SOME REFLECTIONS ON COMPARATIVE CHARACTER--OF HOUSES AS WELL AS
MEN--TEMPTATION, AND THE LEGENDS OF THE "LURLEY" AND THE "FROZEN
HAND"--A LUNCH AT TAYLOR'S, AND AN ARRANGEMENT.
In the "great day of final assize," when beneath the one unerring Eye
and Hand all the drosses of life and circumstance shall be melted away
and all the films and disfigurements removed from action and
intention,--there will be many things, we have reason to believe, shown
in a widely different light from that in which human eyes have looked
upon them. Human character will surprise the beholders, if it does not
produce the same effect even upon the subject under examination. Many a
poor wretch who has been stumbling along through life, unfortunate and
apparently guilty, of no seeming use either to himself or the world,
will be found to have filled a place of necessity not suspected--to have
done much good and very little harm--and to have been acting from
motives quite as pure as those that in other hearts have produced such
different effects. Many a "good" man will be stripped so bare of the
garments woven around him by circumstances or his own self-righteousness,
and so many of his best deeds will be proved to have proceeded from
selfish, interested and unholy motives, that every success and every word
of past approbation will be a reproach, and his naked soul will stand
shivering in the chilling breath of God's displeasure.
It is not exactly certain that _houses_ will come to judgment; but if
they do, there will be the same marked difference in the estimation in
which many of them have been held by the community surrounding them, and
the truth of their influence shown in the "sunlight of the eternal
morning." Some miserable tenant-house in Bermondsey or the Swamp,
overcrowded with human rats, its atmosphere so noisome that fever
floated on every breath and the passer-by from Belgravia or Murray Hill
put his perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils to escape the deadly
infection,--may be found to have been far less injurious to the
neighborhood than the corner-house on Park Lane or the double-front of
brown stone within the shadow of Dr. Spring's church on Fifth Avenue.
Within the one the miserable occupants may have festered in body and
rotted in soul--harming only themselves and the physical atmosphere
meanwhile, and victims of the horrible aggregation of poverty in great
cities; while within the other a maelstrom of pleasant dissipation has
been whirling, to which the victims came in their own carriages with
full liveries, the waves as they circled sending up jets of cooling
spray and redolent of perfumes from the flowers of sunny lands--but
continually widening its circle of evil attraction and drawing in those
who thenceforth had no power of resistance against the banded demons of
wine, of play and of lascivious enjoyment, who lurked beneath the
waters, eager for their prey.
The fable of the "Lurline" is the story of human life and temptation;
and yet few of the thousands who have read it in the old German legend
of the "Lurleiberg" or the charming "Bridal of Belmont" of the author of
"Lillian," or who have gazed at it for hours when presented upon the
stage in the shape of "Ondine" or the "Naiad Queen,"--have fully
realized its significance. To most it has been merely a pretty conceit
or an effective spectacle; to the close student it is an absorbing
picture of the enthralment of human energies. Sir Huldebrand of
Kingstettin is a true as well as a valiant knight, and he has a
golden-haired and white-handed ladie-love in the neighboring castle of
the Baron of Steinbrunnen. He has a hope, a love, a faith, a duty; and
on the day when he fares forth from Kingstettin and takes his way to
the river bank, he has mirth as well as all these, for Karl, his merry
servant, is beside him. But the day is hot and sultry, and he dismounts
from his horse and lies down to sleep beside the Lurleiberg. He has
granted himself rest and indulgence. Half in his sleep and half in his
waking thought he sees the stream rippling below the banks and circling
in pleasant eddies by rock and mossy edge, while the water-lilies nestle
down their soft cheeks to the lapping water in the sheltered nooks, and
the willows bend down and kiss the stream with the swaying tips of their
hundred fingers, and little gleams of golden sunshine steal through the
branches and touch the soft ripples here and there with such tints of
transparent light as the pencil of painter never mastered. Oh, how
deliciously sweet and dreamy is that half wakeful feeling of repose and
indulgence! And then the music rises--gentle and almost
undistinguishable at first from the singing ripple of the water--then
clearer and more distinct, but with still a tinkling ripple in every
cadence, and the name of the listener insensibly blended. Flattery has
come with indulgence, and the subtle wine of its intoxication is
mounting to his brain. Then he turns dreamily on his couch of moss, and
looks over the bank into the river. Above the water white hands are
circling and snowy bosoms are gleaming, and in the midst is one form of
matchless rounded beauty, with a face of angelic splendor, her eye-lids
gemmed with the tear-drops of an awakened affection, and her waved brown
hair caressed by the tide as it sweeps backward. All the white hands are
beckoning to him, and all the coral lips are uttering those low musical
words in which his name is blended. The brain of the knight grows
dizzy--chains of which he only feels a pleasure in the slight pressure,
twine around his limbs. Voluptuous enjoyment takes the place of
energy--he is himself no longer. He cannot even laugh--he can only
sigh--Karl has gone chasing some Lurline of his own, far down the
meadow. Ermengarde, who has been for hours leaning out of the high
window at Steinbrunnen, and looking anxiously for her expected lover--is
nothing to him now. His promised aid to Sir Rudolph to-morrow, with helm
on brow and lance in rest, against the invader who threatens the lands
of both with ravage, is nothing to him now. Love and duty are alike
forgotten. The temptation has done its full work through indolence and
indulgence, and the knight is lost. The brown-haired Lurline is worth
all earth and heaven. Let all the rest go, without a sigh or a
regret--be his the murmur of the river, the delicious music embodying
his name, and the beckoning of the white hands towards him! He does not
leap into the water, as some have held: he merely bends nearer to the
verge, then slips down with eager eyes and outstretched hands; the white
arms twine around him; the music sounds for one moment more sweetly but
more sadly than ever, as the waves close above the pair so unholily
wedded; then the ripples sing on and all is quiet beauty as before--calm
and quiet beauty, as if no tomb had closed above the energies of a human
soul.
Sir Huldebrand may come back again, after a time, as the legend is fond
of making him do. He may even marry the golden-haired Ermengarde and
sire children to heir his lands and perpetuate his name. But the knight
is himself a wreck, with all his best energies burnt out in those weird
orgies beneath the water; and his bridal vow is a hollow one, for when
he utters it he hears the shriek of the Lurline blending with the
wedding music, and his nightly couch is to be henceforth a torture of
unrest--his ride by day a mere hopeless fleeing from the ghosts of dead
pleasures.
Something of the same character is that other wild legend which has
grown into song and drama--sprung from the Norse branch of the great
German mind,--that of the "Ice Witch" or the "Frozen Hand." Here the
Viking Harold is less wrecked by temptation than by circumstance; but
the result of the enthralment is the same. The ice of the Pole closes
around him with the same fatality as the waters of the Rhine around his
brother and prototype. Surrounded by the white arms of Hecla in her
palace of ice, he ceases to lament the bride who is awaiting him in the
far South; and he has not even a thought of regret to cast towards his
perished companions and the stout ship that once bore him so proudly,
her brown ribs now bleaching whitely on the Arctic shore. He too
returns, after a long period, but he brings with him the fatal gift of
his Northern bride--_a hand of ice_. He may be strong and brave still,
as he was when he went away; but he is no longer the peerless and envied
warrior. Men look upon him with a ghostly shudder, and women shrink back
from his chilling presence. Not even Freja can thaw away all the ice
that has gathered in his veins. He may chastise the robber Ruric from
the hills, and sleep once more in the warm embrace of Isoldane; but who
knows that at some midnight hour the old curse may not return upon him
and the hand he stretches in love and fondness strike death to the
hearts that are dearest? Not the same--changed, changed--as is every man
who has once yielded to the great temptation of his existence.
All this, which may be purely irrelevant matter, has grown out of a
visit paid by some of the characters in this narration, to a fashionable
restaurant and saloon on Broadway, and the belief that in some of those
houses temptation is lurking in so insidious and deadly a form that they
are doing a thousand times the injury inflicted by the acknowledged
haunts of vice. Special allusion may or may not be made to the gorgeous
but tawdry room in which the three sat down to discuss their _a la mode_
beef, coffee and biscuits. Any one of the fashionable houses to which
ladies habitually resort without male protection, for a noonday lunch
when shopping,--may serve as a type of all the rest; and not one of them
but may be passed with a shudder, by husbands who wish their wives to
remain like Cesar's, not only chaste but above suspicion,--and by
fathers who do not desire the peach-bloom too early rubbed off from the
innocence of their fair daughters.
At this marble table, where the cloth is being so carefully spread by
the white-napkined waiter who has a steaming cluster of dishes on a
salver on the table opposite,--there may be a little party, like that of
our three friends, dropped in on the most proper of errands--that of
merely procuring a bit of lunch in the midst of a day of business,
without going home for it or visiting the table d'hote at a hotel; but
at the next table and the next there is something different. Here sit a
party of three giddy girls, without male protection, innocent enough in
their lives and intentions, but boldly exposing their faces to the rude
gaze of any of the libertine diners-out who may happen to be at the
tables opposite, and returning that gaze, when met, with a smile and a
simper that merely means scorn and self-confidence but may be easily
construed into a less creditable expression. And at this table, only two
removed, discussing a _pate de foix gras_ which may or may not have come
from Strasburg of the Big Goose Livers, and washing down his edibles
with a glass of liqueur that fires the blood like so much molten
lava,--sits a boldfaced man, fashionable in dress and perfumed in hair
and whiskers, whose gaze is that of the evil eye upon the reputation of
any woman, and who has no better occupation than lounging in any place
of public resort, to spy out the beauties of female face and figure and
the weaknesses in the fortifications that surround female virtue. And
here--at one of the opposite row of tables, her cup of coffee and plate
of French trifles in pasty just being set down before her--here is a
sadder spectacle than either. The wife of a wealthy merchant, yet young,
beautiful and attractive, but with a frightened look in her dark eye and
a nervous glancing round at the door every time it opens, which too well
reveals her story to the close observer. She is waiting for her
_lover_--harsh word in that connection, but the true and only one; her
lover, whose acquaintance she may have made through unforbidden glances
in this very room, and whom she has permitted to approach her, slowly
but surely, as the serpent stole upon Eve in Eden, until she has fallen
completely into his power, losing honor, self-respect, everything that a
true wife most values, and probably supporting the wretch in a course of
gambling and dissipation, with money wrung on one pitiable pretext or
other from the grudging hand of her betrayed husband.
It is enough!--let the curtain fall. But oh, heart of man, put up the
prayer that other and holier lips once uttered: "Lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil!" And may not the _houses_ indeed
come into judgment?
We have no concern whatever with the pleasant small-talk which floated
over the little table at Taylor's, from the lips of Tom Leslie and his
two female companions; nor is there any need to pause at this juncture
and remark whether the strange glance of Josephine Harris on being
introduced to the young man on the street, was repeated or returned. The
trio seemed to be a very happy one, Miss Bell Crawford a little starched
at first towards a man who had been flung into her way so ambiguously,
but rattle-pated Joe firing off occasional fusillades of odd sayings,
and Tom, the prince of _preux chevaliers_, falling into the position of
an old acquaintance with marvellous rapidity. Their lunch was nearly
over, when the mischievous face of Joe, who had been making running
comments upon some of the people on the other side of the room,
good-naturedly wicked if not complimentary--lit up with a conceit which
set her hazel-gray eyes laughing away down to the depths of her brain.
At the same moment the quick eyes of Bell Crawford saw that the hand of
the merry girl was rummaging in her pocket, and _her_ face became
anxious. Before the latter could speak, however, the hand of Joe came
out with the treasure she had been seeking--a torn half column, or less,
of the _Herald_. The moment Miss Crawford saw the slip, her anxiety
seemed to be redoubled, and she reached over to Joe, as if to take the
paper, with the words, half-pleading, half-pettish:
"Don't, Joe--pray don't!"
"Oh, but I must!" said the mischievous girl, taking care that her
companion should not reach the slip. "I cannot think of throwing away
such an excellent opportunity. I say, Mr. Leslie, you are not an
unscrupulous destroyer of female innocence--one of those dreadful
fellows we read about in the books, are you?"
"Oh, Joe, I am ashamed of you!" said Bell Crawford, and she lay back in
her chair, very near to a fit of the sulks.
"Really," said Tom Leslie, blushing a little in spite of himself, though
without knowing precisely why--"really, Miss Harris, I am afraid I am
not the best of men, but I hope I do not deserve any such terrible
appellation."
"There, I told you so, Bell, I knew he wasn't!" went on the wild girl,
as if she had been asking a solemn question and receiving a conclusive
answer. "We can trust him--he says we can, and I am going to put him to
the test at once. Suppose, Mr. Leslie, that a couple of distressed
damsels--"
"What a ninny you are making of yourself!" put in Miss Crawford, in a
tone not very far from earnest.
"Suppose that a couple of distressed damsels," Josephine Harris went on,
without heeding her in the least, "about to pass through a gloomy and
desolate wood, on the way to an enchanted castle, should appeal to you
to accompany them and give them the benefit of your courage and
your--yes, your respectability, in the adventure; would you go with
them, even if you were obliged to abandon a game of billiards and
forfeit the smoking of two cigars for that purpose?" and she threw
herself back in her chair, screwed her face into the expression supposed
to belong to a grand inquisitor, and waited for a reply.
"I would do my devoir like a true knight," said Leslie, making a mock
bow over the table, with his hand on his heart, "even if I forfeited
thereby not only two cigars but four and the playing of two whole games
of billiards."
"Generous knight!" said Joe, still preserving her melodramatic tone, "we
trust you--we enlist you into our service, 'for three years or during
the war!' Read!" and she solemnly handed over the slip of paper, on
which Leslie perceived the following advertisement, marked around with
black crayon, and under the general head of "Astrology":--
"THE STARS HAVE SAID IT! MADAME ELISE BOUTELL, from Paris, whom the
stars favor and to whom the secrets of the unknown world are
revealed, may be consulted on any of the great events of life, at No.
-- Prince Street, near the Bowery, every day, between 10 A.M. and 6
P.M. Let ignorance be banished, and let the light of the world
unknown dawn on the darkened minds. Persons who attempt deception in
visiting Madame Boutell, will find all disguise unavailing; but all
confidences are safe, as strict secrecy is observed."
"Well?" added Leslie, looking up inquiringly, after reading the
mysterious announcement.
"Well?" said the mad girl, mimicking him. "Is _that_ all the effect it
produces upon you? Do your knees not shake and does not your hair start
up on end when you think of it, so that your hat--if your hat was not
unfortunately hung upon the hook yonder, would require to be held on by
main force?"
"How _can_ you be so absurd?" suggested Bell, who really feared that the
pronounced behaviour of her friend might draw too much attention to
their table, as there was indeed some danger of its doing.
"Bah!" said Joe, "I _couldn't_ be absurd! I was 'never absurd in my
life,' as Sir Harcourt Courtley says. But Mr. Leslie!--what have I said?
You look pale--ill!" and the face of the young girl tamed instantly to
an expression of genuine alarm, not at all unwarranted by the
circumstances. The face of Tom Leslie had indeed undergone a sudden
change. His usual ruddy cheek seemed ghastly white, his eyes stared
glassily, and there was a quick convulsive shiver running over his frame
which did not escape the notice of either of his two companions. The
kind heart of Josephine Harris at once hit upon a solution for the
otherwise strange spectacle. She had said some awkward word--touched
some hidden and painful chord connected with past suffering or
experience; and she felt like having her tongue extracted at the root
for the commission of such a blunder.
What _was_ the cause of this sudden emotion? The explanation may not be
so difficult to any thoughtful reader of this story as it was to the two
young girls who sought it. Tom Leslie had merely read over the
mendacious advertisement, at first, with the same indifference given to
thousands of corresponding humbugs; and at the first reading he had not
noticed the place at all. At the second reading, his mind took in the
direction: "No. -- Prince Street, near Bowery," and at the same moment
he comprehended the words, "Madame Elise Boutell, _from Paris_." Tom
Leslie was every thing else than a coward; and yet he had shuddered
before at the sight and the memory of the "red woman:" he whitened and
shuddered now. What if another meeting with that mysterious woman was at
hand?--if the scenes of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard were about to be
re-enacted? The French name and the words "from Paris," the place, which
seemed to him undoubtedly the same of his adventure with Harding--all
made up a presumption of identity that was for the moment overwhelming.
But those who show surprise or emotion quickest are not slowest to
recover from its effects. Whatever he felt, nothing more was to be shown
the two ladies. Reaching for a glass of ice-water standing upon the
table, Leslie drank the whole of it off at a draught, and the electric
shock at once restored the tone to his system and brought back the red
blood to his face. With a laugh he said:
"I really beg ten thousand pardons for alarming you, but these slight
attacks are constitutional, and they need not cause the least fear. That
is over, and I am as well as ever. What was it you were saying, Miss
Harris?"
"Thank heaven that you _are_ better!" said the kind-hearted girl. "I was
really for the instant apprehensive that something I had said might have
awakened some painful recollection. I was trying to get you, at that
moment, to understand the terrible significance of this advertisement."
"Well," said Leslie, laughing, "what am I to understand? That you have
been testing the skill of this seeress, or that you are about to do so?"
"There you go!" said Joe Harris. "Now you are on the _other_ side of the
fence! Excuse my similes, but I have not always been cooped up in this
humdrum city--I occasionally pay visits to the country. A moment ago you
grew pale at the name of the mighty Madame Boutell, whose cognomen
sounds a good deal like the Yankee 'doo tell!' I admit; and now you are
laughing at her!" The young girl had by this time recovered from her
good-natured anxiety and regained her habitual vivacity, and she rattled
on to the great edification of her auditors, and happily without
attracting any additional notice from the people at the other tables.
"Yes, sir, Miss Crawford and myself are about to consult this modest
exponent of the mysteries of the stars, though about what we have not
the least idea. _I_ have not, at least; have _you_, Bell?"
"Not the ghost of an idea," was the answer of Miss Crawford.
"Ghost is good, in that connection," rattled on the gay girl. "You see
I have never yet consulted a fortune-teller, and I am afraid I shall
soon be too old to do it to advantage. I lost my faith in Santa Claus, a
good many years ago, and long before my stocking was too big to hang up;
and I cried over the discovery for a fortnight. Suppose I should lose my
faith in fortune-telling before I ever had any experience in that
direction--wouldn't it be dreadful?"
"But why this lady in particular?" asked Leslie, who was at the moment
studying a theme which no man knows more about to-day than was known in
the days of Aristotle--that of chances and coincidences.
"Oh," said Joe, fumbling in her pocket for other slips, and drawing them
out and exhibiting them with great gravity, to the infinite amusement at
least of Leslie. "Oh, I have been preparing myself, and found the best.
Here is a 'Madame R.,' who has 'just arrived in the city and taken a
room at No. 7 Pickle Place.' That would never do, you see. 'Taken a
room' is too suggestive of limited accommodations and no carpet on a
very dirty stair. Then here is another, in which 'Madame Francena
Guessberg' promises to 'give information about absent friends' and to
'show the faces of future husbands.' Most of my friends who are absent I
never wish to hear of again; and as to the husbands, I shall see them
all soon enough, if not too soon."
"Hem!" said Leslie, though scarcely knowing why he made that comment.
"That is all," continued the wild girl. "All the rest are insignificant
or impossible, except--no, here is one who promises to 'call names.' Now
if there is any thing in the world that I don't like except when I do it
myself, it is 'calling names.' And now see Madame Boutell. There is
nothing of the petty or the insignificant about _her_. She has the
'stars' at command, and is about to open the 'unknown world.' She is
_the_ woman, of course! Knows all about the 'great events' of life.
Can't be humbugged, and keeps a secret as a steel-trap holds a rat. And
now, will you go with us, and protect us, and--Mr. Harding said you were
a newspaper man,--will you take down a full, true and circumstantial
account of all that occurs? That is what I have been trying to get at
for this quarter of an hour. Will you go with us?"
"You are going to-day, then?" asked Leslie.
"Miss Harris insisted upon my accompanying her, and I half consented to
do so," said Miss Bell Crawford, apologetically.
"Fiddlestick!" said the merry riddle. "Don't try to beg out of it, Miss
Bell! She sent her carriage home, Mr. Leslie, so that we need not be
seen going there with it; and there we were going, two lovely and
unprotected females, when providence raised up a champion in the person
of our new friend."
"Who hopes yet to be an _old_ friend, and who will go with you, with the
greatest pleasure," said Leslie. "At the same time"--reflecting a
moment--"at the same time I must be as prudent about myself, for certain
reasons, which I will explain some day if you wish it--as Miss Crawford
has been about her carriage. Oblige me by remaining at the table here
and trifling with some creams, chocolate and a few bon-bons, while I
leave you for a few minutes--not more than fifteen or twenty. At the end
of that time I shall be ready to accompany you."
Giving the necessary orders and throwing a bill to the waiter, Tom
Leslie passed rapidly out into the street and walked quite as rapidly up
Broadway, until he turned again down Broome Street, which he had quitted
with Harding but a little while before. Had he _more_ to do with the
Police?