Tim, old Ellen's cat, leaped upon the bed, and the doctor brushed him roughly off. The nurse from the settlement house wondered whether the stifling closeness of the tenement accounted for the doctor's irritation, or if he, too, felt a painful contrast between the sleek, luxurious creature and its surroundings. Little Miss Cresswell had not been a nurse long and she was still impressionable.
"It's too pitiful," she sighed, half aloud. "Too dreadful."
She turned from the doctor and his patient to examine the tenement more closely.
The time was scarcely afternoon, but the sun of the North End, piercing through many tall buildings, gave only a dim, yellow light. She could barely distinguish an oil lamp on a cheap, scratched table, a dilapidated stove behind which Ellen's sister crouched brokenly, and one chair. The room was in perfect order, but strangely enough the fact seemed only to intensify its meagerness. Tim's presence added the last grim figure in this drama of poverty. That the owner of such a room should persist in keeping a cat furnished another example of the unpractical nature, the eternal inefficiency of the poor.
From her survey Miss Cresswell felt her eyes drawn back to the bed. One beam of direct sunlight from the high window lay across it and showed Ellen's face, tiny and elfish in the midst of the white expanse. Dampness had curled the scant gray hair into baby ringlets around her forehead, the vague blue eyes had the look of childhood - it was the childhood of failing powers, not of budding strength. Only one part of old Ellen's body seemed alive, her fingers, which moved constantly, now tightening, now relaxing. The seal of paralysis lay upon the rest of her shrunken body and her quiet lips.
Tim crept to the bed again, and caught at a thread dangling from the coverlet. He pulled until something slipped from under the pillow. It was a bit of crocheted lace, of exquisite delicacy, the task which the weak fingers had been forced to relinquish. The girl pointed to the work bitterly.
"Look," she said in an awed tone, "look, she is finishing it."
"What a sad, what a dreadful life," she went on, her voice vibrant with sympathy. "Think! She has slaved for people always, always with no existence of her own, no joy, nothing to look forward to. Two dollars for a collar like that and it takes almost a week to make! And she has helped support her sister for years and a crippled brother-in-law, too. Now that she's worn out her eyes and her soul for them, she has to die! To die without ever having lived!"
The doctor looked up in kindly surprise as he rose to go. He spoke with experience's gentle authority.
"I see what you mean, but I don't know that I agree with you. Monotonous lives are not necessarily unhappy ones."
On the topmose of the three steps leading to the same tenement, Ann Ryan, Ellen's widowed sister, sat crocheting. She had slipped away from the sickroom, from the little vacant face, from the trim nurse who moved sympathetically. She tried to interest herself in the foreign life of the busy street. Up and down at her feet it surged, Jewish, Armenian, or Greek, but ever alien, vivid, appealing. Half-naked babies rolled on the narrow walk, or staggered courageously toward the curb; one of them tottered and saved himself by catching at Ann's skirt. A group of Italian women returned from market, their arms full of round, golden loaves. They chattered placidly, but, on occasion, their soft eyes could flash fire swift as that of their husband's stilettos. Shrill as locust cries through the heat came the voices of boy venders, plying their tiny trade in thin watermelon slices for the children, "polly seed" for the parrots.
"A sad life, a dreadful life," Ann repeated slowly, looking straight past the dirty, robust urchins at her feet. "A sad life, no joy, no joy -"
For the first time in the year since she had come to live with her aging sister, Ann had lost her quick Celtic interest in the changing pageant. No face existed for her but the drawn one on the pillow, while the nurse's words rang wildly through her brain. In the dark corner of the room she had heard all, unseen, and now she was bracing trembling shoulders against the doorpost and trying to deaden sorrow in the intricacies of her work.
But fast as her fingers flew, she could not forget. She had spent all her days in loving and doing, but to-night she thought, thought, thought, puzzling over the mystery of her sister's soul. It was not the future which she feared for Ellen, - Ann had stood too close to death for that, - it was the past. She could not bear to connect sorrow with Ellen, the sister whom she adored.
"Sure and I'd have said 't was me who was sad," Ann thought. Ellen had been in America, the land of gold, able, now and then, to send back money to her struggling sister. She had not endured the rigors of the poor cottage, nor had it been her lot to "bury her three" and see an ailing husband waste slowly away.
The light was fading. Ann moved to the lowest step and bent more closely over her work, picking out the pattern laboriously. Used to hard outdoor labor, the minute problems of the lace irked her. Ellen, on the contrary, loved them, and the web under her fingers became a magic thing hinting of bird and flower as a frost etching recalls the vanished summer. Her one ambition had been to rent a room where she might give her whole time to the work, and she had attained it.
Evening was coming on. Clara Slovinsky, of the tenement above, returning gayly from a "peekneek" under the charge of "the teacher," greeted her with a cheerful though unheeded "Hello." The darkness which had long shrouded the tenement now spread its shadows through the narrow street. An imperious velvet paw brushed Ann's hand in warning. Tim knew the supper hour. Ann rose and went in weakly, with the cat following her.
The nurse was still in the room.
"Here is the medicine, Mrs. Ryan, on this side of the table. Give your sister a teaspoonful before you go to bed," Miss Cresswell directed as she put on her hat and gloves preparing to leave for the night. "You are n't afraid, are you? There won't be any change, dear, the doctor thinks, for hours. If you want me, you know, you have only to send Jacob Slovinsky over to the settlement house and I'll be here in ten minutes."
When she had gone out, Ann crossed the room mechanically and drew from a dark cupboard a loaf of bread and a little milk in a pitcher, - the cat's supper and hers.
"Tim! Tim!" brought him beside her to purr between laps of the milk in his shallow saucer and to rub gayly against her. How proudly Ellen used to tell of his coming, a little sick creature crawling to her door one biting night, when he was no longer than her crochet needle!
Ann rose abruptly, poured her share of the milk into Tim's, and flung herself sobbing beside her sister.
It was late that night before she slept. Ellen lay in the stillness more terrifying than the delirium of fever, but, beside her, Ann tossed, counting the hours. Gradually the lights of the city faded. At last the lanterns on the settlement house roof-garden were extinguished. Passing had almost ceased. The street was quiet as a country lane, an Irish lane.
Where had she felt that touch of saltness in the air before? The wind had veered in sudden fashion and blew from the haror, a mighty breath of freshness and balm. Ann sat up in bed with a spring. She was in a narrow lane again, just where it turned to a white thread across the twilight downs. Michael had overtaken her on the way home from the butter market and was asking her to marry him.
"Is it sure ye are that ye be after liking me, Michael?" she demurred.
"Sure? Sure, my colleen." His strong voice broke.
The sea was too far away for sound, but the white mist bore its infinite longing. It pulsed through Michael's faltering words, and leaped in her answering heart.
In her joy there mingled a note of surprise that he loved her, - Ann, with her red hands, rough face, and the tawny streaks which the sun had burned in her hair as she stooped in the potato-fields. How could he help loving Ellen, who moved like a queen? No wind ever roughened her fair skin. Ann had noticed that morning long ago, with a younger sister's admiration, how pretty Ellen's hands were as they packed the butter. White as May blossoms she had called them, and the eyes of fairy blue.
So Michael and she were married, and Ellen left for America. Strange that she had gone so soon. For the first time in forty years a suspicion kindled in Ann's Mind. Glowing in her excited brain, it blazed to a gigantic light by which she sought to read the riddle of her sister's life. So Ellen had loved Michael, too, - nobody could help loving Michael, - and she had never told. Ellen was so good! No wonder the years had been sad with that secret pain at the heart, and it was her fault, Ann's fault!
"Ellen!" she called: "Ellen!"
No answer. The wind increased to a gale and she shivered with a sudden consciousness of the cold. An utter weariness seized her. It was all a nightmare which she must try to shake off, she told herself. Michael was dead, the boys were dead. Ellen and she were old, old women together. It was all the same. But even as she spoke, she seemed looking into the sunny eyes of little Michael, the child who had lived the longest. It was not the same - it could never be the same. She had entered a land of which Ellen had only dreamed.
The next day Ann opened her eyes, a criminal self-accused. She knew herself for the usurper, the thief of her sister's happiness. Cowering through the long hours of the night she had cried aloud to Ellen for one word of forgiveness - in vain. She had prayed to God to unseal the lips, if only for one word to pass them. No voice had answered.
Though she could never be well, Ellen lingered on. The nurse came twice a day, but for the rest the sisters were alone. The hours by the bed were a torture to Ann, as she watched the expressionless eyes that had been so bright. She tempted her sister with many things, hoping for some syllable from the quiet lips.
"The flower, the pretty flower! See, sister, what the darlin' has brought you," she urged while Clara Slovinsky stood statuelike by the bedside, tendering a stray rose, crushed by rude feet on the pavement, but fragrant still.
The eyes kept their vacant look.
Sometimes it seemed to Ann that they tried to follow Tim, but she herself was growing unstrung and the appearance might have been a fancy.
The silence was a palpable thing, bearing her down, crushing her. Trembling under the load of it, Ann's mind evolved a greater horror. Before she died, Ellen would speak again, and the words, perhaps only one word "Michael," would be her sister's sentence, prove Ann's guilt. And after that? Ann could think no farther.
From the moment when the thought became a conviction, she knew no rest, she redoubled her watching. All day she gazed at the silent lips. In the night she awakened twenty times, fearing lest they had spoken.
Sometimes in the strain of mind and heart she caught herself wishing that the worst might happen at once, longing that Ellen might die. When she realized what she was doing, the second weight of self-hatred was greater than the first.
The room was crowded with spectators, for Ellen Joyce was dying at last. Births were of common occurrence in the tenement world, but a death was of more importance. Still, the curiosity was tinged with sympathy, for many were neighbors. Clara Slovinsky stared with round eyes, but something in the atmosphere frightened her, and she hid her face babywise in her mother's gown. Mrs. Slovinsky gesticulated with Jewish vigor, while pity struggled with the importance in her voice.
"She ain't spoke for eleven days," she told the assembly.
Through the circle of faces Miss Cresswell caught the anguish in Ann's and crossed the room.
"Don't feel so badly, dear," she said, putting her arms gently on the heaving shoulders. "It is so much better for your sister to go! She will be so happy there!"
Ann's old face worked.
"Ye don't understand, darlin', ye don't understand."
The crowd by the door parted for the doctor to hurry in.
"Back," he cried; "give her more air."
The spectators, all but Ann, retreated to a subdued group around the old stove. The doctor's watch could be clearly heard as he bent over the sick woman's pulse.
But another sound, a scratching, broke the tenseness of the room. By Ann, with eyes fixed on her sister's face and heart keyed to endure the unbearable, Tim's coming was scarcely noticed.
With all the beauty of feline grace and a human eagerness he bounded across the room and sprang to the bed, arching his silky back. He purred, rubbing gently against Ellen's thin hand. Then for Ann a miracle happened, for Ellen half raised herself from the bed and a wonderful light came into her shrunken face and shone from the soft blue eyes. It illuminated her quiet soul, and showed it no longer empty or bitter, but glorious, transfigured.
Love, the quest, may choose strange guides to the soul's threshold. While the little face fell back on the pillow, the fingers closed convulsively on the soft fur, and the voice when it came had a buoyant, caressing melodydddd.
"Ann, me darlin', Ann, don't forget to feed Tim."