IV.MADDIE.
The doctor took an early train to the city and spent the best part of the forenoon trying to find someone who knew anything of the whereabouts of Maddie Morrison. He learned that the grandmother had died some time in August, that she was a quiet old body, keeping much to herself, and no one knew anything of the child. Almost discouraged, while waiting for a car, he asked a big policeman if he could give any information. He remembered “the little red-headed girl, the sunlight making a glory of her hair.” “Yes, they took her to an asylum.” He thought it was the one in B—— Street, and there the doctor found her.
The matron was not at all sure about the doctor’s right to see the child, but bless you, the doctor had no doubts, and was so convincing that after much talking and telephoning a satisfactory arrangement was reached.
Maddie did not seem to be a very great favorite at the asylum. She had aired very decided opinions as to “orphum ’sylums.” From what the doctor could gather, Maddie had somewhere gleaned the idea that she was an individual with the right to live and grow according to the dictates of her sunny-hearted nature.
She had grown restive under the constant surveillance, and in a fit of exasperation she had told the matron she was “tired bein’ chased round. If it wasn’t a woman mad ’cause she had too much to do, marching her round, it was a big girl puttin’ on airs,” “and she wasn’t no roach to be routed out and ’sterm’nated.”
When pressed for an explanation by an irate matron, she had drawn a very vivid picture of the destruction of roaches in the tenement where she had lived, and the “board o’ health man” who had said, “you got to rout ’em out. Keep right after ’em till you ’sterm’nate ’em out.” So “somebody was always shooin’ ’em out o’ one place into another, like you do the orphums here.”
“She really is a very troublesome child,” said the matron; “why, last Thursday an officer came to the door at two o’clock in the morning to say there was a child on the fire escape. He thought she might be walking in her sleep. When I reached there, with my heart in my mouth, I found Maddie, in her night clothing, with the thermometer at zero, calmly looking at the sky, and not one word of explanation can anyone get out of her, except that she wanted to.”
“Then you would not call her a promising child,” suggested the doctor.
“No—that is—the child is a care; she is not tractable. We have one hundred children here,” and the matron threw out her hands in a most telling gesture.
“One hundred children!” murmured the doctor,and turned from her, for something hurt his throat.
The next moment Maddie, who had wanted to “hear her own feet walking,” was with them. A slip of a child, perhaps seven years old, with a frightened, anxious little face, that broke into dimpling smiles when the doctor lifted her to his knee with a “Well, Maddie, I have come to take you home with me, to the Christmas jollification, you know.”
Maddie did not know, but she was willing to take him on trust. She held fast to his finger, and leaned her bright head against him, while he put on her shabby little coat that did not fit, and the shabbier little hat. The matron looked at him, half smiling, and then at Maddie with perplexity.
“It is just a little helpless child after all,” she thought. Then, taking the bonny face between her hands, she stooped and kissed her. “Be a good girl, dear,—I hope you will be happy.”
It was here that Maddie made her explanatory apology. “I will be. I couldn’t be happy here, you see—’cause—I wasn’t used to bein’ a ’sylum orphum—I was born the other kind of a orphum—they’re different and always has a granny—and a lap—and——”
“Yes, I know, dear,” replied the matron, looking very red and teary, and ready to laugh all at once, while the doctor shook hands in a haven’t-a-moment-to-spare sort of a way, and hurried the small prattler away.
They found Jeanie waiting at the store with everything ready for the trying on. Jeanie, whoseemed to know all about little girls—and doctors. Then followed a most exciting time. Maddie hardly knew just what happened, but dusk found her with the doctor and Jeanie, homeward bound. No one would ever have suspected, to see her then, that she knew aught of “’sylums.”
“Tell me, Maddie,” said the doctor, “whatwereyou doing on the fire escape at midnight?”
“I was talkin’ to God,” she answered, quite simply. “You see, before granny died, she said to me: ‘Maddie, dear, be sure and remember,God will take care o’ you. Now don’tforgetit,’ she said, ‘just keeprememberin,’ God will take care o’ you.’
“You see, granny forgot ’bout God—she told me so—and she wanted me to be different. When I got to the ’sylum, I tho’t He didn’t live there, tho’ they did read ’bout Him outen a book every mornin’, and before we et we shut our eyes and said somethin’ sounded like ‘ou—wou—wo—wou,’ they said it so fast, I never knew just what they was talkin’, but they called it ‘thanking God.’ I just kept rememberin’,God will take care o’ you, but it seemed like—He—maybe didn’t.
“Then, when they sent me to bed ’cause I told ’em they all acted sif orphums was to be ’stirm’nated like bugs—I s’pose bein’ in bed so long, ’fore it was night, I woke up, ’fore it was day, and got to thinkin’—He had forgot all about me, ’cause granny had forgot about Him.
“I went out on the fire ’scape, so I could get a little nearer to Him, and told him, nice and p’lite, for I don’t believe God likes to be wowed at: ‘God,I reely ain’t no roach, and I don’t want to be ’sterm’nated. I am that little girl wotyoumade; please don’t be mad to granny any more ’cause she forgot ’bout you. She was sorry.’
“Then I told God some things ’bout granny. How tired she was, how hard she worked, scrubbin’ and washin’—an’ she was old—and her bones was stiff; and I told God, ‘Grannynever told no lies, not for fair. Just play lies, you know, like when we didn’t have anythin’ to eat, she’d say, “Well, I guess we’ve been eatin’ too much roast duck and fixin’s, an’ we better fast ’til morning,” and then she’d hold me in her lap and we’d laff ’bout the duck not settin’ well in our stummicks.’
“After ’while she’d say in a sort of a tuney talkin’ way:
‘I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,High O! High O!For the world we don’t care a fiddle-de-dee,Since I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,High O! High O!’
‘I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,High O! High O!For the world we don’t care a fiddle-de-dee,Since I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,High O! High O!’
‘I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,High O! High O!For the world we don’t care a fiddle-de-dee,Since I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,High O! High O!’
‘I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,
High O! High O!
For the world we don’t care a fiddle-de-dee,
Since I’ve got Maddie and Maddie’s got me,
High O! High O!’
“I told God there wasn’t no laps to the ’sylum, and would He please take care o’ me quick.”
The troubled blue eyes lifted to the doctor’s face made him gather her suddenly into his arms and ask, “What is wrong with this lap?” With her curly red head against his shoulder they talked of more joyous happenings. The new shoes, with “shiny tips,” the kid mittens with snappers to make them stay shut, the wonderful things they had seenin the shops, the doll that sat wide-eyed on the arm of Jeanie’s chair.
After a long, dreamy pause, Maddie sat erect, and putting her hands on the doctor’s shoulders, she looked long and earnestly into his strong, kindly face. Slowly a light came into her eyes and she said: “God ain’t forgot me. He sent you. Granny said I was to ’member, ‘God will take care o’ you,’ andHeDID!”
“Yes, Maddie,” said the doctor, softly, and again, “Yes! yes!”
The head with its bobbing curls was back on his shoulder, the weary eyelids drooping.
“She is off to dreamland,” the doctor thought, when she roused again:
“P’raps He will take care o’ granny; she was sorry.”