CHAPTER IV

“What’s the use of crying when the mother that bore ye (Mary, pity women!) knew it all afore ye?”

THE club room, large and bare, with a bench or two and one long table, was full of girls, though at first glance you might not have been inclined to call them so. They were all so inexpressibly old. As they stood talking in groups, large and broad, with their frowsy hair and draggle-tailed dresses, lifting loud, rough voices and breaking from time to time into hoarse roars of laughter, they could scarcely be called prepossessing. These were the girls who had warned a simple-minded lady Bible-reader that “if she didn’t tyke ’erself orf they’d strip her”—and they would have done it.

As Muriel Dallerton entered the room the whole gang swarmed towards her in greeting. They loved her. “She ’adn’t got no nonsense about ’er,” “She was a real good sort, and no mistake,” and they showed their appreciation of her by rushing from their ten hours’ work into the club and paying with treasured pennies the tiny entrance fees she exacted for the classes.

To-day was cooking class, and from a great cupboard were drawn two dozen aprons, which they themselves had helped to buy and make.

Muriel knew just what wages they had, and never denied them the dignity of giving a little, if they had that little to give.

Two long hours’ class followed. To the girls who were accustomed to factory work it was mere play, and the pleasure and excitement of seeing how Mary Ann’s scones or Minnie Newlove’s pie turned out was inexhaustible.

It was not until it was over and the cooking boards and utensils put away that Muriel missed one of the number. Lizzie Belk was a girl who attended most regularly, and Muriel walked over to her mate to inquire after her.

“Mary Ann, where is Lizzie this afternoon?” she asked. There was a titter of laughter from the group of girls with her.

“Ye will! will ye!” shrieked Mary Ann in a sudden fury. “I’ll bash yer ’ead in for ye, Florrie Stevens!” she cried to a girl whose laughter was the loudest. “What right ’ave ye to pass it on _my_ mate? I’ll tell ye, miss.” She appealed to Muriel. “Florrie’s none so straight as she can blacken poor Liz.” Muriel leaned against the table, feeling sick.

“Hush, Mary, you must not talk like that,” she said at last. “What is the matter with Lizzie?” There was an uneasy silence. “The rest of you can go,” said Muriel. “Good-night, girls, go out quietly, please.” And the girls nodding to her in rough good-nature went out leaving her alone with Lizzie’s mate.

Muriel crossed to her side and took her hand gently. “Poor Lizzie!” she said softly. “Poor, poor Lizzie!” Mary burst into tears.

“’E ’adn’t ought to er done it, miss, ’e really ’adn’t!” she sobbed. “She was alwers a straight ’un, was Liz, an’ ’e promised ’er the lines an’ all, an’ now——”

“Where is she, Mary?” said Muriel quietly.

“She ain’t got nowheres to go to ’cept the ’orspital. They turned ’er off to-day at the factory; an’ ’er father’s beat ’er somethink hawful, miss, the blasted, drunken sot!” Muriel still held her hand.

“I think we had better go and find her,” she said.

“Ye won’t ’ave nought to do with the likes o’ ’er, will ye?” asked the girl in blank astonishment.

“Yes, Mary; don’t you think Lizzie needs help?”

“She needs it bad, miss.”

“Then that’s what we’re going to give her,” said Muriel firmly. Mary still stood where she was.

“Ye—ye won’t be rough on her, miss?” she begged in shamefaced tones. “’E treated ’er cruel bad.”

“No, Mary, I won’t be rough on her. I’m not angry at all, only so _very, very_ sorry. It’s such a dreadful thing, isn’t it? Poor Lizzie, we must do all we can for her.” Mary’s big hand tightened over the slender fingers of their “wonderful lady,” who seemed to understand without being told, and never said more than she meant to do.

They went out into the streets together. Lizzie was not hard to find. She was in a deserted yard near the factory, among heaps of refuse and mouldered iron. She had cried till she could cry no more, and lay in a sort of hopeless apathy, with wide, dull eyes staring straight in front of her. Muriel knelt down by her side, and Mary, with the unobtrusive delicacy many of the poorest have, turned away for a little.

“Lizzie,” said Muriel, as if she were speaking to a little child, “Lizzie, I want you to come with me.”

“Oh, my God!” said the girl. “Oh, my God!”

“You will come, won’t you, Lizzie?” She put out her hand.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” wailed the girl. “Who brought ye ’ere? Ye don’t know what I am. Oh, my God! my God!”

“I know all about it, Lizzie, and you must get up now and come with me.”

“They shan’t tyke me to the ’orspital, I tell yer—no, nor hanywheres. ’Ome? I daren’t show my fice there! D’ye see my harm an’ my ’ead? Father did that, an’ ’e said ’e’d kill me if I was to come back! Oh, let me alone! Why don’t ye let me alone?”

“Get up, Lizzie,” said Muriel, rising briskly to her feet. “Get up at once. I am not going to take you either home or to the hospital. You are coming back with Mary and me to the club, and I shall find a room for you in my lodgings.”

“Oh, now, Liz, do come, lovey, do come!” Mary urged. Lizzie rose dizzily to her feet, and between the two they got her back somehow—first to the club, and when they had fed her they took her to a room next Muriel’s.

The landlady did not say much. “If the young lydy choose to look hafter the likes o’ ’er, well an’ good, if not she could not stiy, of course.” But the young lady did choose to look after her, and to pay double for the room as well, so there was no more to be said.

It was a terrible night. Muriel never forgot it. She sat there holding the girl’s hand and hearing the whole story—the old, old story, told in all its crude, black reality between gasping sobs.

“’E said as ’ow I should ’ave my lines,” she groaned; “an’ now ’e says we’d starve. But I shouldn’t care for that, miss—no, I shouldn’t, if honly they couldn’t call me——”

“No, dear, no! they shan’t call you that,” Muriel murmured. “What is his name, Lizzie?”

“Oh, ’e ’adn’t er ought to a treated me so—Gawd knows ’ow I loves ’im! No!—I can’t tell ye ’is name, dear miss—don’t hask it!”

“But you must tell me, Lizzie.”

“Not if I was to die for it, miss!”

“If you tell me I can help you, Lizzie, perhaps to—to get your lines.”

“Oh, miss, ’e’d never forgive me!”

“Then I can do nothing, Lizzie.”

The girl sobbed afresh. Muriel rose and went to the window. Out of the dark clouds the stars peeped timorously, as if afraid to look down on the sad, sordid world beneath. A church clock chimed the hour—twelve o’clock—and from the public-house across the way a burst of brawling voices broke. It was illegal she thought to close so late.

The candle on the washstand flickered miserably. She went back to the bedside, and with careful, tender hands put back the heavy hair and sponged away the tears.

“Lizzie,” she said, and it seemed to her as if the whole of London stood still to listen, “there is some one I love with all my heart—I—I think I could forgive him anything.” She drew in her breath with a long gasp. “Now—won’t you tell me his name, Lizzie?” she pleaded. The two women looked at each other. The girl raised herself on her elbow and stared as if she were weighing the soul of the other woman (she had forgotten she was a lady). At last she sank back satisfied. “If she had a man,” Lizzie thought, “she might understand.”

“It’s—it’s Hobbs—Dick Hobbs,” she said. “Ye won’t be ’ard on ’im, miss. They can’t ’elp it, can they? Not as I knows on—an’ hanyway ’twere all my fault, I think.”

“I—I won’t be hard on him, Lizzie.” The tears were rolling down her cheeks. “And now I’ll put out this light, and you’ll go to sleep, won’t you? And to-morrow I’ll see Dick and get a license, and—and everything.”

“Oh, miss!” cried the girl—“not my lines?”

“Yes, Lizzie! If you’re a good girl and go to sleep you shall have your lines to show.” Muriel left her. When she came back a few minutes later she found the exhausted girl fast asleep; her face was red and swollen still with crying, but there was a happy smile on her lips. She was only seventeen.

“And there are thousands like this—thousands,” thought Muriel. “God forgive us our blindness and their pain.”

Suddenly she felt very faint and dizzy. She remembered she had had nothing to eat since her tea with Mary Huntly. She covered her face with her hands, for she realized more overwhelmingly than ever that she could never marry Jack Hurstly. But though she had cried for the other girl, no tears came now.