At the right of the stairs, off a miserable hall lit by one dim, blinking gas-jet, was an open door, which the child had evidently just entered. As I paused for breath on the top step I caught a glimpse of Casey's rubber coat also vanishing across the threshold. I slipped back into the shadow of the hall and waited. What I wanted was to hear the reassuring tones of human voices, and I found myself listening for these with suspended breath and straining ears; but for a long moment I heard nothing at all. I realized now that there was no light in the room, and this suddenly seemed odd to me. Then I heard Casey's voice, speaking to the child with a new note in it—a note of tense excitement that made my heart-beats quicken. The next instant I, too, was in the room.
Casey stood under the single gas-bracket, striking a match. As I went toward him, the light flickered up, dimly revealing a clean, bleak room, whose only furniture was a bed, a broken chair, and a small gas-stove. On the chair lay an empty tin cup and a spoon. The child, her back to both her visitors, stood beside the bed. Characteristically, though Casey had spoken to her, she ignored his presence. She was whimpering a little under her breath, and pulling with both hands at something that lay before her, rigid and unresponsive.
With a rush I crossed the room, and the desolate mite of humanity at the bed turned to stare at me, blinking in the sudden light. For an instant her wet brown eyes failed to recognize me. In the next, with an ecstatic, indescribably pathetic little cry, she lurched into the arms I opened to her. I could not speak, but I sat down on the floor and held her close, my tears falling on her curly head with its brave red bow. For a moment more the silence held. Then the child drew a long, quivering breath and patiently uttered again her parrot-like refrain.
"Fine-kine-rady," she murmured, brokenly.
Casey, his cap in his hand, stood looking down upon the silent figure on the bed. "Starvation, most likely," he hazarded. "She's bin dead fur an hour, maybe more," he mused aloud. "An' she's laid herself out, d'ye mind. Whin she found death comin' she drew her feet together, an' crost her hands on her breast, an' shut her eyes. They do ut sometimes, whin they know they's no wan to do ut for thim. But first she washed an' dressed her child in uts best an' sint ut out—so ut w'u'dn't be scairt. D'ye know th' woman?" he added. "Have ye ivir seen her? It seems t' me I have!"
Holding the baby tight, her head against my shoulder, that she might not see what I did, I went forward and looked at the wasted face. There was something vaguely familiar about the black hair-line on the broad, Madonna-like brow, about the exquisitely shaped nose, the sunken cheeks, the pointed chin. For a long moment I looked at them while memory stirred in me and then awoke.
"Yes," I said, at last. "I remember her now. Many evenings last month I saw her standing at the foot of the elevated stairs when I was going home. She wore a little shawl over her head—that's why I didn't recognize her at once. She never begged, but she took what one gave her. I always gave her something. She was evidently very poor. I remember vaguely that she had a child with her—this one, of course. I hardly noticed either of them as I swept by. One's always in a rush, you know, to get home, and, unfortunately, there are so many beggars!"
"That's it," said Casey. "I remember her now, too."
"If only I had realized how ill she was," I reflected aloud, miserably, "or stopped to think of the child. She called me 'kind lady.' Oh, Casey! And I let her starve!"
"Hush now," said Casey, consolingly. "Sure how could ye know? Some of thim that's beggin' has more than you have!"