UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE MIDGE BY H. C. BUNNER, AUTHOR OF "AIRS FROM ARCADY AND ELSEWHERE." NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1887 COPYRIGHT, 1886, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS PS a I TO A. L B. 347709 THE MIDGE. CHAPTER I. IT was quiet in the Brasserie Pigault. It was a snowy night, for one thing, the air full of a damp, heavy fall of broad white flakes. And then there had been a bad fire down in Grand Street, and the frivolous and pleasure-seeking portion of the quarter's population had gone down to see the wounded people taken out of the ruins. So business was dull at the Brasserie Pigault. Undeservedly dull, for the only stains on the dim walls were the stains of time : the table-tops shone like century-polished mahogany, the lusty, friendly fire glowed through the red eyes of the great stove, the sand on the floor was crystal- bright, and bright were Madame Pigault's black eyes, as she sat knitting behind the desk, and looked toward the window, where a fantail of THE MIDGE. gas-jets lit up alluringly the legend which, when you once got inside, read : /I3DAJ > c QUA 83IdMAHa .83WIW 3WH It was only a beer-saloon, of course ; but there was a comfort and cleanliness about it that were almost homelike. And, just for this dull hour, the room was filled with the charm of that sacred yet sociable quiet which the male animal of our species loves to establish in whatever serves him for club-room. There were little noises, but they were of a gentle sort. From time to time there was the joggle of falling coal in the big stove; and then Louis, the waiter, set it right with a subdued rattling. Sometimes a gas-jet flared and wheezed and whistled until madame's knitting-needles clicked on the counter, and Louis flew across the room just as the vicious spurt of flame made up its mind to subside. More often than this, a glass clinked against the shining brass faucet of the THE MIDGE. 3 keg, and there was a " whish ! " of beer, quickly drowned in its own bubbling overflow. And almost regularly every ten minutes, the crash of shuffling dominos came from where Mr. Martin and M. Ovide Marie, the curly-haired music- teacher from Amity Street, were playing. Just across the room from Mr. Martin and M. Marie, at the table under the corresponding gas light, sat the Doctor. His overcoat, with its military-looking cape, was thrown back over his shoulders, his elbows were planted on the table, and his head was propped up be'tween the closed fists. A good American face it was, too, that looked at you over those lean, sinewy, nervous American knuckles. A hatchet-face, if you will, but a pleasant face for all that strong and fine, with the lines of good stock in it, with force in the clear gray eye and humor in the curl of the mouth. A gentle face babies pawed the air to get at it as soon as they saw it and yet, looking at it, you could quite understand that this was the same Captain Peters who, in 1863, carried despatches straight through Quantrell's lines to that interesting arm of the U. S. forces which at that time was fighting fire with fire, up and down Missouri. Nobody ever called him Captain nowadays, though. Between Broadway and the North River, from Washington Square nearly to Canal Street, old residents hailed him as " Doctor," and with 4 THE MIDGE. the sensitive modesty of the genuine soldier, he accepted the civilian title, and said nothing about his captaincy or his record. Besides, it was Fate, he thought, that he should be a doctor after some fashion. All the Evert Peterses for five genera tions back (and there the count stopped) had been doctors. This last Evert Peters had had no liking for a physician's life ; but no choice had been given him. When he was old enough to go to medical college, to medical college he went, and there he stayed until six weeks before final examination, when his father died. Then he gave his books and kit to his chum, went back to Oneida, buried his father, took himself to Troy, and set to work studying civil engineer ing. Then the war broke out, and he found what little he knew of medicine and civil-engin eering coming handy in ways he never dreamed of. When he came home from the war, he sought out the quiet region where what is now the French quarter of New York merges into Greenwich Village, and there settled himself for a week or two, to look about him. And then Ovide Bocage, working in the planing-mill in Prince street, got his hand into the machin ery, and would have lost three fingers if it had not been for the timely surgery of the young man just home from the war. And so the young man was gratefully called " the Doctor." The " week or two " had become fourteen years, THE MIDGE, 5 the pale brown hair of the "young man" had grown paler yet with streaks of gray, the great city had grown up and left their quarter far down town, but still the people thereabout called Evert Peters " the Doctor," and he occupied a well-established yet ill-defined place in the com munity, something between the physician and the priest, a sort of amateur ally and adjunct of two professions, accepted by both and recog nized by neither ; but very dearly loved by all with whom he had to do. He knew what was wanted, sitting cozily that night in the Brasserie Pigault, when he heard Piero open the door, put his head in, and shout : " Ohe, m'sieu' le docteur ! " Piero had the singsong of the sea in his cheery hail. He was a Franco-Italian, and the first voyage he ever made was his voyage to this country, in 1867, on the bark Mariana III. As the rest of the Mariana's burden consisted of Cette wines and Portuguese sailors, it must have been Piero's personal virtue that saved her from going down in an unregrettable shipwreck. Since his arrival, Piero had never left the French quarter ; but, with the aid of a pair of rings in his ears and a roll in his walk, he contrived to give a maritime flavor to his life ; and when he entered a room, as far as he possibly could he made you feel that he was just opening the door 6 THE MIDGE. of your cabin to smile on you with his storm- beaten brown face and report all snug aloft. " What's the matter, Piero ? " inquired the Doctor, with a harmless scowl bringing his bushy gray eyebrows closer together. " Ooman goin' die," Piero answered, grinning with all his white teeth : " goin' die bad, down 'Ouston Strit." " Why don't you go for Dr. Milhaud ? It's his business, you marine chissy-cat," said the Doctor, trying to be irritable. " How often have I got to tell you that I won't interfere with a regular physician unless it's a case of neces sity ? " " Yes," grinned Piero, catching at the last word : " Necess'tairee, vair necess'tairee. She goin' die, ev-vair-ee time, shu'." The Doctor rose from his table with a little sigh of discomfort and a glance at his half- drunk glass of beer, and then he resolutely but toned his coat. "Where's Dr. Milhaud? Down at the fire?" " Yes, sair. Down to ze fi-er. Two men burn', t'ree kill', le petit Coquerel knock' down by en gine ; guess lose leg," Piero explained, with great cheerfulness. " Doct' Milhaud got 'em boce, dem fell's ouat bin burn' zey don't ouant go to no hospital." " More fools they," observed the Doctor, lead ing the way to the door, touching his hat as he THE MIDGE, j passed Mme. Pigault. Piero cast a longing, suggestive eye at the bar, and followed him out where the silent flakes sifted down on them out of the moist blackness above. " Who is it now, Piero ? " inquired the Doctor, as he strode on, tall and straight, towering above Piero, who rolled along as though he had the whole Spanish Main surging in his legs. " Zat Poland lady, wiz ze liT gal. Her hos- ban' he die two mont' ago." "Why, Piero," the Doctor knit his brows again, " that woman's in the last stages of con sumption, sure enough. Milhaud told me about her. You don't want me to go there ; you want the priest." " No, she don' ouant no prist," and Piero shook his head vigorously : " she sen' fo' you!' " What's her religion? " " Ma foi, I guess she don' got no God nor nossin'. I say to her : ' I get you prist.' She say : ' You get me prist ; prist bring my hosban' back, eh ? ' I say : ' No ; if you got hosban', ouat you ouant of prist ? if you no got you' hosban' no mo', zen you ouant prist. Zat ouat prist good fo' talk good ouen you ain' got ouat you ouant." The Doctor laughed softly. " Zen M'sieu' Goubaud she bo'd wiz M'sieu' Goubaud, he biggin talkin', an' he say: 'You me, madame; you die somevair else, I g THE MIDGE. don* care ouaire you go; you die he', in my 'ouse, you got go heaven. Eef you no have prist, you have prodestan' ; if you no have pro- destan', you have Doct' Pittair.' Zen she say: ' I take Doct' Pittair,' an' M'sieu' Goubaud, he sen' me fo' you." It was an old story for the Doctor. Many was the poor outcast, afraid to face priest or clergy man, who had consented to open his sin-laden heart to the good-natured stranger who was nothing more than a sympathetic fellow-sinner. This was a sort of duty for which the Doctor considered himself utterly unfit; but which chance forced upon him. He went through it all with a grimly humorous hope that some good, in some unseen direction, might come of it all. For himself, he could find, as he said, no sense in it. " Far as / can see," he remarked once, " I'm getting my system saturated with the smell of cabbage, and helping a lot of cussed scoundrels to die easy, when it would be a sight healthier for their eternal souls to take hold and wrastle with their iniquity, and die with some sort of understanding of what their prospects are. I'm afraid some of those fellows that I've sent off so slick and pleasant wouldn't thank me for it now." In Houston Street, the dampness and heavi ness, and the lifeless fall of the snowflakes, were enough to depress the spirits of even the chil- THE MIDGE. g dren, who had long ceased to skylark about the areas and basements and up and down the sharp- pitched steps. Beer saloons and groceries kept the street awake with patches of light ; but the weight of the dull, damp weather was over everything. M. Goubaud was a dealer in feathers, and the smell of his stock penetrated to the uttermost corner of the rickety building in which he kept shop and stored lodgers. But it was lost among a dozen other smells in the close back room to which Piero led the Doctor. Few sick-rooms are sweet, but in this one there was an element of unusual offensiveness in the musky cheap perfume which rose from an open trunk in one corner where some bits of gaudy silk and satin showed bright and sharp amid the dirt and grime around them. "Theatrical, of course," said the Doctor to himself. He sat down by the bed while Piero introduced him : "Docf Pittair!" announced the sea-farer, his head half-way in the door : " All same prist ! " and he vanished. Emaciated and death-stricken, it was beautiful still, the face that lay pale against the soiled blue ticking of the pillow. Young, too, the Doctor noticed ; scant thirty. A lovely creature she must have been, ten years before, when there was color in those tea-rose cheeks, rosy fire in the I0 THE MIDGE. pale, shapely lips, life in the tangled mass of dark hair damp with death. Her great black eyes opened as he looked at her, and in the first flash it seemed as though he saw her as she must have been. Then they closed again wearily; they had taken no notice of his presence. Madame Goubaud, sallow, lean and unsympa thetic, bent her hard mechanic face over the sick woman, and raspingly appealed to her to wake up and say her last words to the good doctor. The thin face moved on the pillow in a pettish way, and the eyes remained obstinately closed. " Maman ! " This came from a child, a girl, a thin, small reproduction of the dying woman ; a little dark- haired, dark-eyed thing, who had slipped up in front of the visitor, and stood, frowning anxiously as she looked at the invalid. Her meagre, nervous hands grasped a medicine-bottle and a spoon. " Maman / " she said again with a vehement severity of tone, while her pale lips trembled : "Maman! parle done! ce n'est pas gentil, c,a tu le sais bien ! " She turned to the Doctor in explanation and dropped into an English of her own. The voice was childish ; but the manner, the management of emphasis and inflection, were absurdly mature. " It is with a sick as with a crazy, monsieur. You must treat them as the children. It is no use to reason with them. Maman ! tu m'ecoutes ? " THE MIDGE. ! T The mother opened her great eyes again, and stared at the Doctor, at first vacantly, then with a fretful summoning of intelligence. " C'est M. Peters," said the child, encourag ingly. Her English words she pronounced cor rectly, with perhaps the least faintly perceptible trace of a French accent But the French seemed to slip more easily to her tongue. The mother was opening and closing her feverish lips, as though to indicate that her mouth was dry and choking. The Doctor noted in the act that little touch of exaggeration and appeal which marks the undisciplined invalid. The child put a spoonful of water between her mother's lips and carefully tilted it, standing patiently, with knit brows and watchful eyes, until it was all drunk. " You spik Franch ? " inquired the woman, hoarsely. The Doctor bowed. His French had never recovered from the accent he had painfully learned at school ; but he had been long enough in the French quarter to accustom his ear to a language that he heard more frequently than his own ; and he could generally follow what was said to him, were it said in anything short of a Basque patois. It was a rapid talker who could force him to help himself out with an occasional "pah si vite!" or " ^.y&r-c'est-que-c.a." But he had a hard task this time. The woman's story was brief, and her speech was slow, but so improbable seemed what she had to say, so inco- 12 THE MIDGE. herent and confused was her manner of saying it, that when, at the end, she drew from under the pillow and thrust at him a loose handful of dirty, creased and crumpled letters and papers, the Doctor took them mechanically, while he stared at the stranger with puzzled eyes, wondering whether she was delirious or he was dazed. Her name was Mrs. Eustace Talbot. Her husband her dead husband has been a great singer, though no one knew an artist in this ac cursed country. She was going to die, she knew. She was only thirty ; but that was thirty years too much, and she was going to die. It was better so ; there was a good God, after all, for he sometimes let people die. When she was dead, she wanted to have her child sent to England, to her husband's people. Her uncle, Sir Richard Talbot, would care for the little one. He was a great man a very rich man if it was any trouble to M. le docteur, he would be well paid for it. He was a demon, Sir Richard ; but at least he was not canaille; he would take the child out of this canaille atmosphere that had killed her poor father and her poor mother. Sir Rich ard had a palace ; he would take the child to his palace ; she would learn to forget her miserable father and mother ; it was best ; she could only remember them as living among canaille and so the papers would tell all to M. le docteur so let her die in peace. THE MIDGE. ! 3 This was told brokenly, excitement struggling with weakness. It ended in a piteous and feeble outcry over her sad case, over her unhappy life ; and then she turned her back on Dr. Peters, with a movement of the shoulders that seemed to dis miss him and the world together. There was so much of the spoiled child in it, so much of hys terical affectation and exaggeration, that if the Doctor had not seen the unmistakable signs of death in the damp face, he would have taken it for an extreme case of invalid malingering. All the while the little girl stood by the bed side, her large, dark, anxious eyes fixed on her mother. Their look of distressed comprehension was painfully mature ; but her upper lip quivered in childish fashion, and her breast heaved with big breaths that were almost sobs. She still held the spoon, and at each breath it clicked softly against the glass in her other hand. She said not a word, and her gaze never once dropped from the sick woman's face. The Doctor left the bedside and sat down under the one meagre gas-jet to glance over the letters. He was not ready to believe this story of rich and titled connections. But it was true, seemingly. He slowly shuffled over the soiled papers, lifting them up to the dim light, and they bore out the tale. They were mainly short notes from Sir Richard Talbot, of Pollard Hall, Stonehill, Kent, to his brother in Paris. They 1 4 THE MIDGE. were of an unfriendly tone, refusing or grudg ingly allowing repeated demands for money. But they left no doubt that there was a Sir Richard Talbot, and that he had had a scapegrace brother named Eustace, and that this Eustace was an opera-singer. He had scarcely run through them when he heard a new sound from the bed, and Mme. Gou- baud bent quickly to look in the changing face. The Doctor crossed the room, but not before the child had thrown herself forward on the bed in a storm of tears and caressing cries and wild ap peals to the spirit that was slipping away in dumb unconsciousness. She knew it ; she had seen it before, inexorable death. There was no hope in her instinctive outcry; she saw, with wide staring eyes, the light sink out of the face and leave a hard, dull gray, a blank strangeness ; and she knew what it meant. She turned in quick, understanding obedience, when the Doctor drew her to him and held her face against his breast. For a moment it rested there motionless, and then her sobs broke forth, and her slim body shook and quivered in Dr. Peters's arms. He pressed her closer, and she clung to him and made no attempt to look be hind her. Madame Goubaud peered sharply into the still face, crossed herself, pressed her toilworn thumb down on the half-closed eyelids, and then, much THE MIDGE. ^ as she might have corded up a bundle of fea thers, passed an old red print handkerchief under the dead chin, and tied the ends in a knot on top of the head. Dr. Peters lifted up the girl in his arms. She yielded herself to him, keeping her face away from the bed until she could hide her eyes on his shoulder. He carried her out of the room. Alphonsine, the homely-faced, good-natured ap prentice of the house of Goubaud, offered to take la pauvre petite in her own bed that night. They climbed the steep stairs to the little attic room where Alphonsine shivered of winter nights until, under the collection of rags that served her for a coverlid, she generated the animal warmth of healthful sleep. It was a poor place for the child, bleak and bare and wind-ridden, and the desperate poverty of the tattered bed-clothes caught the Doctor's eye ; but he thought of Mme. Goubaud's soul less, hard face downstairs, and he left the little one to the comfort and protection of Alphon- sine's broad bosom. CHAPTER II. snow had ceased, .the wind had risen, 1 and the thermometer had fallen, when the Doctor set out for his home. It was late, too, past twelve, but he went out of his way to the little French undertaker's in Grand street. The undertaker was not in bed ; he was " confec tioning" an important commission, as he in formed his visitor, and he crimped a piece of discolored satin and smiled cheerfully as he promised, with encouraging redundancy of as surances, that he would go around in the morn ing, and supply that hideously meagre attempt at a funeral which just saves the pride of the poor from the keen disgrace of the Potter's Field. A pine coffin, a hearse, one hack, and a share of a grave in some God-forsaken cemetery in New Jersey you can have all these for twenty dol lars. And, that being settled, Dr. Peters went on to Washington Square, on the dark south side of which he found one late light glimmering in a high window. The house in which it shone stood a little back from the street, and looked 16 THE MIDGE. if even darker and gloomier than those about it. The one pale light did not give an idea of home ; there was nothing of expectant welcome about it; it rather suggested a weary and uncanny wakefulness, and made the Doctor feel that he ought to have been in bed hours before. He let himself in with a great old-fashioned brass key, and toiled up the silent stairs, passing out of the region of perpetual cabbage only when he reached the third story. He opened the door of his own private domain with some apprehension ; but he found a bit of fire still in the grate a fire of anthracite, clink- ery, gassy, and dull, yet capable of revivification, and after a temporary eclipse under the blower, it brightened up and gave forth warmth after its kind. The Doctor got into his slippers and his old " house-coat," while the fire was rekindling, and, late as it was, he lit his pipe and sat down with his soles close to the grate, to look over the papers in his pocket, for in addition to those he had received from Mrs. Talbot, M. Goubaud had seen fit to entrust to him a bundle of scrap- books, letters and odd documents found in the trunk with the theatrical raiment. In the hour that he sat before the fire, he got at no more than the bare outlines of a story that in after years he was able to round out and fill up ; but he had enough knowledge of the weak !8 THE MIDGE. side of human nature to form in that brief glance a judgment which better knowledge only confirmed. He found out that Eustace Reginald Hunt Hunt Talbot was the son of Sir Hugh Talbot, vaguely described in various clippings from French papers as " un nobleman anglais." His mother was a Frenchwoman, the daugnter of a rich banker, Cesar Galifet. He had an uncle Antoine Galifet, a Gascon, supposed to be a man of vast wealth. Uncle Antoine desired that his nephew Eustace should be brought up in France, and it appeared that the Talbot family was very willing to oblige Uncle Antoine. There was reason, indeed, to believe that they were glad to get rid of Eustace, and that Eustace had given them cause for such gladness. He was sent to France at twelve years of age, put through pension and college, and turned loose in Paris ten years after he left England. Uncle Antoine had probably had some little schemes of his own for shaping the future of his nephew; but, whatever they may have been, they came to naught. From 1852 to 1862, Mr. Eustace Talbot, whom his French friends, by some Gallic association of ideas, called M. le vicomte de Talbot, was a man- about-town in Paris. He had an allowance from Uncle Antoine, just large enough to make him wish that it was larger, and when he was very deeply in debt he applied to his father in Eng- THE MIDGE. !