"Every word," I said. "For once, we are all alone, and the rain pours down so nobody is likely to interrupt. Such a face as that could hardly help having a story, and a strange one."
"The most of it happens often enough, but I'll tell you. You think it's pretty, but that black an' white thing doesn't tell much. If you could once have looked at her, you'd have wanted to do something, same as 'most everybody did when the time for doin' was over. Let me get my bit of work, an' then I'll tell you."
It was in the "McAuley Mission-parlor." The street below, cleared by the pouring rain, was comparatively silent, though now and then a sailor swung by unmindful of wet, or the sound of a banjo came from the tenement-houses opposite. Below us, in the chapel, the janitor scrubbed vigorously to the tune which seems for some unknown reason to be always a powerful motive-power,
"I'm goin' home, no more to roam,"
the brush coming down with a whack at each measure. In my hands was the mission album, a motley collection of faces, as devoid of Nature or any clew to the real characteristics of the owners as the average photograph usually is, but here and there one with a suggestion of interest and, in this special case, of beauty—a delicate, pensive face, with a mass of floating hair, deep, dark eyes, and exquisite curves in cheek and lip and chin—the face of some gently born and nurtured maiden, looking dreamily out upon a world which thus far, at least, could have shown her only its tender, never its cruel or unfriendly, side, and not, as its place would indicate, that of one who had somehow and at some strange time found a home in these slums. Beauty of a vulgar, striking sort is common enough there—vivid coloring, even a sparkle and light poverty has had no power to kill—but this face had no share in such dower, and the dark, soft eyes had a compelling power which made mine search them for their secret,—not theirs, after all, it might prove, but only a gift from some remote ancestor, who could transmit outline, and even expression, but not the soul that had made them.
Mrs. McAuley slipped the picture from its place as she sat down by me again. "I ought to have done that long ago," she said. "Jerry is always telling me I've no business to keep it where everybody can look at it an' ask about her; an' I hadn't, indeed, for it brings up a time I'd hardly think or talk about unless I had to for some good. I'll put it away with two or three more I keep for myself; an' Jerry'll be glad of it, for he hates to think of her, 'most as much as I do.
"Her father and mother? Ah, that's it: if she'd had them! But, you see, her mother was a young thing that wasn't used to roughing it, an' this Nan only a baby then. They were decent English folks, an' he looked like a gentleman; but all we know was that she died of ship-fever on the passage over, an' was buried at sea; an' he had it too, an' came 'most as nigh dyin', an' just had strength to crawl ashore with Nan in his arms. He'd a cousin in the Bowery, a woman that kept a little store for notions, but didn't make any headway on account of two drinkin' sons; an' he went to her, an' just fell on the floor before he'd half finished his story. She put him to bed, and, though the sons swore he shouldn't stay, an' said they'd chuck him out on the sidewalk, she had her way. It didn't take him long to die, an' he'd a good bit of money that reconciled them; but when he was gone there was the baby, just walkin' an' toddlin' into everything, an' would scream if Pete came near her. He was the oldest, an' he hated her worse than poison, an' about once in so often he'd swear he'd send her to the orphan asylum or anywhere that she'd be out of his sight. Jack didn't care one way or another, but the mother was just bound up in the little thing; an' she was, they said, just that wonderful-lookin' that people stopped an' stared at her. Her eyes weren't black, as they look there, but gray, with those long curly lashes that looked innocent an' baby-like to the very last minute; and her hair—oh, you never saw such hair! Not bleached out, as they do it now, to a dead yellow, but a pure gold-color, an' every thread of it alive. I've taken hold of it many a time to see it curl round my finger, an' the little rings of it lying round her forehead; an' her face to the last as pure-lookin' as a pearl—clear an' soft, you know—an', when I saw her first, with a little color in her cheeks no deeper than the pink in a pink rose.
"Now, it'll seem to you like a bit out of the Police Gazette or those horrid story-papers, but, do you know, when she wasn't three Pete came home one night just drunk enough to be cunnin', an' he said, after he'd had his supper, he wanted to take the child a little way, only round the corner, to show her to some friends of his. Mrs. Simpson said No—whoever wanted to see her could come there, but she shouldn't let her be taken round. The shop-bell rang that minute, an' she went out. It wasn't ten minutes, but when she came back Pete an' the child weren't there. She ran to the door an' looked up an' down the street, but it was twelve years before she ever saw that child again. Pete was gone a week, an' when he come home not a word would he say but that the child was safe enough, an' he'd had enough of her round under foot. They had high words. She told him he should never have another cent till Nan was brought back, an' he went out swearin' an' cursin', to be brought home in half an hour past any tellin' in this world. He'd been knocked down an' run over by a fire-engine, an', though there was life enough left to look at his mother an' try to speak, speak he couldn't.
"Well, there was nothin' that woman didn't do, far as her money would go. She'd a nephew was a policeman, an' he hunted, an' plenty more, but never a sign or a word. She couldn't get out much on account of the shop, but whenever she did there wasn't a beggar with a child that she wouldn't stop an' look with all her eyes to see if it might be Nan. You wouldn't think anybody would take a child that way to be tormented with, when there's hundreds runnin' round loose that nobody claims; but, for all that, it's done. Not as often as people think. There's more kidnappin' in the story-papers than ever gets done really, but it does happen now and then. An' New York's a better place to hide in than anywheres out of it. I know plenty of places this minute where the police couldn't find a man if they hunted a month.
"Pete Simpson took this child to a hole in the Five Points, rag-pickers an' beggars an' worse, an' gave her to a woman that took children that was wanted out o' the way. He paid her a dollar, an' said she could make enough out of her to pay for the trouble, she was so fair-lookin'. She was one of the women that sit round with a baby an' one or two children close to her, mostly with laudanum enough to make 'em stupid.