HERE'S mother, Mrs. Warren?" inquired a girl of about seven or eight years of age, with pallid face, and dress hanging in tatters about her bare feet, as she slowly dragged up the broken stairs to the one room where her father and mother, herself, and four younger children lived and slept.
"You needn't ask me, child. She's locked her door, and the little uns are inside; and here's the key. I 'spect she's off on a spree." The child took the key, and sighing heavily, proceeded on her way. Two of the children were screaming loudly, but ceased their cries as she entered the room, and began, one to crawl, and the other to toddle, towards the only being in their little world who never struck or kicked them, but tended them with the love and gentleness which, but for her, they would never have known.
"Mammie's left us all alone, Mattie; and Fan and baby has been crying all the morning, and Bob and me's been doing all we can, and they won't do nothing but scream," exclaimed the eldest of the four children in wearied tones.
"That's right, Melie; you're good children; but I've come home, and 'll look after the lot of you. What's for dinner? Did mammie say?"
"There's some crusts left up on the mantel," answered Melie.
"Bob, you just climb up and fetch 'em down, and I'll nurse the baby, and, Fan, you come right away and sit by me." Mattie picked up the dirty, tear-stained baby, and seated herself on the only chair in the room. She had been to school all the morning, and, while ostensibly puzzling her little brain with the mysteries of "the three R's," her heart had been full of fear for those little ones in the house. What if her mother should leave them with the door unlocked, and Fan and baby should find their way headlong down those dark, steep stairs? Or, suppose the window in their room should by any means become unfastened, and one of them should fall to the pavement beneath; for Mattie remembered that, only the week before, a drunken mother had let her baby drop from her arms out of the window at the top of the house into the court below, from whence it had been picked up a shapeless, bleeding mass. So she was greatly relieved that everything had gone well in her absence. As for Fan's and baby's crying, that was to be expected while she was away.
"I shan't go to school this afternoon; 'taint to be expected as I can, although teacher'll be just mad, being as it's near 'xamination time," declared Mattie.
"That's prime, Mattie! What'll we do? Not stay up here all the time?" cried Bob.
"In course not. We'll have our dinner, and then we'll just get a breath of air in the park. It'll do baby good; won't it, darling?" said Mattie, stooping over her puny charge as fondly as if he were the bonniest baby in the land, instead of a feeble, wan-faced infant, upon whom, as indeed upon each of the group which surrounded him, there was stamped the unmistakable imprint of an inherited curse.