Our lunch on Christmas Eve was a strange blend of artificiality and genuine exhilaration. After it we had but one purchase to make.
“We are in no hurry,” Helen said. “Let's take a horse-hansom for old sake's sake.” In it we were like boy and girl together until the jeweler's was reached.
There gloom, in spite of us, settled down over our hopes and feelings. Helen walked to the hansom like a gray ghost. Like the whisper of some far-off stranger I heard myself order the driver to take us home.
In the hansom we sat silent, looking straight in front of us at nothing. I stole a glance at Helen and saw a tear in the corner of her eye. I sat choking.
All at once she seized my hand. “Look!” she exclaimed, “Look!”
I looked where she pointed, but discerned nothing to account for her excitement. “What is it?” I queried.
“The old man!” she exclaimed.
“What old man?” I asked bewildered.
“The old man on the puzzle,” she told me. “The old man who was leading Amy.” Then I was sure she was demented. To humor her I asked:
“The old man with the brown coat?”
“Yes,” she said eagerly. “The old man with the long gray hair over his collar.”
“With the walking stick?” I inquired.
“Yes,” she answered. “With the crooked walking stick.”
I saw him too! This was no figment of Helen's imagination. It was absurd of course, but my eagerness caught fire from hers. I credited the absurdity. In what sort of vision it mattered not she had seen an old man like this leading our lost Amy.
I spoke to the driver, pointed out to him the old man, told him to follow him without attracting his attention and offered him anything he asked to keep him in sight.
Helen became possessed with the idea that we should lose sight of the old man in the crowds. Nothing would do but we must get out and follow him on foot. I remonstrated that we were much more likely to lose sight of him that way, and still more likely to attract his notice, which would be worse than losing him. She insisted and I told the man to keep us in view.
A weary walk we had, though most of it was mere strolling after a tottering figure or loitering about shops he entered.
It was near dusk and full time for us to be at home when he began to walk fast. So fast he drew away from us in spite of us. He turned a corner a half a square ahead of us. When we turned into that street he was nowhere to be seen.
Helen was ready to faint with disappointment. With no hope of helping her, but some instinctive idea of postponing the evil moment I urged her to walk on, saying that perhaps we might see him. About the middle of the square I suddenly stood still.
“What is the matter?” Helen asked. “The house!” I said.
“What house?” she queried. “The house in the puzzle picture,” I explained. “The house where I saw Amy at the window.” Of course she had not seen any house on the puzzle, but she caught at the last straw of hope. It was a poor neighborhood of crowded tenements, not quite a slum, yet dirty and unkempt and full of poor folks.
The house door was shut, I could find no sign of any bell. I knocked. No one answered. I tried the door. It was not fastened and we entered a dirty hallway, cold and damp and smelling repulsively. A fat woman stuck her head out of a door and jabbered at us in an unknown tongue. A man with a fez on his greasy black hair came from the back of the hallway and was equally unintelligible.
“Does nobody here speak English?” I asked.
The answer was as incomprehensible as before. I made to go up the stairs.
The man, and the woman, who was now standing before her door, both chattered at once, but neither made any attempt to stop me. They waved vaguely explanatory, deprecating hands towards the blackness of the stairway. We went up.
On the second floor landing we saw just the old man we had been following. He stared at us when I spoke to him.
“Son-in-law,” he said, “son-in-law.”
He called and a door opened. An oldish woman answered him in apparently the same jargon. Behind was a young woman holding a baby.
“What is it?” she asked with a great deal of accent but intelligibly. Three or four children held on by her skirts.
Behind her I saw a little girl in a blue-check dress. Helen screamed.
The people turned out to be refugees from the settlement about the sacked German Mission at Dehkhargan near Tabriz, Christianized Persians, such stupid villagers that they had never thought or had been incapable of reporting their find to the police, so ignorant that they knew nothing of rewards or advertisements, such simple-hearted folk that they had shared their narrow quarters and scanty fare with the unknown waif their grandfather had found wandering alone, after dark, months before.
Amy, when we had leisure to ask questions and hear her experiences, declared they had treated her as they treated their own children. She could give no description of her kidnappers except that the woman had on a hat with roses in it and the man had a little yellow mustache. She could not tell how long they had kept her nor why they had left her to wander in the streets at night.
It needed no common language, far less any legal proof, to convince Amy's hosts that she belonged to us. I had a pocket full of Christmas money, new five and ten dollar gold pieces and bright silver quarters for the servants and children. I filled the old grandfather's hands and plainly overwhelmed him. They all jabbered at us, blessings, if I judged the tone right. I tried to tell the young woman we should see them again in a day or two and I gave her a card to make sure.
I told the cabman to stop the first taxicab he should see empty. In the hansom we hugged Amy alternately and hugged each other.
Once in the taxicab we were home in half an hour; more, much more than half an hour late. Helen whisked Amy in by the servants' door and flew upstairs with her by the back way. I faced a perturbed and anxious parlorful of interrogative relatives and in-laws.
“You'll know before many minutes,” I said, “why we were both out and are in late. Helen will want to surprise you and I'll say nothing to spoil the effect.”
Nothing I could have said would have spoiled the effect because they would not have believed me. As it was Helen came in sooner than I could have thought possible, looking her best and accurately playing the formal hostess with a feeble attempt at a surprise in store.
The dinner was a great success, with much laughter and high spirits, everybody carried away by Helen's sallies and everybody amazed that she could be so gay.
“I cannot understand,” Paul's wife whispered to me, “how she can ever get through the party. It would kill me in her place.”
“It won't kill her,” I said confidently. “You may be sure of that.” The children had arrived to the number of more than thirty and only the inevitably late Amstelhuysens had not come. Helen announced that she would not wait for them.
“The tree is lighted,” she said. “We'll have the doors thrown open and go in.” We were all gathered in the front parlor. The twins panted in at the last instant. The grown-ups were pulling motto-crackers and the children were throwing confetti. The doors opened, the tree filled all the back of the room. The candles blazed and twinkled. And in front of it, in a simple little white dress, with a fairy's wand in her hand, tipped with a silver star, clean, healthy-looking and full of spirits was Amy, the fairy of the hour.