Miss Theodora/Chapter 9



When Kate accompanied her on her round of visits, Miss Theodora did not penetrate far into the little lanes that zigzagged off from Phillips Street. She kept more to the main road, and seldom took the young girl upstairs, or down into the dingy basements. For in her mind's eye a large place was occupied by Mrs. Stuart Digby, who at any time might end Kate's visiting among the poor. Kate, therefore, had to content herself with restricted vistas of fascinating alleys with wooden houses sloping toward each other at a curious angle, with little balconies of strangely southern appearance; and she sighed that she could not wander within them. She looked longingly, too, at the little church whenever they passed it; for Ben, who, rather for entertainment than edification, went there occasionally to the evening prayer meetings, had repeated many amusing speeches made by the colored brothers.

Still, if she could not do all that she wished to, she made the most of what came in her way. She loved to notice the difference between the kinds of things sold in Phillips Street shops and in those of the more pretentious thoroughfare to the north, through which the horse-cars ran to Cambridge. In the former case, eatables of all kinds were conspicuous,—not only meat and vegetables, and especially sausages, but corn for popping and molasses candy and spruce gum, all heterogeneously displayed in the small window of one little shop. On Cambridge Street, oyster saloons and bar-rooms and pawn-shops, before which hung a great variety of old garments on hooks, jostled against each other, strangely contrasting with numerous cake-shops, which offered to the passer-by a great variety of unwholesome comestibles. From the little windows of the dwelling rooms above the shops, frowsy and unkempt women looked down on the street below, and Miss Theodora usually drew Kate quickly along, as occasionally they traversed it for a short distance on their way to the hospital.

In the same neighborhood was a short street of unsavory reputation, partly on account of a murder committed within its limits many years before, and partly because it held the city morgue. Hardly realizing where she was, Miss Theodora one day was picking her way along the slippery sidewalk, with Kate closely following, when something dark crossed their path. They stopped to make way for it. It was a grim, indefinite something, which two men had lifted from a wagon to carry into a neighboring building—a something whose resemblance to a human body was not concealed by the dark green cloth covering it. Then they knew that they were near the morgue; and while the elder woman was regretting that she had brought Kate with her, she heard a voice speak her name, and, turning, saw Ben Bruce but a few steps behind.

"Isn't it late for you ladies to be in this part of the city?" he exclaimed as he overtook them, and they realized that it was almost dusk.

"We are not timid," smiled Miss Theodora; "but we shall be glad of your company, Ben. We stayed longer than we meant to stay at the hospital, and I know that I ought not to have kept Kate so late."

"I wasn't thinking so much of the time as the place," said Ben. "Some way I do not like to have you and Miss Kate wandering about in these dirty streets—at least alone."

"I suppose you think that we would be better off with any slip of a boy. But truly we do not need a protector, although we shall be very glad of your company home."

"I do not mean safety exactly," answered Ben; "but it does not seem to me—well, appropriate for you and Miss Kate to go around into all kinds of dirty houses," and he glanced at Kate's pretty gown and fur-trimmed coat.

"Oh, it does not hurt my clothes at all," Kate answered, as he glanced at her dress. "I have only my oldest clothes on to-day, and I've been in a very clean place, too. I'm sure nothing could be cleaner than the hospital."

"Well, you can turn it into fun, but you know what I mean," said Ben. For like many another young man, he felt that tenderly bred women should be kept ignorant of the unsightly parts of a city. Thus as they went up the hill Ben and Kate kept up their merry banter, until they reached Miss Theodora's door.

"Come in to tea with us. Ernest will be glad to see you," said the elder woman. But Ben shook his head.

"Thank you very much, but they expect me home."

Nevertheless, he went inside for a little while, and sat before the open fire in the little sitting-room,—Miss Theodora allowed herself this one extravagance,—and heard Kate humorously relate the adventures of the afternoon.

"I have brought," she said, "a bottle of old Mrs. Slawson's bitters. I feel guilty in not having any of the many diseases they are warranted to cure, but I shall give the bottle to our cook, who is always complaining, and keeps a dozen bottles sitting on the kitchen mantelpiece. You know about Mrs. Slawson, don't you, Ben?"

"Oh, she's the old person who made so much money out of a patent medicine."

"Yes, and then married a 'light-skinned darky,' as she called him, who ran away with it all. It is great fun to hear her tell of the large number of people she has cured. Why, the greatest ladies in Boston, she says, used to drive up in their carriages to patronize her."

"Why doesn't she keep up her business now?"

"Well, she is too old to continue it herself, and she does not wish any one else to have her formulas. She has just enough money to live on, and once in a while she has a few bottles put up to give away to her friends. My visits to her are purely social, not charitable, and this is my reward"—and Kate displayed a clumsy package in yellow wrappings.

Then Ernest came in—now a tall lad looking younger than Kate, though a year older—and welcomed Ben, and begged him to spend the evening. But Ben, resolute, though reluctant to leave the pleasant group clustered around Miss Theodora's fire, hurried off just as the clock struck six.