Sue started to rise. Enoch raised his hand.
“Pray don’t get up,” he begged. “Sit where you are, dear, and sing me the ‘Old Kentucky Home.’”
The room grew hushed. Two dark forms filled the narrow doorway of the bedroom. Enoch slipped into his favorite chair, his chin sunk deep in the palm of his hand. Then Sue began. The old song poured forth from her pure young throat clear and plaintive, in all the simple beauty of its words and melody. Matilda’s lips moved. At the third verse something seemed to be strangling her; unseen in the dusk, she buried her black, tear-stained face in her hands, Moses comforting her in whispers.
Joe sat beside the singer in the dusk—immovable—in a dream. Beneath his hand lay Sue’s—warm, tender, unresisting. Thus ended the song—as if it were the most natural thing in the world for songs to end that way.
CHAPTER X
Miss Jane had gone out. She had taken her purple parasol with her to Stuyvesant Square, where the sun this March afternoon glistened on its faded fringe, and sent the saucy brown sparrows to doze and preen their wings in the bare branches of the trees, Miss Jane finding protection for her frail person back of the iron fence on a hard bench, its thin, cast-iron arms polished by the weary, the worthless, and the poor. Sometimes she sat in the corner, looking out upon the passing life of the street, though she much preferred the bench beside the straggling geraniums and begonias when the sun shone. She had taken with her as well, secreted in the depths of her black silk reticule, a small volume of Lowell’s verses—some of them she knew by heart, and those she did not helped her to forget her cough.
There were a lot of things tucked away for safe-keeping in that reticule of Miss Jane’s: Old addresses of cheaper seamstresses which might some day be needed, a spool of sewing silk and a needle, in case of accidents; her name and address written plainly by Miss Ann; three old prescriptions that, alas! were always being renewed, and clippings from the New York Observer on sermons she had missed, stuck to licorice drops—all these did not hinder her thin fingers from finding a hidden cracker for the sparrows, which she fed them in tiny bits under the alcoholic eye of a well-to-do Tammany policeman with park manners, who always saluted her respectfully.
Miss Jane was so reticent in public that she rarely opened her lips, total strangers like car-conductors and new church-sextons being an unavoidable exception. She took up but little space in the world, and was of no more hinderance to others than her own shadow—and yet she was a woman, had once been a girl, and once a baby. There is a degree of modesty which becomes conspicuous. It is almost impossible to conceive that Miss Jane had ever loved; that she had ever laughed, or felt the pain of happiness; that coquetry had once peeped mischievously from the corners of her eyes, playing hide-and-seek with her smile—a smile that once had made more than one young man’s heart beat the faster—all that was dry and dead.
There were other withered leaves in the park.
And so Miss Jane had gone out. In fact, there was nobody left in the house but Miss Ann, Ebner Ford, Matilda, and the cat, Moses having crossed the ferry to his savings-bank in Brooklyn, a suburb noted for its savings.