The little fellow raised his heavy lids and for a moment stared into her face with eyes so deeply blue and beautiful they almost startled her, then with an effort pointed down the path, saying,
“Dad’s over there in the long tunnel talking to someone. Tell him I got hurt. I want Dad.”
She gently lifted him to his feet and led him out of the road into the apparently deserted path where she made him sit down. “I am going to find his father,” said Paula to Cicely, “I will be back in a moment.”
“But wait; you shall not go alone,” authoritatively exclaimed that little damsel, leaping in her turn to the ground. “Where does he say his father is?”
“In the tunnel, by which I suppose he means that long passage under the bridge over there.”
Holding up the skirts of their riding-habits in their trembling right hands, they hurried forward. Suddenly they both paused. A woman had crossed their path; a woman whom to look at but once was to remember with ghastly shrinking for a lifetime. She was wrapped in a long and ragged cloak, and her eyes, startling in their blackness, were fixed upon the pain-drawn countenance of the poor little hurt boy behind them, with a gleam whose feverish hatred and deep malignant enjoyment of his very evident sufferings, was like a revelation from the lowest pit to the two innocent-minded girls hastening forward on their errand of mercy.
“Is he much hurt?” gasped the woman in an ineffectual effort to conceal the evil nature of her interest. “Do you think he will die?” with a shrill lingering emphasis on the last word as if she longed to roll it like a sweet morsel under her tongue.
“Who are you?” asked Cicely, shrinking to one side with dilated eyes fixed on the woman’s hardened countenance and the white, too white hand with which she had pointed as she spoke of the child.
“Are you his mother?” queried Paula, paling at the thought but keeping her ground with an air of unconscious authority.
“His mother!” shrieked the woman, hugging herself in her long cloak and laughing with fiendish sarcasm: “I look like his mother, don’t I? His eyes—did you notice his eyes? they are just like mine, aren’t they? and his body, poor weazen little thing, looks as if it had drawn sustenance from mine, don’t it? His mother! O heaven!”
Nothing like the suppressed force of this invocation seething as it was with the worst passions of a depraved human nature, had ever startled those ears before. Clasping Cicely by the hand, she called out to the groom behind them, “Guard that child as you would your life!” and then flashing upon the wretched creature before her with all the force of her aroused nature, she exclaimed, “If you are not his mother, move aside and let us pass, we are in search of assistance.”
For an instant the woman stood awestruck before this vision of maidenly beauty and indignation, then she laughed and cried out with shrill emphasis:
“When next you look like that, go to your mirror, and when you see the image it reflects, say to yourself, ‘So once looked the woman who defied me in the Park!’ ”
With a quick shudder and a feeling as if the noisome cloak of this degraded being had somehow been dropped upon her own fair and spotless shoulders, Paula clasped the hand of Cicely more tightly in her own, and rushed with her down the steps that led into the underground passage towards which they had been directed.
There were but two persons in it when they entered. A short thickset man and another man of a slighter and more gentlemanly build. They were engaged in talking, and the latter was bringing down his right hand upon the palm of his left with a gesture almost foreign in its expressive energy.
“I tell you,” declared he, with a voice that while low, reverberated through the hollow vault above him with strange intensity, “I tell you I’ve got my grip on a certain rich man in this city, and if you will only wait, you shall see strange things. I don’t know his name and I don’t know his face, but I do know what he has done, and a thousand dollars down couldn’t buy the knowledge of me.”
“But if you don’t know his name and don’t know his face, how in the name of all that’s mischievous are you going to know your man?”
“Leave that to me! If I once meet him and hear him talk, one more rich man goes down and one more poor devil goes up, or I’ve not the wit that starvation usually teaches.”
The nature of these sentences together with the various manifestations of interest with which they were received, had for a moment deterred the two girls in their hurried advance, but now they put away every thought save that of the poor little creature awaiting his Dad, and lifting up her voice, Paula said,
“Are either of you the father of a little lame lad—”
Instantly and before she could conclude, the taller of the two, who had also been the chief speaker in the above conversation, turned, and she saw his hand begrimed though it was with dirt and dark with many a disgraceful trick, go to his heart in a gesture too natural to be anything but involuntary.
“Is he hurt?” gasped he, but in how different a tone from that of the woman who had used the same words a few minutes before. Then seeing that the persons who addressed him were ladies and one of them at least a very beautiful one, took off his hat with an easy action, that together with what they had heard, proved him to be one of that most dangerous class among us, a gentleman who has gone thoroughly and
