Friend Zoned

It was a queer old house in Bloomsbury, that had been fashionable some two hundred years ago, and had fallen into abject neglect. The hall door was dim for want of paint, and weatherbeaten to a dirty gray; the lower windows were tawdry with vulgar blinds and curtains, and enlivened with green boxes full of a few pining flowers. The drawing-room windows showed a sort of mildewed finery, and then, in melancholy degrees, poverty claimed the upper stories. It had all the features and cast of a London lodging house.

Within, the house carried out the same suggestion of past grandeur and present decay. The hall was wide, dingy, and unfurnished; the staircase of oak was impressive, stained, and dusty.

On the topmost step of the top flight might habitually be seen, toward sunset, a child seated and watching, with head thrust through the banisters. She would sit still until there came the scrape of a latchkey turning in the lock, and the sound of footsteps in the hall. Then the mute little figure would grow full of sudden life; the little feet would run down faster than eye could mark. Arrived in the hall, the child would stop with sudden dignity before a man, robust and tall, and looking up, ever so high, into a bright, young, manly face smiling down upon her, she would lift her tiny forefinger, and some such colloquy would ensue:

"You are late; where have you been, Mr. Standish?"

"At work, Meg-at work all the time."

"You have not been to the parlor of the Dragon?"

"No, Meg; not set my foot inside it."

"You have not been with those horrid whisky-smelling men?"

"Not seen one of them, Meg."

"Then you may come up," the child would say, taking his hand and leading him up.

Mr. William Standish was beginning life as a journalist. He contributed descriptive articles to a London paper, and was correspondent to a colonial journal. His straight-featured countenance expressed energy and decision; his glance betokened a faculty of humorous and rapid observation; closely cropped blond hair covered his shapely head.

The journalist occupied the rooms on the upper story of Mrs. Browne's lodging-house. He was the single member of the nomadic population sheltering under that decaying roof who lived among his household gods. He had made it a stipulation, on taking the rooms, that he should have them unfurnished, and he had banished every trace of the landlady's belongings.

The child was Meg. She went by no other name. When Mrs. Browne answered her lodgers' queries concerning her, she replied vaguely that the child had been left in her charge. Meg went to an over-crowded school in the morning, and did odd jobs of household work in the afternoon. In the intervals she sat on the topmost stair, watching the social eddies of the shabby miniature world breaking down below. She was a silent child, with a mop of dark brown hair and gray eyes, the gaze of which was so sustained as not to be always pleasant to meet. The gravity of her look was apt to make those upon whom it was directed feel foolish. She repelled the patronizing advances of lodgers, and, when compelled to answer, chilled conversation by the appalling straightforwardness of her monosyllabic replies.

Two events had influenced her childhood. One day, when she was about seven years of age, she had suddenly asked the old servant, who from time immemorial had been the sole assistant of Mrs. Browne in discharging her duties toward her lodgers:

"Tilly, had you a mammy?"

"Lor' bless the child!" answered Tilly, almost losing hold of the plate she was washing. "Of course I had."

"Has every child got a mammy?" persisted Meg, with deliberate plainness of speech.

"Of course they have," answered the old woman, utterly bewildered.

"Is madam my mammy?" asked the child, a slight tremor perceptible in the slower and deeper intonation of her voice.

"Madam" was the name by which she had been taught to call Mrs. Browne.

"No!" answered Tilly sharply; "and if you ask any more questions ye'll be put into the dark closet."

The threat, that brought to the child's mind associations of terror, wrought the desired effect of silence. She stood, with her glance unflinchingly directed on Tilly's face, and with a question trembling on her lips, until the old servant turned away and left the kitchen.

Hitherto Meg had never asked a question concerning herself. She had accepted a childhood without kissings and pettings-a snubbed, ignored childhood-with a child's sainted powers of patience and resignation.

That night, as the old woman was composing herself to sleep in the attic that she shared with the child, she was startled by Meg's voice sounding close to her ear, and, turning, she saw the diminutive figure standing near her bed in the moonlight.

"Tilly," she said, "I don't mind your locking me up in the dark closet, if you'll just tell me-is my mammy dead?"

"Yes," said Tilly, taken off her guard.

There was a moment's pause, and an audible sigh.

"I'll never be naughty again, Tilly-never," resumed the child's voice, "if you'll just tell me-what was she like?"

"You'll not ask another question if I tell ye?" replied Tilly after a moment of silent self-debate.

"No, Tilly."

"Never another? Do ye hear?"

"Never, Tilly," repeated the child solemnly.

"And you'll never let madam know as I told you?" said Tilly excitedly, sitting up in her bed.

"Never."

"Then, I don't mind saying, for I thinks as you ought to know, as she was as pretty as a picture as I ever saw, and the gentlest, sweetest, ladiest lady," said Tilly, nodding, as a sharp sob sounded in her throat.

"Lady?" said Meg.

"A lady she was in all her ways, every bit of her; and the man as let her die here all alone was a brute-that he was!" said Tilly, with vehemence.

"What man?" asked the child, in a low voice.

"Go to bed," said Tilly severely, through her sobs.

"Was it my pappy?" said the child, who had seen and heard strange things during her seven-years' life.

"Go to bed," repeated Tilly. "You promised as you'd never ask another question."

"I will not, Tilly," said Meg, turning away, and returning through the moonlight to bed.

The child kept her word, and never alluded to the subject again to Tilly.

A few days later, when she was helping the old servant to tidy the rooms after the departure of some lodgers from the drawing-room floor, Tilly was surprised by the eagerness with which she craved permission to keep a crumpled fashion-plate that she had found among the litter. It represented a simpering young woman in a white ball dress, decked with roses. Permission having been granted her to appropriate the work of art, Meg carried it up to her attic, and hid it away in a box. Had any one cared to observe the child, it would have been remarked that she, who kissed nobody, lavished kisses upon this meaningless creation of a dressmakers' brain; gazed at it, murmured to it, hid it away, and slept with it under her pillow.

The next great event marking Meg's childhood had been the arrival of Mr. William Standish to the lodging-house. It had occurred nearly two years after the talk with Tilly concerning her mother. Meanwhile the old servant had died.

Meg had watched with interest the arrival of the new lodger's properties; and she had listened, fascinated, to his lusty voice, singing to the accompaniment of hammering, and rising above the flurry of settling down.

On the third evening Mr. Standish, who had observed the little figure cowering in the dusk, and had once or twice given to it a friendly nod, invited her to enter. Meg held back a moment, then shyly walked in.

She had a general impression of books and writing materials, pipes, and prints on all sides, and of an atmosphere impregnated with the perfume of tobacco.

After another pause of smileless hesitation, she took the footstool her host drew for her by the fire. At his invitation she told him her name, and gave a succinct account of her general mode of life. She admitted, with monosyllabic brevity, that she liked to hear him sing, and that it would please her if he would sing for her now. She sat entranced and forgetful of her surroundings as he warbled:

"Nellie was a lady-

Last night she died,"

and followed the negro ballad with a spirited rendering of the "Erl King."

At his invitation she renewed her visits. She was tremendously impressed when he told her that he wrote for the papers; and was dumb with amazement when he showed her, in a newspaper, the printed columns of which he was the author.

They had been acquainted about a week, when Meg broke the silence set upon her lips, and spoke to her new friend as she had never spoken to human being before.

Mr. Standish had recited for her the ballad of the ghostly mother who nightly comes to visit the children she has left on earth, and till cock-crow rocks the cradle of her sleeping baby. The young man was astonished at the expression of the child. Her cheeks were pale; she breathed hard; her round opened eyes were fixed upon him.

"I wish mother would come just like that to me," she said abruptly.

"Your mother-is she dead?" he asked gently.

She nodded. "She's dead. I never saw her-never. I'd love to see her just a-coming and standing by my bed. I'd not be a bit frightened."

"But if you have never seen her you would not know she was your mother," he replied, impressed by the passionate assertion of her manner.

"Oh, I'd know her! I'd know her!" said the child, with vivid assurance. "Soon as she'd come in I'd know her. She was a lady."

"A lady!" he repeated. "How do you know? What do you mean?"

"Tilly told me. Tilly's dead," answered Meg with ardor. "She told it to me once before; and I went to see her at the hospital, and she said it again. She said, 'Meg, your mother was a lady-the sweetest, prettiest, ladiest lady'-that's what she said; 'and, Meg, be good for her sake.'" She paused, her eyes continuing to hold his with excited conviction. "That's how I know she was a lady," Meg resumed; "and I know what a lady is. The Misses Grantums down there"-infusing scorn into her voice as she pointed to the floor to indicate she meant lodgers who lived below-"they're not ladies though they've fine dresses; but they have loud voices, and they scold. I go to the corners of the streets. I watch the carriages. I see the ladies in them; and when I see one gentle and a-smiling like an angel, I say mother was like one of these. That's how I'd know what she'd be like. And," she added more slowly, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper and advancing a step, "I have a picture of her. Would you like to see it?"

"I would," he answered, thinking that at last he was approaching a clew to the mystery.