“Well, they dropped my little mother in the sea, a good priest saying the words of the church over her. Some were kind to us, but after all it was not many who were knowing us. The wild weather kept up, and hundreds there were on the ship who did not leave their beds at all. David and I had no heart for talking, and we kept much to ourselves as we had seen our mother do. There were rough people all about us, and our ways were gentle, so oftentimes we did not feel at home with them. I kept up my heart by thinking of David and what I must do for him; and now that mother was gone, he clung to me all of the time. He could hardly breathe without me it seemed, and though I was only ten years old, I had the mother-feeling in me, and I prized myself for the sake of my little child.”
“I can understand that,” Azalea murmured from her heart.
“Well, we got to the landing place at last, and I was near suffocated with the beating of my heart. I was as afraid of the city as if it had been a dragon. The fear of cities always was in me, but no city—not Calcutta, not Hong Kong, nor any foreign place—could have seemed more terrible to me than New York. ‘For David’s sake I must be brave,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘For David’s sake.’ Well, the first and second-class passengers were let off, and then came our turn. I never did know how many hundreds there were of us. We seemed like a city-full in ourselves. And if you’ll believe me, at the same time, on the other side of the dock, another great steamer was unloading. So that presently we were all mixed—all mixed and scattered.”
“Yes,” said Azalea, guessing now what was coming.
“So I lost David,” whispered Mary Cecily; “I lost my little brother. His hand slipped from mine and I could not find him. I looked for him all that day; I asked everybody, and no one could tell me anything about him. At night a policeman took me away and put me in the house of a woman and told me to sleep and he would look. So I stayed in the house that night, and the next day I began searching again; and the policeman had others looking. But we never found him, any of us.”
“You never found him at all?”
“Never at all. My uncle came on, after I had written him, and he searched. But it was no use. David was never found; and they concluded at last that he had been pushed from the wharf into the water and drowned. But I said no. I could hear him calling for me in the night the way the dead never call. I could feel him somewhere, drawing me, drawing me, but I could not tell which way to go, or I would have run to him across the world.”
“Of course you would—of course.” Azalea drew nearer till she could rest her hand on Mary Cecily’s knee.
“But we never found him,” she repeated. “So after a while we left the city, my uncle and I, and went to the little farm he had in Maryland. He was something of a writer too, like my father; and he published a little weekly paper. So you see it was an interesting home he had brought me to. His wife was one of those women who are well pleased to have a motherless child to add to her own. She was kind to me but she didn’t spoil me because I was bounden to her. She set me my tasks and saw to it that I did them, and when I was a grown girl and showed a little talent for writing I was sent to my uncle’s office to help with the making of his paper and setting of it up. He drilled me in writing and he taught me type-setting, and I was content there. I never wanted to take up any life of my own. I wanted to be left to myself to mourn for David—”
“Oh, but there was nothing in that,” broke in Azalea.