“Tell me something about yourselves;” and he roused from his dream abruptly. “Where is your father?”
“’Twas him that hurted Bess’s legs, an’ he got jugged for it. He beat mammy dreadful—he uster when he had the drink in him. An’ now mammy’s goin’ the same way. That’s why I’d like to take Bess somewhere—”
“Are there just you two?”
“There’s Owen an’ Dan. They’re little chaps, but they’d get along. Boys soon get big enough to strike back. An’ some one else ’ud have to look out for the babies.”
“Babies! How many?” in amaze.
“I keep thim when their mothers go to work. Sometimes they’re cross, and it’s dreadful for poor Bess.”
“And your mother allows you to do that?”
“She’s got ter!” cried Bess, her smouldering indignation breaking out. “An’ keep the house. An’ when there’s only two or three mother swears she’ll send Dil to the shop to work. So we’d rather have thim, for it would be dreadful for me to be without Dil, don’t you see?”
Yes, he saw, and his heart ached. He had a vague idea of some of the comfortable homes, but to be without Dil! “Did his mother and sisters ever meet with any such lives, and such tender devotion?” he wondered. It was enough to break one’s heart. It almost broke his to think he could not rescue them. The picturesque aspects of poverty had appealed to him in the street-gamins and ragged old men who besieged him for “tin cints fer a night’s lodgin’,” that he knew would be spent for whiskey in the nearest saloon; but of the actual lives of the very poor he had but the vaguest idea.
“And your mother?” he ventured, dreading the reply.