Meg's Friend Part 3

"Herring!" she faltered.

"Herrings," he repeated in a voice of rich appreciation. "Two herrings, fat as lord mayors!"

Meg walked about the room, her eyes bright with angry misery, her lips trembling. "It's downright wicked! You want to kill yourself, that's what you want to do." She flicked a tear away. "A workman in the street down there has a better dinner than that."

"Now, Meg, be reasonable," the young man pleaded in a voice of protest.

"Don't you see," he went on, striking his left palm with two fingers of the right hand, "there is a day called 'pay-day' that rules my bill of fare, as I explained to you the other day the moon rules the tides. On pay-day and its immediate followers I live in abundance. Then come days of lesser luxuries, then abstinence. I have reached this period. Soon plenty will reign again."

"It is a foolish way of managing money," said Meg, abrupt in her trouble, and only half-comforted.

"Can you tell me, Meg, how to manage money without reference to pay-day?" he asked.

"Will you do as I tell you?" she said, stopping short in her restless peregrinations.

He nodded.

"Take your money, all your money, and divide it into little parcels, as many parcels as there are days it must last, and every day spend just what is inside one of the little parcels, and not a bit more," said Meg with elucidating gestures.

Mr. Standish vowed she spoke like a chancellor of the exchequer; that the more he heard her the more he was determined on coming into the colossal fortune he was to enjoy some day, to appoint her his almoner, housekeeper, the dispenser of his bounties, the orderer of his dinners.

This project to be his housekeeper was one dear to Meg's heart, the pacifier of her wrath. By what means Mr. Standish was to come into possession of this fabulous wealth remained vague. Sometimes he would announce his intention of getting it by marrying an heiress, a project always chillingly received by Meg. Sometimes she would suggest spitefully that the heiress would not marry him; but Mr. Standish overrode all objections, and would depict days of indolent delight for himself and his bride, while Meg managed the household. When the daydream reached this point it generally abruptly terminated by Meg plunging out of the room, and banging the door after her with an emphatic "Shan't!"

On the evening of the fish dinner Mr. Standish left the heiress out of the question, and Meg was softened.

The next day the young man supped at home. His tray, as usual on these occasions, was brought in by Meg. A burly German sausage and a pot of Scotch marmalade graced the board. Meg's answers were evasive concerning the source from which these dainties came. It struck Mr. Standish that Meg had bought them with the store of half-pence he had taught her to put away in a moneybox he had himself presented to her, with a view to inculcating economical instincts. Her fierce refusal to answer convinced him that he had guessed right.

The refusal to touch these dainties died on his lips. He could not hurt the child. He ate the supper she had provided with loud laudations of its excellence. Before it was finished an arrangement had been entered into between them. On pay-day Meg would henceforth receive a sum to be kept for him against the days of privation. The contract had been fulfilled. Meg had proved a stern treasurer, resisting the young man's entreaties to dole out portions of the money before the appointed time.

If the child had gained much by intercourse with an educated mind, if her English had grown by it more refined and correct, her mind stored with more definite and varied knowledge; if, above all, there had come to her by this affection a precocious womanliness, taming and sweetening her lonely life, Mr. Standish had gained as much by the tie between them. A sort of wonder, half-amused, half-tender, sometimes awoke in his heart at the thought of the child's devotion. His occupation led him to see rough sides of life, and as he became familiar with degradation, the goodness, the innocence of the child was ever before him. He felt it was touching to be loved by a child of ten. Her advanced wisdom struck him.

If it stirred his sense of humor and inclined him to laugh, still it made him thoughtful.

During those two years he had enlarged his connections. He was earning more money. Individuals, somewhat of unkempt appearance, whom Meg disapproved of thoroughly, often made their way up the stairs to the young man's rooms. The peals of laughter, the loud talk emerging from the sanctum, confirmed Meg in judging these visitors foolish company for her hero. The child grew hot with angry apprehension when the bell rang shortly after their coming, and Jessie would answer it with tumblers of whisky and lemons. On letting out these friends Meg thought that Mr.

Standish usually looked excited, his eyes brighter, his manner more expansive. The child grew restless, alert, suspicious. She did not disguise her feelings to Mr. Standish. Why did these rough men come drinking his whisky? She would break into fierce denunciations against drink.

"Madam"--Mrs. Browne--"always said she was poor. Why was she poor?

Because she was always a-sipping and drinking. He'd keep being poor too."

Often Meg's tones, staccato with prophetic denunciation, would falter at the picture she evoked.

Mr. Standish listened sometimes with an amused and indulgent good humor that exasperated Meg; sometimes an uneasy qualm was perceptible in his voice as he admitted that Meg was wise; sometimes he a.s.sumed a superior tone of disapproval that silenced her for the time, but left her more than ever under the shadow of a vague and sorrowful apprehension.

One Sunday afternoon Mr. Standish emerged from his room ready to sally forth. Meg appeared out of her shadowy corner.

"Going out?" she asked shortly.

He nodded, smiling down with benign amus.e.m.e.nt. He seemed enveloped in a holiday brightness.

"Going with those horrid men?" she resumed, throwing her words out with sorrowful brevity.

He nodded, and drew out his watch. He was apparently in a mood to be entertained.

"Come, Meg, there are five minutes for a sermon. I will listen to it respectfully, as if it were the Archbishop of Canterbury preaching."

But Meg was too much absorbed to mind a joke. She followed him into his sitting-room, and began restlessly walking about.

Mr. Standish sat down, and as he stroked his hat with his sleeve he watched the little figure's perambulations. Meg wore her Sunday gown, a rusty black velveteen, foldless and clinging, b.u.t.toned from throat to hem. She had outgrown its scanty proportions. Her feet, incased in black felt slippers, looked large under the trim ankles.

"Well, Meg, I am waiting," said Mr. Standish.

"Don't go," said the child, stopping short and facing him abruptly. The quaint austerity of the skimpy garment brought out the lines of the childish figure as she stood erect and animated before him.

"Why not, Meg?"

"Because they're bad; because I hate them; because they'll bring you to misery," said the child, with an upward flash of one little brown well-formed hand, and with a piteous emphasis on the last word.

"Nonsense, Meg!" said Mr. Standish, impatient because more impressed than he cared to be. "You keep comparing my friends with Mrs. Browne--I don't mean any disrespect--an uneducated tippling old woman. My friends, my dear Meg, are gentlemen, educated men, who, I admit, are fond of a joke, fond of a gla.s.s or two gla.s.ses of grog, but who respect themselves."

"Education has nothing to do with it," snapped Meg, with concise energy.

"There was a man downstairs, he was educated. I think he was the devil.

He'd leave his wife and little child for days, and come back drunk." Meg gave a fierce little shudder. "There'd be scenes. One day he went and never came back--never, and the wife and baby boy went off one snowy day to the workhouse."

"Poor child, you should not see those things!" said Mr. Standish with a troubled look.

"Why not? You would not let these men up there take your money if you saw them."

There was a grotesque sweetness in Meg's appearance as she stood there in her skimpy dress, her short dusky hair falling in ma.s.ses about her neck and over her forehead. There came to the young journalist a remembrance of those wingless angels that the pre-Raphaelite masters painted, gracious, grave, workaday beings, with unearthly wise faces.

But it was not as a picture that he contemplated Meg; the thought of the goodness, the purity, the holiness of the child, who knew so much and understood so little of life, overcame him. Her innocence almost frightened him. He felt the sacredness of a vow taken to her; it would be more binding than one taken before a court of justice.

"What is it that you want me to promise, Meg?" he asked.

"Not to let them take your money from you, not to let them give you drink," she replied with her accustomed unhesitancy, but her voice faltering with harbored longing.

"Not drink at all?" he asked.

"I wish not at all; I wish not at all," she replied with unconscious repet.i.tion.

"Look here, Meg; I'll promise you this--I'll not waste my money, and I'll not tipple like Mrs. Browne downstairs. Will that satisfy you?"

"You promise!" said Meg vehemently, with another upward flash of the well-formed little brown hand, and holding him with her eyes.

"I promise," said Mr. Standish gravely, disguising an inclination to laugh.

The young man was busy in the intervals of journalistic work composing a political squib. He had not so much time to devote to Meg as in the less-employed days, but he allowed her to sit near him when he wrote, reading the story-books and ballads he gave her. In his leisure, as he smoked his pipe, he watched with half-closed eyes the quaint little figure, and drew the child out to talk. He explained the difficult pa.s.sages in the books she read, and gave her lessons in recitation.

Better than anything to Meg, he sometimes imparted to her the last _bon mot_ he had put into the mouth of "Sultan Will" to his suffering subjects--a confidence that invariably produced abnormal gravity in Meg.

The child had no reason to think the young man was not fulfilling the promise he had given. His alert carriage and concentrated expression contradicted any suspicion of faltering. Yet she was restless; his friends came often to see him.

"Why did they come, disturbing him at his work?" she asked spitefully.

Mr. Standish called her a hard little taskmaster, and received his friends cordially. A formless fear was at the child's heart. She haunted the threshold of his door when they were in his room; she lay awake of nights when she knew that he had gone out with them. She magnified to herself the number of times that he had gone out earlier and come home later than he used. If she dropped asleep her slumbers were broken until she heard the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.