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How long has he been in this awful place? How long has he been ill? Who takes care of him?" Nance, with her arms about Mrs. Clarke, told her as gently as she could of Mr. Demry's advent into the alley fourteen years before, of his friendship with the children, his occasional lapses from grace, and the steady decline of his fortune. "We must get him away from here!" cried Mrs.
Nance, shivering with the cold, got together the few articles that constituted Mr. Demry's worldly possessions. A few shabby garments in the old wardrobe, the miniature on the shelf, a stack of well-worn books, and the violin in its rose-wood case. Everything else had been sold to keep the feeble flame alive in that wasted old form. Nance looked about her with swimming eyes.
Demry's fiddle and the sound of pattering feet, synchronizing oddly with the lugubrious hymn in which Mrs. Smelts, in the room opposite, was giving vent to her melancholy. Nance, eager for her chance, yearning for financial independence, obsessed by the desire to escape from the dirt and disorder and confusion about her, still hesitated.
Nance asked. "Her's making me a gingerbread man." "I know a story about a gingerbread man; want to hear it?" "Is it scareful?" asked Ted. "No, just funny," Nance assured. Then while he sat very still on the gate post, with round eyes full of wonder, Nance stood in front of him with his chubby fists in her hands and told him one of Mr. Demry's old fairy tales.
Nance was puzzled, but not convinced. Wiser heads than hers have struggled with a similar problem in vain. She kept steadily on, and it was only when the squeak of Mr. Demry's fiddle came up from below that her fingers fumbled and the buttons went rolling on the floor. Six nights in the week, when Mr.
Already she was planning munificent gifts from that fabulous sum that was henceforth to be her weekly portion. At Mr. Demry's closed door she paused; then hastily retracing her steps, she slipped back to her own room and got a potted geranium, bearing one dirty-faced blossom.
His legs were much drunker than his arms, and when the two determined youngsters flung themselves upon him and shoved him out of the door, he lost his balance and fell headlong to the street below. By this time the party had swarmed into the hall and out on the steps and Mr. Demry's gentle, frightened face could be seen peering over their decorated heads.
Even the almost deserted old tenement, blushing under a fresh coat of red paint, took on a hue of romance. "You wait 'til we get it fixed up," said Nance. "They're taking out all the partitions in the Smelts' flat, and making a big consulting room of it. And over here in Mr. Demry's room I'm going to have the baby clinic.
Demry, of how many squeaks of the old fiddle had gone into the making of this party, of the bread and meat that had gone into the oranges and doughnuts, of the fires that should have warmed Mr. Demry's chilled old bones for weeks to come, that went roaring up the wide chimney in one glorious burst of prodigality.
In her first confusion of mind she thought he must be the prince come to life out of Mr. Demry's old fairy tale. Then she caught her breath. "I believe it's that Clarke boy!" she thought, with rising excitement, "I wonder if he'd remember the fight? I wonder if he'd remember me?" She went over to the automobile and ran her fingers over the silver initials on the door. "M.D.C," she repeated.