The Turn of the Tide
Copyright© 2024 by Eleanor H. Porter
Chapter 34
It was on a particularly beautiful morning in June that Margaret and Patty started for New York—so beautiful that Margaret declared it to be a good omen.
“We’ll find them—you’ll see!” she cried.
Little Maggie had been left at the Mill House with the teachers, and for the first time for years Patty found herself care-free, and at liberty to enjoy herself to the full.
“I hain’t had sech a grand time since I was a little girl an’ went ter Mont-Lawn,” she exulted, as the train bore them swiftly toward their destination. “Even when Sam an’ me was married we didn’t stop fur no play-day. We jest worked. An’ say, did ye see how grand Sam was doin’ now?” she broke off jubilantly. “He wa’n’t drunk once last week! Thar couldn’t no one made him do it only you. Seems how I never could thank ye fur all you’ve done,” she added wistfully.
“But you do thank me, Patty, every day of your life,” contended Margaret, brightly. “You thank me by just helping me as you do at the Mill House.”
“Pooh! As if that was anything compared ter what you does fur me,” scoffed Patty. “‘Sides, don’t I git pay—money, fur bein’ matron?”
In New York Margaret went immediately to a quiet, but conveniently located hotel, where the rooms she had engaged were waiting for them. To Patty even this unpretentious hostelry was palatial, as were the service and the dinner in the great dining-room that evening.
“I don’t wonder folks likes ter be rich,” she observed after a silent survey of the merry, well-dressed throng about her. “I s’pose mebbe Mis’ Magoon’d say this was worse than them autymobiles she hates ter see so; an’ it don’t look quite—fair; does it? I wonder now, do ye s’pose any one of ‘em ever thought of—divvyin’ up?”
A dreamy, far-away look came into the blue eyes opposite.
“Perhaps! who knows?” murmured Margaret. “Still, they haven’t ever—crossed the line, perhaps, so they don’t—know.”
“Huh?”
Margaret smiled.
“Nothing, Patty. I only meant that they hadn’t lived in Mrs. Whalen’s kitchen and kept all their wealth in a tin cup.”
“No, they hain’t,” said Patty, her eyes on the sparkle of a diamond on the plump white finger of a woman near by.
Margaret and Patty lost no time the next morning in beginning their search for the twins. There was very little, after all, that Patty knew of her sisters since she had last seen them; but that little was treasured and analyzed and carefully weighed. The twins were at the Whalens’ when last heard from. The Whalens, therefore, must be the first ones to be looked up; and to the Whalens—as represented by the address in Clarabella’s last letter—the searchers proposed immediately to go.
“An’ ter think that you was bein’ looked fur jest like this once,” remarked Patty, as they turned the corner of a narrow, dingy street.
“Poor dear mother! how she must have suffered,” murmured Margaret, her eyes shrinking from the squalor and misery all about them. “I think perhaps never until now did I realize it—quite,” she added softly, her eyes moist with tears.
“Ye see the Whalens ain’t whar they was when you left ‘em in that nice place you got fur ‘em,” began Patty, after a moment, consulting the paper in her hand. “They couldn’t keep that, ‘course; but Clarabella wrote they wa’n’t more’n one or two blocks from the Alley.”
“The Alley! Oh, how I should love to see the Alley!” cried Margaret. “And we will, Patty; we’ll go there surely before we return home. But first we’ll find the Whalens and the twins.”
The Whalens and the twins, however, did not prove to be so easily found. They certainly were not at the address given in Clarabella’s letter. The place was occupied by strangers—people who had never heard the name of Whalen. It took two days of time and innumerable questions to find anybody in the neighborhood, in fact, who had heard the name of Whalen; but at last patience and diligence were rewarded, and early on the third morning Margaret and Patty started out to follow up a clew given them by a woman who had known the Whalens and who remembered them well.
Even this, however, promising as it was, did not lead to immediate success, and it was not until the afternoon of the fifth day that Margaret and Patty toiled up four flights of stairs and found a little bent old woman sitting in a green satin-damask chair that neither Margaret nor Patty could fail to recognize.
“Do I remember ‘Maggie’? ‘Mag of the Alley’?” quavered the old woman excitedly in response to Margaret’s questions. “Sure, an’ of course I do! She was the tirror of the hull place till she was that turned about that she got ter be a blissed angel straight from Hiven. As if I could iver forgit th’ swate face of Mag of the Alley!”
“Oh, but you have,” laughed Margaret, “for I myself am she.”
“Go ‘way wid ye, an’ ye ain’t that now!” cried the old woman, peering over and through her glasses, and finally snatching them off altogether.
“But I am. And this is Mrs. Durgin, who used to be Patty Murphy. Don’t you remember Patty Murphy?”
Mrs. Whalen fell back in her chair.
“Saints of Hiven, an’ is it the both of yez, all growed up ter be sich foine young ladies as ye be? Who’d ‘a’ thought it!”
“It is, and we’ve come to you for help,” rejoined Margaret. “Do you remember Patty Murphy’s sisters, the twins? We are trying to find them, and we thought perhaps you could tell us where they are.”
Mrs. Whalen shook her head.
“I knows ‘em, but I don’t know whar they be now.”
“But you did know,” interposed Patty. “You must ‘a’ known four—five years ago, for my little Maggie was jest born when the twins come ter New York an’ found ye. They wrote how they was livin’ with ye.”
The old woman nodded her head.
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