to lift,—the golden-haired child looked on with the compassion of an angel in her angelic face,—newsboy No. 2 hung on[Pg 195] behind dexterously, making sure that his offence would pass unnoticed in the general mêlée, and the carriage rolled away toward Moonstone Court. Presently the golden-haired child spoke.
"What if they haven't any good place for her there, mamma?"
Mrs. Brierly, for that was the lady's name, bent forward and addressed newsboy No. 1, on the box.
"Is the old Sally you spoke of the girl's mother?"
"No, ma'am. She ain't no relation to her. I've heard folks say, Ruthy's father and mother died, and old Sally took her in to beg for her; to be a sufferin' orphin, you know; and lately Ruthy won't beg any more, and they say the old un do beat her awful."
"O mamma!" It was all the pitiful, childish lips said; but the blue eyes full of tears finished the prayer.
"Don't be afraid, Gracie," the lady answered, smiling; "she shall not go there." Then she turned to newsboy No. 1. "Here is some money[Pg 196] for you. You can tell old Sally that the girl got hurt, and has been taken to the hospital. You had better go and let her know at once."
So newsboy No. 1 got down from his unwonted elevation, pulled again at the phantom of a cap, and, looking curiously at the fresh, crisp currency in his hand, walked away. Newsboy No. 2, correctly divining that nothing was to be gained by remaining, while, by following his comrade he might perhaps come in for a treat, let go his hold on the carriage, and went after the other.
"Now, James," Mrs. Brierly said to the coachman, "you may drive to the Children's Hospital, on Rutland Street."
"We shall go right by home, shan't we, mamma?"
"Yes, dear."
"I suppose we couldn't be a hospital, could we?"
"Not very conveniently, I think. It is better to help keep up a hospital outside than to turn our own house into one."
[Pg 197]
"Yes'm," Gracie said, thoughtfully, "only this once, when we did the hurting, I didn't know but it would be nice if we did the curing."
Just then, before Mrs. Brierly answered, the swooning girl revived, and opened for an instant her curious, olive-colored eyes. There was something in their look, perhaps, which went farther than Gracie's argument. At any rate, the lady said,—
"After all, James, you may as well leave us at home, and go at once for Dr. Cheever."
In five minutes more the carriage had stopped before a substantial, prosperous-looking house, the coachman had carried the poor, suffering little waif upstairs in his arms, and Mrs. Brierly had summoned Mrs. Morris, the good, motherly woman who had been Gracie's nurse, to her councils.
When Dr. Cheever came, he found his patient in clean, pure clothes, in a fresh, lovely room, waiting for him with a piteous, silent patience which it was pathetic to see. She suffered cruelly from her hurt, a compound fracture of[Pg 198] the wrist, but she was not used to making moans or receiving sympathy; and it would have seemed to her a sort of sacrilege to cry out with human pain in this paradise to which she had been brought. One could only guess at her suffering by her compressed lips, with the white pallor round them, and the dark rings about her eyes.
Dr. Cheever listened to the account of the accident, while he dressed the poor hurt wrist with a gentleness which soothed the pain his touch caused. When he had done all he could, he followed Mrs. Brierly from the room.
"This will be an affair of several weeks," he said. "Would it not have been better to take the girl to one of the hospitals?"
"I thought so, at first; but, as Gracie said, we did the hurting, and it seemed right we should do the healing. Besides, the child's face interested me strangely, and I think it will not be a bad thing for us to have a little experience of this sort."
Meantime Ruthy lay and looked about her, as[Pg 199] we have all fancied ourselves looking when, the death sleep over, we shall open our eyes to a new morning in some one of the Father's "many mansions." To a denizen of Moonstone Court this peaceful spot in which Ruthy found herself might well seem no unworthy heaven. The walls were tinted a soft, delicate gray, with blue borderings. On the drab carpet blue forget-me-nots blossomed. Blue ribbons tied back the white muslin curtains, and all the little china articles for use or ornament were blue and gilt.
Only one picture was in the room, and that hung over the mantel, directly opposite the pure white bed where Ruthy lay. It was a landscape by Gifford,—one of those glorified pictures of his which paint nature as only a poet sees her. Soft meadows sloped away into dreamy distance on one side, and, on the other, into the green enchantment of a wood a winding path beguiled you. In the centre, with her raised foot upon a stile by which she was about to cross into the peaceful meadows, a young girl stood with [Pg 200]morning in her eyes. Just as she raised her foot she had paused and turned her head to look over her shoulder, as if she heard a voice calling her, and was hesitating whether to go on her appointed way or back into the green wood's enchantment. There was a wonderful suggestion for a story in the girl's face, her attitude, her questioning eyes. But if Ruthy felt this at all, it was very vaguely and unconsciously; yet the picture revealed to her a new world. Somewhere, then, meadows bloomed like these meadows, and woods were green, and light flickered through tender leaves, and over all th............