Under the Law - Edwina Stanton Babcock

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to the prodding toe of a village gamin and his challenge, "Say, ain't you got no manners? The lady is speakin' to yer," the head, sunk between the shivering shoulders, was raised with a sodden, uncomprehending look. Then the man, ragged, unshaven, with an unspeakable look of abandoned misery, did a strange thing. He struggled, shaking as with palsy, to his feet. There was a week's reddish growth of beard on his white face; his voice, very feeble, stammered and was lost in places, but he replied slowly, "Can—can you read that name in my hat? Perhaps there is an address there, I don't know. I can't remember." With a hand like a claw, the tramp pointed to a wrinkled cap lying in the gutter.

      Sard, seeing him sway as though he would pitch forward, put out an arm to steady him. At this, a passer-by came up to her and, without a word, supported the collapsing man on the other side. This youth smiled sympathetically.

      "Is there anything I can do, Miss Bogart?"

      The girl turned sharply. "Mr. Lowden," then with a little air of relief, "this man seems dazed, sick. Oughtn't we get help? Oughtn't we to do something?"

      "Wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner," bawled the chorus of loafers. A dozen voices advised, "Snowgen will put him in the lock-up, and if he can't prove anything, they'll send him up for vagrancy. Here's his hat. No, ma'am, I wouldn't touch it if I was you; that ain't no hat fer a lady to hold." One of the group, with effects of delicate shrinking, held the wretched headgear so that the girl could read a name written with ink on a piece of tape stitched inside on the lining. There were two initials smutted beyond recognition, but she could distinguish the surname "Colter." With a curious little gesture of courtesy, she bent to the pitiful figure she was helping support, asking gravely and distinctly, "Mr. Colter, you are in trouble. Can we help you? Is there anything we can do for you?"

      This courtesy to the forlorn scarecrow the crowd found vastly amusing. The thing brought laughter and the inevitable double entente of small-town comprehension. At last someone said wrathfully, "Shut up! Don't you know nothing? That there's the Judge's daughter. She ain't no fool!" The crowd, now avid for more sensation, watched to see how the wastrel tottering there would take this thing.

      The shaking hand was held out for the cap. Some bystander with rough hand jammed it on the tumbled head of thick auburn hair, but the tramp feebly removed it. He turned slowly, staring into the girl's face. His eyes, of a very intense blue, were large and unnaturally bright, as from fever.

      "Thank you," he said weakly. Then with a swift glance full of unnameable shame, "Please don't worry about me. I am only going to find work—somewhere," The man closed his eyes, muttering,

      "When I can forget—when I can remember——"

      Sard Bogart turned to the youth who was helping her. "Will you come with me?" she appealed. He nodded.

      "I am going to drive this poor thing to that little boarding-house on Norman Street. I know the woman who keeps it. It is quiet and clean."

      The circle of loafers tittered. "Say, lady, wait till Snowgen gets back from his dinner. Snowgen can take the feller to the right boarding-house, all right."

      The girl, for answer, smiled good-humoredly. "Mr. Snowgen can interview this man after he has been fed and can speak for himself. Just at present, Mr. Lowden and I will take charge."

      Lowden, the young assistant of the Morris Bank, frowned on any more suggestions, and together the man and girl supported the wretched figure to the car. Together they somehow got it to a seat. Then the young fellow watched Sard with admiration as she calmly drove with her rather dubious-looking passenger through the staring streets of Morris.

      The girl was silent, and the young banker made but one observation. "Small town life breeds a thirst for sensation, doesn't it? It never gets mentally to the economic questions lying back of the sensation."

      "It is still the Binet Test, fourteen-year-old mind," laughed the girl.

      As the car halted before the little boarding-house on Norman Street, Lowden begged, "I wish you'd let me handle all the rest."

      The girl turned her eyes on him. "You think I may meet with awkward things?"

      The young banker was evasive. "Let's remember we are rather a mean little town," he said simply. "Please leave it all to me. I'll do exactly as you say."

      The girl's grave look rested on the wreck of a man sitting in a heap beside her, his head sunk on his chest, his ragged coat open and showing his bare, famished-looking chest, his white lips muttering feebly.

      "I want him put to bed and fed—very lightly at first. I want him bathed and shaved, after a doctor has seen him. I want him either sent to the hospital here at my expense or, when he is strong enough, to come to my father for work. I want him to be sure, sure, he has friends. I want him," the quick tears came into her young eyes, "to feel that he has another chance."

      The youth nodded, his eyes on hers. This was Sard Bogart, the Judge's daughter, who had been back from college only a few months. It was understood in the villages of Morris and Willow Roads that Miss Bogart was a "queer," lonely girl, impatient of many things, apt to be impulsive and to do impolitic and "unpopular" things. This was one of the things—pulling a muddy gutter-snipe out of the gutter. Yet the light in the girl's clear brown eyes was a new and grateful thing to the young bank officer. Somehow he felt as if he had never looked into a fine woman's eyes before. He took his orders gladly and with sober admiration. "And keep me in touch, won't you?" The girl leaned from the car, laying her commands on him. He lifted his hat gravely.

      Lowden alighted and helped down the ragged vagrant. His gentleness was like Sard's own. The girl, watching this gentleness, saw the broken figure of the man try to turn once—try to look back at her. "Yes?" said the girl "Yes?" Then her eyes, warm with pity, "Wait a moment, please, Mr. Lowden. Yes, Colter, what is it you want to say?"

      But she could not understand. She saw only a shaken, shivering man muttering, "I can't remember," and again the stammering sentence, "I can't remember."

       Table of Contents

      UNDER THE LAW

      The house faced on the river. The massive hills that turned bronze in the setting sun were irregular background for the white castle-like buildings on the eastern banks. But the western shore of the Hudson had set between small mountains little, hilly-looking villages; among them were the Dutch towns, Morris and Willow Roads, whose old roofs, slowly giving way to factories and churches of one period, were at last disappearing before the real estate man's idea of a suburban development. At the edge of this development were the far-apart homes of the well-to-do and the long lines of green lawns; the rich trees and tinted shrubberies were illumined and laced with a thousand lovely colors of massed iris and waving tulips set, like the gardens on the river, against royal purple of opposite shores.

      Sard's room was in the square tower of the house her father had built in his more grandiloquent days. If the Judge's wife had lived, they might have lengthened and strengthened the home into something like a practical sunny house of our day, but as it was, the curious construction of red sandstone and black and white Tudor retained its perplexed conglomerate air, only saved from freakishness by the soft mantle of vines that ruffled the chimney and girdled its windows. All around to the sloping banks of the river were the trees that the Judge's father had planted and tended into maturity. It was a League of Nations in Trees! English maples, Norway spruces, lindens, horse-chestnuts from Versailles, Japanese maples and Greek planes and orange trees from along the Mediterranean. To Sard, since her very first party dress, those trees had seemed a sort of litany; the noble forms of every clime and country raised their mysterious crests, sought with yearning roots, were full of the first murmur of June-bee days; waved like women the soft undulations of their shapes, bathed in blue morning or loomed in formless grandeur on the night.

      It was a puzzle to Sard that these trees kept to the laws of their growth in one soil.

      The

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