The dwelling-place, with the few apparently worthless articles it contained, was all the club had ever accepted as a gift. Even that might have been declined had it not been for the fact that it was going begging. When old Miss Smedley died it was found that she had left her residence in Vandiver Place as a legacy to St. David’s Church, across the way. She had left it, however, as an empty residence. As an empty residence it was in a measure a white elephant on the hands of a legatee that had no immediate use for it.
St. David’s Church, you will remember, was not now the fashionable house of prayer it had been in its early days. Time was when Vandiver Place was the heart of exclusive New York. In the ’forties and ’fifties no section of the city had been more select. In the ’sixties and ’seventies, when Doctor Grace was rector of St. David’s, it had become time-honored. In the ’eighties and ’nineties the old families began to move up-town and the boarding-houses to creep in; and in the early years of the twentieth century the residents ceded the ground entirely to the manufacturer of artificial flowers and the tailor of the ready-to-wear. In 1911 the line of houses that made it a cul-de-sac was torn down and a broad thoroughfare cut through a congeries of slums, the whole being named Vandiver Street. Vandiver Place was gone; and with it went Miss Smedley.
Rufus Legrand, who succeeded Doctor Grace as rector of St. David’s, offered Miss Smedley’s house as a home for the Down and Out; but it was Beady Lamont, a husky furniture-mover and ardent member of the club, who suggested this philanthropic opportunity to Rufus Legrand.
“Say, reverent, my buddy’s give in at last, on’y I haven’t got no place to put him. But, say, reverent, there’s that old house I helped to move the sticks out of two or three months ago. There’s three beds left in it, and a couple of chairs. Me and him could bunk there for a few nights, while he got straightened out, and—”
“But you’d have no bedclothes.”
“Say, reverent, we don’t want no bedclothes. Sleepin’ in the Park’ll learn you how to do without sheets.”
“My daughter, Mrs. Ralph Coningsby, could undoubtedly supply you with some.”
“Say, reverent, that ain’t our way. We don’t pass the buck on no one. What we haven’t got we do without till we can pay for it ourselves. But that old house ain’t doin’ nothing but sit on its haunches; and if I could just get Tiger into the next bed to mine at night—we don’t want no bedclothes nor nothing but what we lay down in—and take him along with me when I go to work by day, so as to keep my search-lights on him, like—”
Rufus Legrand had already sufficiently weighed the proposal.