It was very disconcerting. Blanche said it made her quite sea-sick, or words to that effect. This dreadful little apartment lay snug against the roof. In the winter the snow sifted prettily but uncomfortably here and there. In the summer the heat was appalling. Those old-timers who knew the house well, called No. 15 the "torture-chamber," and many a time, during the fiercest heat, Mrs. Bradshaw would literally drive me from the small fiery furnace to her own room, where at least there was air to breathe, for No. 15 had but half a window. And yet, miserable as this place was, it was a refuge and a shelter. The house was well known, it was ugly, as cheap things are apt to be, but it was respectable and safe, and I trembled at the thought of losing my right to enter there.
In the past my mother had been employed by the landlady as seamstress and as housekeeper, besides which she had once nursed the lonely old woman through a severe sickness, and as I had been permitted to live with my mother, Mrs. Miller of course knew me well; so one day when she found me engaged in the unsatisfactory occupation of recounting my money she asked me, very gruffly, what I was going to do through the summer. I gazed at her with wide, frightened eyes, and was simply dumb. More sharply, she asked: "Do you hear?—what are you going to do when the theatre closes?"
I swallowed hard, and then faintly answered: "I've got one week's board saved, Mrs. Miller, but after that I—I—," had my soul depended upon the speaking of another word I could not have uttered it.
She glared her most savage glare at me. She impatiently pushed her false front awry, pulled at her spectacles, and finally took up one of my six little piles of coin and asked: "What's this for?"
"Washing," I gasped.
"You don't send your handkerchiefs to the wash, do you?" she demanded, suspiciously.
I shook my head and pointed to a handkerchief drying on a string at my half-window.
"That's right," she remarked, in a slightly mollified tone. Then she reached over, took up the pile that was meant for the next week's board, and putting it in her pocket, she remarked: "I'll just take this now, so you won't run no risk of losing it, and for the next five weeks after, why, well your mother was honest before you, and I reckon you're going to take after her. You promise to be a hard worker, too, so, well nobody else has ever been able to stay in this room over a week—so I guess you can go on stopping right here, till the theatre opens again, and you can pay me by fits and starts as it comes handy for you. Why, what's the matter with you? Well, I vum! you must be clean tuckered out to cry like that! Land sakes, child! tie a wet rag on your head and lay right down, till you can get picked up a bit!" and out she bounced.
Dear old raging savage! how she used to frighten us all! how she barked and barked, but she never, never bit! How I wanted to kiss her withered old cheek that day when she offered me shelter on trust! But she was eighty-five years old and my honored guest here at "The Pines" before I told her all the terror and the gratitude she brought to me that day.
My clear skin, bright eyes, and round face gave me an appearance of perfect health, which was belied by the pain I almost unceasingly endured. The very inadequate provision my poor mother had been able to make for the necessaries of her child's welfare, the cruel restrictions placed upon my exercise, even upon movement in that wooden chair, where I sat with numb limbs five hours at a stretch, had greatly aggravated a slight injury to my spine received in babyhood. And now I was facing a life of hard work, handicapped by that most tenacious, most cruel of torments, a spinal trouble.