The senator laughed. “I hope not. If it is, we needn’t stay long. You see—it’s a profound secret from the ship’s officials—but I’m going over on purpose to investigate steerages. I’m seriously thinking of coming back in one from Liverpool.”
“You are!” Betty’s eyes opened wide in amazement. “Without letting any one know who you are?”
The senator nodded. “Exactly. And by the same token I’m making this little visit to-day quite impromptu. Want to come? You can talk to the women and find out if they’re being made comfortable.”
“If this isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is,” Betty reflected, following the senator down the steps to the lower deck and past the guard,—who looked very threatening at first, but bowed profoundly when he saw the senator’s card,—into the network of low-ceiled passages beyond the tiny square of open deck. It was dirty, or at least it was unpleasantly smelly. But by the time Betty had satisfied her curiosity and would much rather have turned and gone straight back to her comfortable steamer chair, the senator had forgotten all about her, and surrounded by a group of eager men was deep in his investigation.
“I can’t interrupt, and I can’t very well skip off without saying anything,” thought Betty sadly, “because he might remember me after a while and try to find me.”
Judging by their conversation with the senator, most of the steerage passengers seemed to be men—Scotch or Irish, going back to the “Ould Country” for a visit to the “ould folks.” Betty listened a few minutes, and then went on to the end of the passage, which opened out into a room that seemed to be salon and dining-hall combined. Though this room was nearly empty, the air was close and stifling and Betty was going back to the deck to wait there for the senator, when her attention was attracted by a group of women gathered in one corner. They were standing around a little figure that sat huddled in a forlorn heap on the wooden bench along the wall. The woman—or the child, for she looked hardly more than that—hugged a baby tight in her arms, and rocked it back and forward, moaning pitifully to herself all the time.
Betty hesitated for an instant, and then went timidly up to the group. “What’s the matter?” she asked softly of one of the bystanders, a fat Irishwoman. “Can’t we do something to stop her crying like that?”
“Ah, it’s sore thruble she’s in, the pore young crayther,” explained the woman eagerly. “Her fayther and her mither and her two brothers died in the same week av the dipthery, and she’s takin’ her baby sister home to the ould folks. An’ she’s lost the money for her ticket to County Cork.”
“You mean she hasn’t any money at all?” asked Betty in amazement.
“Niver a cint,” the sympathetic Irishwoman assured her. “Shure, ’twas lost or stolen the first day out. Anyhow ’tis gone.”