Yet he helped Trench put the sleeping child into the carriage, and as they did it a new sound gurgled into the night, the voice of the tippler in the attic, who had been shut up there alone and frightened, but was sipping and sipping to keep up his spirits. Now he sang, one kind of spirits rising as the other kind went down. And the song that followed them through the night, as they drove away from the house of death, with the nameless child between them, was “After the Ball.�
“The Lord forgive us!� said the doctor musingly; “it’s ‘after the ball’ with most of us, and then the straight house! G’long with you, Henk!�
XIV
JUNIPER’S spouse, Aunt Charity, was in the habit of sweeping out Caleb’s office and washing his windows, and the morning after Jean Bartlett’s death was her morning for scouring the premises. She was a stout old woman, nearly black, with a high pompadour, the arms and shoulders of a stonemason, and “a mighty misery� in her side. She stopped five times in the course of sweeping the inner office and stood, leaning on her broom, to survey the bundle of indiscriminate clothes on the floor, which was Sammy.
The transfer had disturbed him so little that, after his first screams of surprise, he had renewed his insatiable demands for pennies, and having one clasped tightly in either fist he sat in the middle of the floor viewing the world in general, and Aunt Charity in particular, with the suspicion of a financier. On her side, suspicion was equally apparent.
“Fo’ de Lawd!� she said, and swept another half yard, then stopped and viewed the intruder. “Fo’ de Lawd!� she said again.
Sammy heard her and clasped his pennies tighter; he read enmity in her eye and doubted. Aunt Charity swept harder, her broom approaching the rear end of Sammy’s calico petticoat. “Git up, yo’ white trash, yo’,� she commanded, using the broom to emphasize her order.
“Won’t!� wailed Sammy, “won’t! Shan’t have my pennies!�
“Git up!� said Aunt Charity; “w’at yo’ heah for, ennyway?�
“Yow!� yelled Sammy, wriggling along before the broom and weeping.