While he waited, he mourned angrily and bitterly, as he had done a thousand times before, the passion, or credulity, or madness, or whatever it was, that took his pure, white lily into such houses as these. “Those people are well enough off,” he muttered angrily; “why can’t she let them alone? They live their life, we live ours. She thinks she can raise them up. Pah! as easily as rats from a gutter.”
He grumbled on mercifully unconscious of the fact that could he have seen Stargarde at the time his uneasiness would not have been allayed.
The old tenement house was one of the worst in the city, and when Stargarde entered it, she knew she must step cautiously. Passing through the doorway she found herself in a narrow, unlighted hall, not evil-smelling, for the door had been partly ajar, but as cold as the outer world, and with an uneven floorway, almost covered by an accumulation of ice and snow brought in during many days by many feet, and that would linger till a thaw came to melt it.
At the back of the hall was a sound of running water, where the occupants of the house, with a glorious disregard of the waste, kept their tap running to save it from freezing. Beyond the tap Stargarde knew she must not go, for there was a large hole in the floor utilized as a receptacle for the refuse and garbage of the house, which were thrown through it into the cellar. As for the cellar itself, it was entirely open to the winter winds. The windows had been torn away, part of the foundation wall was crumbling, and over the rickety floor she could hear the rats scampering merrily, busy with their evening feast.
Stargarde avoided the icy sink, the running water, and the crazy steps that led to the cellar, and guiding herself along the hall by touching the wall with the tips of her outstretched fingers, put her foot on the lowest step of the staircase. Carefully she crept up one flight of stairs after another, past walls flecked with ugly sores, where the plaster had fallen off in patches, past empty sockets of windows staring out at the night with glass and sash both gone, and past the snowdrifts lying curled beneath on the floor.
On two flats she passed by doors where threads of light streamed out and lay across the rotten boards, while a sound of laughter and rough merrymaking was heard within.
In the third, the top flat, there was no noise at all. “Foreigners they are, and queer in their ways,” ejaculated Stargarde; and pausing an instant to listen for some sign of life, she lifted up her face to the crazy, moldy roof overhead, where some of the shingles were gone, affording easy ingress to snow and rain, which kept the floor beneath her feet in a state of perpetual dampness.
“Iniquitous!” she murmured; “judgment falls on the city that neglects its poor.” Then bringing down her glance to the doors before her, she sighed heavily and proceeded a little farther along the hall. There were three rooms in this story, and Zeb’s parents lived in the front one. Their door had been broken in some quarrel between the people of the house, and one whole panel was gone. There was a garment clumsily tacked over it, and Stargarde might have pulled it aside if she had been so minded; but she had not come to spy upon her protégés, and contented herself with knocking gently.
The very slight, almost inaudible, sound of voices that she had been able to hear within the room instantly ceased; after a short interval a voice asked her in excellent English who she was and what she wanted.
“Miss Turner,” she replied good-humoredly, “and I should like to see Zeb for a few minutes.”