TEN MINUTES AT A COSTUMER'S--HOW TOM LESLIE GREW SUDDENLY OLD--JOE
HARRIS' SPECULATION ON "THOSE EYES"--ANOTHER SURPRISE, AND WHAT
FOLLOWED.
Mr. Tom Leslie's visit was _not_ to the Police headquarters in Broome
Street, albeit he turned down that street from Broadway when he reached
it after leaving the two ladies at Taylor's. He took the other or upper
side of the street, and stopped immediately opposite the Police
building, at a two-story brick house whereon appeared the name of "R.
Williams" in gilt letters, and a little lower, "Ball Costumer," and in
the two first floor windows of which, over a basement set apart for the
use of persons in need of bad servants and servants in search of worse
places--appeared such a collection of distorted human faces that a
general execution by the guillotine seemed to have been going on, with
all the heads hung up against the glass to dry. The ghastly faces were,
in fact, those of papier-mache masks, waiting for customers desirous of
a certain amount of personal disfigurement, whether on the stage or in
the masked ball; and behind one row of them could be seen the glitter of
an imitation coat of mail which looked very much like the real article
at a distance, but would have been of about as much use to keep out
sword-point or lance-head in the tourneys of the olden time, as so much
cobweb or blotting paper.
Within the inner door of the costumer's, which Leslie entered hurriedly,
might have been gathered the spoils of all ages and all kingdoms, taking
tinsel for gold and stuff for brocade. The robes and mantles of queens
hung suspended from the walls, blended here and there with suits of
beaded and fringed Indian leather, odd coats and trousers for
exaggerated Jonathans, and diamonded garments of motley for clowns.
Around on the floor, on two sides of the apartment, lay heaps of
garments of all incongruous descriptions, from the court dress of King
Charles' time to the tow and homespun of the Southern darkey, as if just
tumbled over for examination. A few stage swords and spears and two or
three suits of armor of suspicious likeness to block-tin, occupied one
of the back corners; while suspended from pegs and arranged upon shelves
were false beards, wigs and eyebrows, preposterous noses, Indian
head-dresses of feathers, hats of Italian bandits wreathed with greasy
ribbons, and crowns and coronets of all apparent values, from that
flashing with light which Isabella might have worn when all the gold and
gems of Columbus' new world lay at her disposal, to the thin band of
gold with one gem in the centre of the front, which some virgin princess
might modestly have blushed under on her wedding day. Through the
half-open door leading to the adjoining apartment in the rear, still
other treasures of costume run mad were discoverable; until the thought
was likely to strike the observer that "R. Williams, Costumer," had been
the happy recipient of all the cast-off clothes, hirsute as well as
sartorial, dropped by half a dozen generations ranging from king to
clod-hopper.
A short, dark-whiskered, sallow man came forward as Leslie entered,
addressing him by name, with an inquiry after his wishes.
"I want a disguise," said Leslie--"particularly a disguise of the face,
and one that can deceive the sharpest of eyes."
The costumer looked at his face for a moment. "I can make you up," he
said, "so that your best friend--or what is of more difficulty, the
woman who loved you best or hated you worst--wouldn't know you."
"That is it," said Leslie. "Now be quick, like a good fellow, for I have
only five minutes."
"You will not need to change your pants, I think," said the costumer.
"Throw off your coat--here is one that will button close and hide your
vest, and I think you will find it about your size. Yours is a
gray--this is a dark brown and rather a genteel garment, and will suit
the gray pants."
Leslie threw off his coat and put on the brown substitute, which fitted
him very respectably.
"That is enough in the way of clothes, I should think," remarked the
costumer, "unless you should be dodging a _very_ sharp woman, or one of
Kennedy's men."
"It _is_ a sharp woman I am trying to dodge," said Leslie, with a laugh,
"but I think she will know very little about my clothes. The face--the
face is the thing! Make me up so that you don't know me--so that I won't
know myself--so that my wife, if I had one, would scream for a policeman
if I attempted to kiss her."
"Yes, the face--that is what we are coming to," replied the costumer.
"You have a moustache already. That we cannot very well cut off, I
suppose."
"Not if I know it!" graphically but somewhat inelegantly said Tom, who
had one of his many prides hidden away somewhere in the flowing sweep of
that ornament to the upper lip.
"Then we must gray it!" said the costumer. "No objection to looking a
little older?"
"Make me as old as Dr. Parr or old Galen's head, if you like," was the
answer. "Only be quick, for the sauciest and best-looking girl in New
York is waiting for me."
"To run away and be married? eh?" asked the costumer, as he went to a
shelf and took down a cup of some preparation very like paint, and with
it a brush. "None of my business, though! Hold still, and never mind the
smell. It will be dry in two minutes, and water will not touch it, but
you can clean it out at once with turpentine." He applied the mixture to
Leslie's moustache, the member over it being drawn up considerably at
times as if the bouquet of one of Hackley's summer gutters was rising;
but in less than two minutes, as the costumer had said, the smell
ceased, the mixture was dry, and Tom Leslie had a moustache
grayish-white enough to have belonged to Sulpizio.
"Beautiful!" said the costumer, handing the subject a small mirror from
the wall. "The hair and beard directly. Now for a complexion old enough
to suit such a facial ornament." In a moment, he had a small cup of
brown paint, with a camel's-hair brush, and was operating on Leslie's
forehead and cheeks, artistically throwing in a few wrinkles on the
former and neatly executed crows-feet under the eyes, in water-colors
that dried as soon as applied. Leslie, by the aid of a glass, saw
himself getting old, a little more plainly than most of us recognize
the ravages made on our faces by time.
"By George!" he said. "Stop!--hold on!--don't make those crows-feet any
plainer, or I shall begin to get weak in the back and shaky in the
knees, and you will need to supply me with a cane."
"They will come off easier than the next ones painted there, probably!"
commented the philosophical costumer, as he finished painting up his
human sign. "And now for the finishing stroke!" He stepped to a drawer,
took out a gray full-bottom beard, fitted it neatly to the chin, clasped
the springs back of the ears, added to it a gray wig, made easy-fitting
by the short hair on the head, and once more handed Leslie the glass.
The young man looked. The last vestige of youth had departed, and he
appeared as he might have expected to do thirty years later when he had
touched sixty and gone on downward.
"Capital!" he said--"capital! If any man, or woman, knows me behind this
disguise, there is some reason beyond nature for their doing so.
There--throw me a hat--anything unlike my own--for I have already
remained too long. I will see you again some time this evening." Handing
the costumer a bill, with the air of one who had taken such
accommodations before and knew what they cost, Leslie put on a
respectable looking speckled Leghorn hat brought from the back room,
took one more glance at his metamorphosis in the glass, and passed
hurriedly out into the street and down Broadway towards Taylor's.
To return to that place for a few moments, after Tom Leslie had left it
and before he was again heard from.
Josephine Harris sat for perhaps five minutes after the chocolate was
brought, toying with the spoon and the cup, a little consciously red in
face, and saying never a word--an amount of reticence quite as unusual
for her, as ice in summer. Bell Crawford made two or three remarks, and
she answered them with "Ah!" and "Humph!" till the other pouted a little
sullenly and said no more.
At length the wayward girl shoved aside her cup, stopped nibbling a
bon-bon, planted one elbow on the table, leaned her chin on her hand,
and looked her companion full in the face with a comic earnestness that
was very laughable.
"Bell," she said, "I am gone!"
"Gone?" asked the other. "What do you mean?"
"Sent for--done up--wilted--caved in--and any other descriptive words
that may happen to be in the language!" was the reply.
"What ails you? Are you crazy?" was the not unnatural inquiry of Bell.
"Crazy? No!" answered the wild girl. "I wonder if I ever shall be!" and
for the instant her eyes were very sad, as if some painful thought had
been touched. But the instant after sunshine broke into them again, as
she said, making a motion of her hand towards the door:--
"That's _he_!"
Bell Crawford looked, but did not see any one, and the fact rather added
to her impression that Miss Josey had suddenly taken leave of her
senses. "Who's _he_? I don't see him!" she replied.
"Pshaw! how stupid you are!" said Josey, pettishly. "See here. Let me
tell you something. Do you remember one day, five or six weeks ago, when
I came into your house a little in a hurry, with a bunch of violets for
Dick?"
"Yes," said Bell, "I remember it, by the fact that you nearly pulled off
the bell-handle because the door was not opened quick enough."
"Right," said Joe, as if she had been complimented by the observation.
"That's me. If Betty doesn't answer the bell a little quicker, some of
these times, you will find that piece of silver-plating at a junk-shop,
sold for old iron. Well, do you happen to remember what I told you and
Dick on that occasion?"
"Oh, good gracious, no!" exclaimed Bell provokingly. "Surely you can't
expect me to keep any account of what _you_ say in the course of a
month. Stop, though--I _do_ remember something. You said, I believe,
that coming up Madison Avenue you found the bunch of violets carrying a
small boy--or the other way; and that at the same time you found a
hat--wasn't it a hat?"
"Bah!" said Joe. "You have kept hold of the wrong end of the story, of
course. I said that just as I met the small boy with the violets and
their perfume began to set me crazy and make me think of being out in
the country among the laughing brooks and the singing birds and
the--yes, the cows and the chickens--that just then some one else met
the small boy and the violets. That was the proprietor of the eyes, and
if it had not been for that outrageous hat I should have had a full view
of them. As it was, they nearly spoiled my peace of mind altogether, and
I have been sighing ever since--Heigho!--haven't you heard me sighing
all around in odd corners?"
"What a goose!" was the complimentary reply of Bell. "If you _have_
sighed, the sound was very much like that of loud talking and laughter.
But what has all that to do with to-day, and why were you pointing
towards the door?"
"Why, you ninny," cried Joe, in response to the "goose" compliment just
passed--"that man who has just left us--that man who is coming back in a
moment--is the owner of the eyes; and those eyes are my destiny!"
"Pshaw!" said Bell, "I did not see anything remarkable about the eyes,
or the man."
"Didn't you, now!" said Josephine, with the least bit in the world of
pique in her voice. "Well, that is the fault of _your_ eyes, and not of
_his_. I tell you those eyes are my destiny--I feel it and know it. I
have not seen a pair before in a long while, that looked as if they
could laugh and make love at the same time, and still have a little
lightning in reserve for somebody they hated. Mr. Tom Leslie--well, it
is a rather pretty name, and I think I must take him."
"For shame, Joe!" said Miss Bell, her propriety really shocked at the
idea of a young girl declaring herself, even in jest, in love with a man
who had said nothing to justify the preference.
"Yes, I suppose it is all wrong!" said Joe, between a sigh and a laugh.
"You know I have been doing wrong things all my life, and anything else
would not be natural. Do you remember, Bell," and her dark eyes had an
expression of demure fun in them that was irresistibly droll--"do you
remember how I left all my trunks unlocked and my room door open, at the
Philadelphia hotel when we were stopping there one winter on our way
from Washington,--and how I left my purse on the bureau in my room and
grabbed a gentleman by the arm in the street, accusing him of picking my
pocket?"
"I _do_ remember," said Bell, a little with the air of a very proper
Mentor who was not in the habit of making corresponding blunders. "And I
should think, Joe, that now that you are a little older you would be a
little more careful!"
"Yes, I daresay you do," answered Miss Josey, "but you know that I am
myself and nobody else. I should stagnate and die in a week, if I was
either one of those 'wealthy curled darlings' kept in exact position by
the possession of too many thousands, or so hemmed by more confined
worldly circumstances that I dared not take one step without stopping to
consider the consequences. Hang propriety!--I _hate_ propriety! Now you
have it, and you may eat it with that last wafer!"
"How you do run on!" merely remarked Bell, who probably enjoyed the wild
girl's conversation quite as much as she was capable of enjoying
anything.
"Yes," said Joe, "and I should like to know any reason for stopping, at
least before our impressed beau comes back. Has he gone off to make
arrangements with the fortune-teller, I wonder, so as to play a trick
upon us when we get there?"
"Eh," said Bell, a little startled, "could such a trick be possible!"
"Very possible, my dear!" said Joe. "I'll warrant such things have been
done, and my gentleman looks just mischievous enough. But no--he would
not _dare_ do such a thing, for he could see with half an eye that if he
did I should one day pay him for it!"
"If you ever had a chance!" remarked Bell with some approach to a sneer.
"Oh," said Joe. "Trust me for that! Didn't I just tell you that I had
half made up my mind to take him? and if I should, you know, I should
have plenty of time to bring him into the proper subjection."
"How do you know but he may be married?" asked Bell, who had a little
more forethought than Miss Joe in certain directions.
"Humph!" said Joe, "that _would_ be awkward, especially as I am not
quite ready, yet, for an elopement and the subsequent flattering
paragraphs in the papers, about 'the beautiful and accomplished Miss
J.H.' having left for Europe on the last steamer from Boston, in company
with 'the popular journalist but sad Lothario, Mr. T.L., who has left an
interesting wife and two children to deplore the departure of the
husband and father from the paths of rectitude.'"
"Well, you _are_ incorrigible!" laughed Miss Crawford, fairly carried
away by the irresistible current of the wild girl's humor. "How can you
talk so flippantly of things so deplorable?"
"I scarcely know, myself!" was the answer. "But there is really a dash
of romance about such things, which almost makes them endurable. Poor
Mrs. Brannan made a mess of it, to be sure, coming out at last with a
ruined character and the widow of a man several ranks lower in the army
than the husband from whom she had run away; but was there not something
chivalrous in Wyman coming back at once at the breaking out of the war,
and sending an offer to the man he had injured, to afford him any
satisfaction he might think proper to demand?"
"And was there not something sublimely cutting," asked Bell, "in the
reply of General Brannan that he demanded no satisfaction whatever, as
Colonel Wyman had only relieved him of a woman unworthy of his love or
confidence?"
"Yes, that _was_ a little lowering to the dignity of the woman, if she
had any left," said Joe. "But the Kearney elopement--was not _that_
romantic without any drawback? There was something of the wicked old
Paladin, that rattle-heads like myself cannot help admiring, in the
one-armed man whose other limb slept in an honored grave in Mexico,
invading the charmed circle of New York moneyed-respectability,
carrying off the daughter of one of its first lawyers and an
ex-Collector--then submitting to a divorce, marrying the woman who had
trusted all to his honor, and plunging into the fights of Magenta and
Solferino with the same spirit which had led him into the thick of the
conflicts at Chapultepec and the Garita de Belen. Poor Wyman has already
expiated his errors with his life, but I do hope that Kearney may carry
his remaining arm through this miserable war and live to be so honored
that even his one great fault may be forgotten!"
The young girl's eyes flashed, her cheeks were flushed, and any one who
looked upon her at that moment would have believed her almost brave
enough for an Amazon and more than a little warped in her perceptions of
what constituted the right and the wrong of domestic relations. How
little, meanwhile, they would have known her! Ninety-nine out of one
hundred of the women unwilling to confess that they had ever read a page
of the Wyman or the Kearney scandal, and saying "hush!" and "tut! tut!"
to any one who pretended to make the least defence of either--would have
been found infinitely more approachable for any purpose of actual wrong
or vice, than rattling, out-spoken and irrepressible Joe Harris!
Wyman was dead, as she had said--having expiated, with his life, so much
as could be expiated of all past wrong, and having partially hidden the
memory of his crime by his brave offer of satisfaction to the wronged
husband and his unflinching conduct before the enemies of his country in
battle. But how little she thought, at the moment of speaking, that the
bullet was already billeted for the breast of Kearney, and that he was
to fall, but a few weeks after, a sacrifice to his own rashness and the
incapacity of others! Does war indeed have a mission beyond the national
good or evil for which it is instituted? And are its missiles of death
and the diseases to which its exposures give rise, especially
commissioned to repay past crimes and by-gone errors? Not so,
inevitably!--or many a worthless incapable and many a dishonest trader
in his country's blood and treasure would before this have bitten the
dust,--and Baker, Lyon, Lander, Winthrop and fifty other prominent
martyrs to the cause of the Union would yet have been alive and battling
for the right!
Suddenly, the conversation between Josephine Harris and Bell Crawford
came to a conclusion, and the former sprung to her feet with a
frightened and angry "ough!" while the latter leaned back in her chair
in a state of stupefied vexation not easy to describe. The cause of this
excitement may be briefly given. Both at the same instant discovered a
face thrust down to the level of their own and immediately between them,
with a familiarity most inexcusable in a stranger. Yet the face was
certainly that of an entire stranger--a respectably dressed elderly man,
with full gray hair and beard, and holding a speckled Leghorn hat in his
hand.
"Ough! get out! who are you and what do you want here?" broke out the
excited girl, with a propensity, meanwhile, to repay this second
impudence of the day by such a sound boxing of the ears as would make
the event one to be remembered; while Miss Crawford took a rather more
practical view of the matter, with the single word "Impertinence" and a
supplementary call of "Waiter!"
"Ladies! ladies! what is the matter?" asked the elderly intruder, as he
saw the movements of the two girls, and the waiter hurrying up with his
towel over his arm, in obedience to the call.
"Anything wanted, Miss?" asked the waiter.
"Yes," said Miss Bell Crawford. "Take that man away from this table. He
must be either a wretch or a madman, to intrude in this way where he is
not known or wanted."
"Yes," echoed Joe, remembering the scene in the street, only an hour or
two before--"take him away, and if you can find any one to do it, have
him caned soundly."
"Come, sir, you must go to another table--these ladies are strangers and
complain of you," said the waiter, taking the strange man by the arm,
and disposed to relieve two ladies from impertinence, though not, as
suggested, to lose a customer for the house.
"Why, ladies, this treatment is really very strange!" said the man
complained of, all gravity and surprise. "Just as if I was really a
stranger---just as if--"
But here he was broken in upon by Joe Harris absolutely screaming with
laughter and dropping into her chair as abruptly as she had quitted it
the moment before.
"Well?" queried Bell; and "Well?" though he did not give the query
words, looked the puzzled waiter.
"Oh! oh! oh! that is too good!" broke out the laughing girl. "Oh! oh!
oh! why don't you recognize him, Bell? That is Mr. Leslie!"
Whether Miss Joe had recognized him by the voice, the second time he
spoke, or whether something in the undisguiseable eyes (were her own the
keen eyes of love, already awakened, that saw more clearly than others
could do?) had betrayed him--certain it was that the masquerade was
over, so far as she was concerned, and our friend Tom Leslie stood fully
discovered. The waiter saw that his interference was no longer needed,
and moved away at once; and Bell Crawford, at length fully aware of the
trick, joined less noisily in the laugh which convulsed her friend.
"And what does the masquerade mean?" finally asked the soberer of the
two girls, as they were leaving the saloon,--while the other, who wished
to know much worse, was considerably more ashamed to ask.
"Humph!" answered Tom Leslie. "You have a right to ask, ladies, but if
you will excuse me I should prefer not to answer until the visit is
paid. You will remember that I told you I had a reason something like
your own for leaving the carriage; and if for the present you will
accept the explanation that I wish to test the accuracy of the
fortune-teller without her being at all indebted to any observation of
my face or any possible previous recollection of me, I shall be your
debtor to the extent of a full explanation afterwards, should you think
proper to demand it."
It is not impossible that Joe Harris, who had just been congratulating
herself upon a promenade with a man not only good-looking but
comparatively _young_, may have had her personal objections to the even
temporary substitution of sixty-five or seventy; but if so, her red lip
only pouted a little, and she said nothing more on the subject as the
three took their way up Broadway and down Prince Street to the place
where all the secrets of the past, present and future were to be
revealed.