Without a moment's hesitation, and as a mere matter of duty, Cleg bent his head, and, running full-tilt between his late landlord's legs, he overset him on the pavement and shot ahead on his way to make his morning call on the Kavannahs. The fulfilment of healthy natural function required that a well-conducted boy of good principles should cheek a policeman and overset a Jew landlord whenever met with. In such a war there could be no truce or parley.
Tinklers' Lands was in one of the worst parts of the city. Davie Dean's Street goes steeply down hill, and has apparently carried all its inhabitants with it. Tinklers' Lands is quite at the foot, and the inhabitants have come so low that they can fear no further fall. The Kavannahs, as has been said, dwelt in the cellar of the worst house in Tinklers' Lands.
Cleg ran down into the area and bent over the grating.
"Vara!" he cried, making a trumpet of the bars and his hands.
"Aye, Cleg, is that you?" said Vara. "She's oot; ye can come in."
So Cleg trotted briskly down the slimy black steps, from which the top hand-rail had long since vanished. The stumpy palings themselves would also have disappeared if they had been anything else than cast metal, a material which can neither be burned nor profitably disposed of to the old junk man.
Vara met him at the foot. She was a pleasant, round-faced, merry-eyed girl of ten – or, rather, she would have been round-faced but for the pitiful drawing about the mouth and the frightened look with which she seemed to shrink back at any sudden movement near her. As Cleg arrived at the door of the cellar a foul, dank smell rose from the depths to meet him; and he, fresh from the air and cleanliness of his own new abode among the shavings and the chips, noticed it as he would not have done had he come directly from the house by the brickfield.
"She gaed awa' last nicht wi' an ill man," said Vara, "and I hae seen nocht o' her since."
Vara Kavannah spoke of Sheemus Kavannah as "faither," but always of her mother as "she." To-day the girl had her fair hair done up in a womanly net and stowed away on the top of her head. When one has the cares of a house and family, it is necessary to dress in a grown-up fashion. Indeed, in some of her moods, when the trouble of Hugh and the baby lay heavy on her, Vara looked like a little old woman, as if she had been her own fairy godmother fallen upon evil times.
But to-day she had her head also tied in a napkin, rolled white and smooth about her brows. Cleg glanced at it with the quick comprehension which comes from a kindred bitterness.
"Her?" he queried, as much with his thumb and eyebrow as with his voice.
"Aye," said Vara, looking down at the floor, for in the Lands such occurrences were not spoken of outside the family; "yestreen."
Hearing the voices at the door, little Hugh, Vara's brother of four, came toddling unevenly upon legs which ought to have been chubby, but which were only feeble and uncertain. He had one hand wrapped in a piece of white rag; and, whenever he remembered, he carried it in his other hand and wept over it with a sad, wearying whimper.
Cleg again looked his query at Vara.
"Aye," said the girl, her eyes lighting this time with a glint of anger; "the bairn toddled to her when she cam' hame, and he asked for a bit piece. And wi' that she took him and gied him a fling across the floor, and he hurt his airm on the corner of the bed."
And Cleg, though he had given up swearing, swore.
"The wean's asleep!" said Vara; "speak quietly."
And upon tiptoe she led the way. The dusk of the cellar was so dense and the oppression of the foul air so terrible that had not Cleg been to the manner born, he could hardly have reached the little crib where the baby lay huddled among swathings of old petticoats and bits of flannel, while underneath was a layer of hay.
Vara stood gazing with inexpressible rapture at the babe.
"Isna he bonny – bonny?"
She clasped her hands as she spoke, and looked for the answering admiration in Cleg's face.
"Aye," said Cleg, who knew what was demanded of him if he expected to remain Vara Kavannah's friend; "he's juist terrible bonny – elegant as a pictur'!"
He had heard his father say that of a new "jemmy."
In truth, the babe was but skin and bone, with the drawn face of a mummy of five thousand years – and tiny hands, prehensile like those of a monkey.
"Vara," said Cleg, "ye canna bide here. I maun get ye awa'. This is no to be tholed. What hae ye had to eat the day?"
"We had some broth that a neighbour brocht in yesterday, and some fish. But the fish was bad," said Vara, flushing and hesitating even to say these things to Cleg.
The badness of the fish, indeed, sufficiently advertised itself.
At the mention of something to eat little Hugh sharpened his croon of pain into a yell.
"Hugh's awsome hungry! Hugh boy wants his dinner!"
Vara went to him and knelt beside him.
"Hush thee, Hugh boy!" she said, speaking with a fragrance of motherliness which must have come to her from some ancestor, for certainly never in her life had she experienced anything like it. "Hush! Hugh boy shall have his dinner if he is a good boy! Poor handie! Poor, poor handie!"
And the girl took the swollen wrist and torn hand into hers and rocked to and fro with the boy on her knee.
"Hugh is gaun to be a man," she said. "He wadna greet. Na, he will wait till faither comes hame. And then he will get ham, nice ham, singing in the pan; aye, and red herring brandering on the fire, and salmon in tins, an' aipples, an' oranges, an' cancellaries."
"Losh, aye, but that wull be guid!" said Hugh, stopping his crying to listen to the enthralling catalogue.
"Aye," said Vara, "and when faither comes hame, he will tak' us away to a bonny hoose to leeve where the ships sail by. For dadda has gane to the seaside to look for wark. It will be a bonny hoose wi' swings at every door, and blacky men that dance in braw, striped claes, and shows. And Hugh boy shall gang to them a'. We'll howk holes in the sand, and fill the dirt into buckets, and row our girds, Hughie. And we shall paidle in the tide, and splash the bonny water aboon oor heids!"
"Oh, oh," cried the child, "Hugh boy wants to gang noo. He wants to paidle in the bonny water and eat the oranges!"
"Bide ye, bonny man," said Vara, fondling him, "that's a' to be when dadda comes hame."
"Hugh boy is gangin' to the door to look for dadda!" said the boy as he moved off with his bandaged hand clutched to his side.
The baby in the bunk among the old clouts set up a crying, and Cleg went to it, for he was touched to the heart by the voice of dumb things in pain, whether babes or beasts.
But little Gavin (called for a comrade of Sheemus Kavannah's who had been kind to him) was wrinkling all his face into a myriad crinkles. Then, lifting up the tiniest shrill pipe, he cried with the cry of underfed and ill-used childhood – a cry that breaks off sharp in the middle and never attains to the lusty roar of the healthy and well-grown malcontent.
Vara flew to Gavin and, taking the babe in her arms, she hushed him back again to sleep, making a swift gesture of command for silence. She kept her eyes fondly upon the peaked little face, till the wailing ceased, the tiny clenched hand fell back from the puckered face, and the infant dropped again to sleep, clasping the frill of Vara's pinafore with fingers like bird claws.
"I was feared he wad waken an' I had nocht to gie him," she explained, simply.
"God!" said Cleg; "I canna stand this."
And without a word he skimmed up the cellar steps and out. He went straight to his mistress of the paper-shop, and with her he had a loud-voiced and maledictory interview, in which he endeavoured to uplift his week's wage before it was