Seeing that comment annoyed us, he ceased, and we
fell to our bridge game; but more than once his eye
fell on Aggie’s doily, and he muttered something
about the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold.
The problem of Tufik’s future was a pressing
one. Tish called a meeting of the three of us
next morning, and we met at her house. We found
her reading about Syria in the encyclopaedia, while
spread round her on chairs and tables were numbers
of silk kimonos, rolls of crocheted lace, shirt-waist
patterns, and embroidered linens.
Hannah let us in. She looked surly and had a
bandage round her head, a sure sign of trouble—Hannah
always referring a pain in her temper to her ear or
her head or her teeth. She clutched my arm in
the hall and held me back.
“I’m going to poison him!” she said.
“Miss Lizzie, that little snake goes or I go!”
“I’m ashamed of you, Hannah!” I
replied sternly. “If out of the breadth
of her charity Miss Tish wishes to assist a fellow
man—”
Hannah reeled back and freed my arm.
“My God!” she whispered. “You
too!”
I am very fond of Hannah, who has lived with Tish
for many years; but I had small patience with her
that morning.
“I cannot see how it concerns you, anyhow, Hannah,”
I observed severely.
Hannah put her apron to her eyes and sniffled into
it.
“Oh, you can’t, can’t you!”
she wailed. “Don’t I give him half
his meals, with him soft-soapin’ Miss Tish till
she can’t see for suds? Ain’t I fallin’
over him mornin’, noon, and night, and the postman
telling all over the block he’s my steady company—that
snip that’s not eighteen yet? And don’t
I do the washin’? And will you look round
the place and count the things I’ve got to do
up every week? And don’t he talk to me
in that lingo of his, so I don’t know whether
he’s askin’ for a cup of coffee or insultin’
me?”
I patted Hannah on the arm. After all, none of
the exaltation of a good deed upheld Hannah as it
sustained us.
“We are going to help him help himself, Hannah,”
I said kindly. “He hasn’t found himself.
Be gentle with him. Remember he comes from the
land of the Bible.”
“Humph!” said Hannah, who reads the newspapers.
“So does the plague!”
The problem we had set ourselves we worked out that
morning. As Tish said, the boy ought to have
light work, for the Syrians are not a laboring people.
“Their occupation is—er—mainly
pastoral,” she said, with the authority of the
encyclopaedia. “Grazing their herds and
gathering figs and olives. If we knew some one
who needed a shepherd—”
Aggie opposed the shepherd idea, however. As
she said, and with reason, the climate is too rigorous.
“It’s all well enough in Syria,”
she said, “where they have no cold weather;
but he’d take his death of pneumonia here.”
