"I mean to find my mother!" I cried. "Where is she?"
Suddenly the thought of being halted thus longer, and the fear that my mother was not there, drove me crazy. I lunged at Rucker, and with a sweep of my arms, threw him staggering across the room. The girl screamed, and ran to, and behind him. I stormed through to the kitchen, expecting to find my mother back there, working for this smooth, sly, scroundrelly pair; but the place was deserted. There were dirty pots and pans about; and a pile of unwashed dishes stacked high in the sink--and this struck me with despair. If my mother had been about, and able to work, such a thing would have been impossible. So she either was not there or was not able to work--my instinct told me that; and I ran to the foot of the stairs, and calling as I had so often done when a child, "Ma, Ma! Where are you, ma!" I waited to hear her answer.
Rucker, pale as a sheet, came up to me, his quivering mouth trying to work itself into a sneaking sort of smile.
"Why, Jacob, Jakey," he drooled, "is this you? I didn't know you. Sit down, my son, and I'll tell you the sad, sad news!"
I heard him, but I did not trust nor understand him, and I went through that house from cellar to garret, looking for her; my heart freezing within me as I saw how impossible it would be for her to live so. There were two bedrooms, both beds lying just as they had been left in the morning--and my mother always opened her beds up for an airing when she rose, and made them up right after breakfast.
The room occupied by the young woman was the room of a slut; the clothes she had taken off the night before, or even before that, lay in a ring about the place where her feet had been when she dropped them in the dust and lint which rolled about in the corners like feathers. Her corset was thrown down in a corner; shoes and stockings littered the floor; her comb was clogged with red hair like a wire fence with dead grass after a freshet; dingy, grimy underclothing lay about. I peered into a closet, in which there were more garments on the floor than on the nails. The other bedroom was quite as unkempt; looking as if the occupant must always do his chamber work at the last moment before going to bed. They were as unclean outwardly as inwardly.
After ransacking the house up-chamber, I ran down-stairs and went into the room from which Rucker had come, where I found the girl hiding behind a sofa, peeking over the back of it at me, and screaming "Go away!" All the walls in this room were hung with some thin black cloth, and it looked like the inside of a hearse. There was a stand in one corner, and a large extension table in the middle of the room, with chairs placed about it. In the corner across from the stand was a spiritualist medium's cabinet; and hanging on the walls were a guitar, a banjo and a fiddle. A bell stood in the middle of the table, and there were writing materials, slates, and other things scattered about, which theatrical people call "properties," I am told. I tore the black draperies down, and searched for a place where my mother might be--in bed I expected to find her, if at all; but she was not there. I tried the cellar, but it was nothing but a vegetable cave, dug in the earth, with no walls, and dark as a dungeon when the girl shut down the trap-door and stood on it: from which I threw her by putting my back under it and giving a surge. When I came up she was staggering to her feet, and groaning as she felt of her head for the results of some suspected cut or bump from her fall. Rucker was following me about calling me Jacob and Jakey, a good deal as a man will try to smooth down or pacify a vicious horse or mule; and after I had looked everywhere, I faced him, took him by the throat, and choked him until his tongue stuck out, and his face was purple.
"My God," said the girl, who had grown suddenly quiet, "you're killing him!"
I looked at his empurpled face, and my madness came back on me like a rush of fire through my veins--and I shut down on his throat again until I could feel the cords draw under my fingers like taut ropes.
She laid her hand rather gently on my breast, and looked me steadily in the eye.