Miss Martha anticipated battle, murder, and sudden death. “No. What is it? Is she——?”
“Oh, nothing’s happened to her! Goodness, it’s a great deal worse than that!” She lowered her voice with cautious glances right and left, though they were alone. “Martha, it’s just got out who she is! You know everybody thought there was something the matter, she was so weird looking. Well, she’s notorious! The notorious Tillie Shields, that’s what they call her. You said her name was Matilda. Well, that’s who she is!” Mrs. Seabury concluded, leaning back in triumph.
For an instant Miss Martha was conscious only of acute vexation. “Notorious how, Eliza? What way?” she stammered, groping for objections, refutations.
“Oh, for mercy’s sake, the way they all are!” Mrs. Seabury rejoined in sharp impatience. “Well, to be sure, you’ve never been married,” she added more leniently, and followed up this apparently irrelevant statement with others very much to the point. “She had a place—one of those places—in the red-light district, you know. It was a good while ago—I don’t suppose she’s really notorious any more, she’s too old. But that’s who she is, the notorious Tillie Shields.”
Miss Martha, envisaging calamity, averted her mind in desperate unwillingness, desperate hope. “But how do you know? Who told you?”
“Why, Martha, it’s all over! Everybody’s heard! It seems she had a fuss with the Gowdy’s cook over their cat or the birds or something——” Mrs. Seabury entered into graphic and approximately accurate details, winding up with: “And the officer used to be on the police force, so, of course, he recognized her right away! I told you you oughtn’t to have taken her without a reference.”
“But the bank said——”
“Oh, the bank!” said Mrs. Seabury scornfully. “She probably keeps a big account there, and that’s all they care about. It’s awful to think how that money was made, but that’s nothing to a bank.—Oh, nobody suspects you of knowing, Martha,” she interrupted herself quickly, misreading her friend’s silence. “Nobody would believe that of you for a minute. We all know you didn’t know.”
Poor Miss Wilcox, in horror, found herself for a moment wishing vehemently that nobody knew. All her castles lay in ruins; and there were those bills that had seemed so trifling, looming monumentally now! She must undertake the abhorrent duty of putting Mrs. Shields out; and where or when would she get another tenant? She went to the house, flinching in expectation of the encounter with this person whom she now classified with formless dread as one of those women; to be sure, previous experience had revealed nothing alarming about her, but now that Mrs. Shields knew herself discovered, it would undoubtedly be different. She did not answer the bell, and Miss Martha, worriedly investigating, at length came upon her in the back yard where she had just finished scrubbing and refilling the bird-bath. Leaning on the broom, she was awaiting the approach of a robin; she saw Miss Wilcox out of the corner of her eye, and made a slight arresting gesture. The bird came on, with a kind of wary confidence, his bright, sidewise glance fixed on her.
“He’s just playing scairt. He knows me,” Mrs. Shields whispered. “But you better keep back a second.”