While Quidmore stood in doubt as to whether to ring the bell or to push the door which already stood a little open, two men came out of the Chop Saloon and began to mount the steps. In faded blue overalls the worse for wear, they had plainly broken a day's work, possibly begun at five o'clock, for a late breakfast. The one in advance, a sturdy, well-knit fellow of forty or forty-five, got a sinister expression from a black patch over his left eye. His companion was older, smaller, more worn by a bitter life. All the twists in his figure, all the soured betrayals in his crafty face, showed you the habitual criminal.
None of these details was visible to Quidmore, because his imagination could see only the bed for which he was craving. To the boy, who trusted everyone, they were no more than the common type of workman he was used to meeting in the markets. The fellow with the patch on his eye, making an estimate of the strangers as he mounted the steps, spoke cheerily.
"I say, mate, what can I do for yer?"
The voice with a vaguely English ring was not ungenial. Not ungenial, when you looked at it, was the strongly-boned face, with a ruddiness burnt to a coarse tan. The single gray-blue eye had the sympathetic gleam which often helps roguery to make itself excusable to people with a sense of fun.
Quidmore muttered something about wanting to see Mrs. Pappa.
"Right you are! Come along o' me. I'll dig the old gal out for yer. Expects you wants a room for yerself and the kid. Hi, Pappa!"
Pappa came out of a dim, musty parlor as the witch who foretells bad weather appears in a mechanical barometer. She was like a witch, but a dark, classic witch, with an immemorial tradition behind her. Her ancestors might have fought at Marathon, or sacrificed to Neptune in the temple on Sunium. In Jane Street she was archaic, a survival from antiquity. Her thoughts must have been with the nymphs at Delphi, or following the triremes carrying the warriors from Argolis to Troy, as silent, mysterious, fateful, she led the way upstairs.
They followed in procession, all four of them. The doorstep acquaintances displayed a solicitude not less than brotherly. The hall was without furniture, the stairs without carpet. The softwood floors, like the treads of the stairs, were splintered with the usage of many heavy heels. Where the walls bulged, through the pressure of jerry-built stories overhead, the marbled paper swelled into bosses. Tom found it impressive, with something of strange stateliness.
"Yer'll be from the country," the one-eyed fellow observed, as they climbed upward.
"Yes, sir," Tom answered, civilly. "We're on our way to Wilmington, Delaware, but my father felt a little sick."