MRS. BUTTERBY'S LODGINGS.
The bleak blasts of a raw March afternoon swept through the city
streets, cold and piercing, driving the dust in whirlwinds blindingly
into the eyes of all it encountered.
In spite of the cold and the piercing wind, Broadway was not empty--Is
Broadway ever empty, I wonder?--and business-men, buttoned up to the
chin in overcoats, and with caps drawn over their frosty noses, tore
along like comets, to home and dinner; ladies in silks, and velvets, and
furs, swarm down the pave to meet them, and young and old, rich and
poor, jostled and elbowed, and pushed and trod on one another's heels
and toes, as usual in that thronged thoroughfare.
Moving among the ceaseless sea of human life, continually ebbing and
flowing in Broadway, came a young woman, walking rapidly. I say "young
woman" advisedly, for she was not a lady. Her black dress was gray and
dingy, and frayed round the bottom; her black cloth mantle was of the
poorest texture and simplest make, and her black straw bonnet was as
plain and untrimmed as bonnet could be, and who could be a lady in such
array as that? To a good many of the Broadway loungers, who devote their
manly intellect to picking their teeth in front of first-class hotels,
and stare at society going by for a living, her face was well known. It
was a face not likely to pass unnoticed--not at all to be passed in a
crowd; and more than once some of these expensively-got-up loafers had
condescended to follow the young woman with the "deuced fine eyes;" but
the black figure flitted along as if shod with the shoes of swiftness,
and these languid admirers soon gave up the chase in despair.
I don't think she ever was conscious of this attention; she walked
steadfastly on, looking straight before her, never to the right or
left, her shawl drawn closely around her tall, slight figure, as much
alone as if she had been on Peter Wilkins's desert island. To a
home-sick stranger in New York, I wonder if Broadway, at the fashionable
hour, is not the loneliest and dreariest of places? Hundreds of faces,
and not one familiar or friendly countenance among them; not one smile
or glance of recognition to the lonely and heart-weary brother or sister
jostled about in their midst. The men and women who passed might have
been a set of automatons, for all the interest the young person dressed
in shabby mourning appeared to take in them, as she hurried on with that
rapid step and that darkly-sullen face. For I am sorry to say this
heroine of mine (and she is that) wore a look of habitual sullenness
that was almost a scowl, and something fierce lay latent behind the
flashing of those brilliant eyes, and bitter and harsh in the compressed
lips. A passing physiognomist, not over-choice in his phrases, meeting
her once in the street, had carelessly observed to a friend walking with
him, that "there was a spice of the devil in that girl;" and perhaps the
girl herself might have agreed with him, had she heard it.
Down town and west of Broadway, there is a certain unfashionable
locality, known as Minetta Street. The houses are tall and dingy, and
swarm with dirty children and noisy mothers; and it is dark and narrow,
and utterly unknown on Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. Among the tall
and dingy houses--all so much alike that they might have been cast in a
mold--there is one with a white board in the front window of the
ground-floor, bearing, in black letters, the name "Mrs. Butterby," and
beneath this legend, "Lodgings." And in this bleak, windy twilight of
this cold March day, the young woman dressed in black turns into Minetta
Street, and walks into Mrs. Butterby's with the air of one having the
right; for she is one of Mrs. Butterby's lodgers, this young person, and
a lodger of some consequence, not only to the house, but to the whole
street. And for this reason--she has a piano in her room! An old and
battered piano, it is true, for which she only pays four dollars per
month; but still it is a piano, and the wonderful harmonies her fingers
evoke from its yellow keys, transfix Minetta Street with amazement and
delight. She has the best room in Mrs. Butterby's house, the first floor
parlor, front, and there is the faded remains of a Brussels carpet on
the floor and a yellow-painted washstand in the corner, two cane-seated
chairs, with three legs between them, a little table, with an oilcloth
cover, and a sheet-iron stove; and these elegant luxuries all of which
she has for the stipend of three dollars per week. There is a bed, too,
and a small trunk, and the battered little high-backed piano, and there
is almost room to turn round in the space which they leave. There is
nothing like this elegant apartment in all Mrs. Butterby's house, and
the other lodgers look into it with envious and admiring eyes. They are
all young ladies, these lodgers--young factory-ladies, and young ladies
in the dressmaking, and pantmaking, and vestmaking, and capmaking, and
bookbinding lines of business, not to speak of an actress, a real
actress, who performed in a Broadway theater, and whom they look upon
with mingled awe and envy. But they like her better than they do the
first-floor lodger, whom they unite in hating with a cordial hatred that
would have delighted Dr. Johnson. They are all young ladies, but they
stigmatize her as "that young woman," "that stuck-up thing," and would
like to scratch those bright eyes of hers out of her head, though she
never did anything to them in her life.
They knew very little about her, either Mrs. Butterby or her fair
lodgers, although she had been two months in the house, except that her
name was Miss Wade, that she earned her living as an embroideress, and
that she put on a great many unnecessary airs for a New York seamstress.
She embroidered slippers, that were pictures in themselves, on rich
velvets and silks, with floss and Berlin wool, and spangles, and beads;
and cobweb handkerchiefs, that might have been the wonder of a Brussels
lace-maker. She worked for a fashionable Broadway establishment, who
asked fabulous prices for these gems of needlework, and who doled out a
miserable pittance to the pale worker, whose light glimmered far into
the night, and who bent over the glistening fabric in the gray and
dismal dawn. They heard all this in the house, and nothing more; for,
except to the landlady, she had never, scarcely, exchanged a word with a
soul in it--with one exception--she had spoken to the actress, who
occupied the room above her own, and who was nearly as cold and
unsociable as herself. "Birds of a feather," the young ladies said, when
Mrs. Butterby told how Miss Wade had been in Miss Johnston's room (the
actress was Miss Johnston, in every-day life, and Miss St. John on the
bills), sewing spangles and gold braid on Miss Johnston's theatrical
robes, and how Miss Johnston had taken Miss Wade to the theater, and had
made her stay and take tea with her in her own room. No human being of
the "earth earthy," can quite live without any one to speak to; the
heart must turn to some one, let it be ever so proud and self-sustained,
and the actress was made of less coarse and rough clay than the young
factory-ladies, who went dirty and hoopless all the week, and flaunted
in gaudy silks on Sunday.
Up in her own room, Miss Wade took off her bonnet, and sat down to work
with her mantle still on, for the fireless apartment was perishingly
cold. She had sat there for nearly an hour, and the cheerless March
gloaming was falling drearily on Minetta Street, when there was a
shambling footstep on the stairs, a shuffling, slip-shod,
down-at-the-heel tread in the hall, and a rap at her door. Miss Wade,
work in hand, opened it, and saw her portly landlady smiling in the
doorway.
"Miss Johnston's compliments, Miss, and would you please to step up to
her room, she says. Bless my heart! ain't you got no fire on, this
perishing evening?"
"It was too much trouble to light it," Miss Wade said, shutting and
locking her room-door, and going along the dark and dirty hall, up a
dark and dirty staircase, into another hall, darker and dirtier still,
and tapping at the first door she met.
"Come in!" a feminine voice said, and Miss Wade went in accordingly. It
was a smaller chamber than her own, and far less sumptuously furnished,
with no fine fragments of Brussels on the bare floor, no piano in the
corner, no yellow washstand, or oilclothed table. Its one dim window
looked out on that melancholy sight, a New York backyard, and the gray
and eerie dusk stole palely in, and the wild spring wind rattled the
rickety casement. But it had a fire, this poor little room, in a little
ugly black stove, and, sitting in the one chair the apartment boasted
of, crouching over the heat, in a strange and wretched position, was the
room's mistress. A poor, faded, pallid creature, young, but not
youthful, with sharp cheekbones, and sunken eyes. She was wrapped in a
plaid shawl, but she looked miserable and shivery, and crouched so low
over the stove, that she nearly touched it. Sundry gaudy garments, all
tinsel and spangles and glitter, lay on the bed, with two or three wigs
keeping them company, a rouge-pot, and a powder-box. These were her
stage-dresses; but, looking at her, as she sat there, you would as soon
think of seeing a corpse tricked out in that ghostly grandeur as she.
She rose up as her visitor entered, with a pale smile of welcome, and
placed the chair for her. There was a certain quiet grace about her that
stamped her, like Miss Wade herself, God help her! as "one who had seen
better days." But she was far more fragile than the seamstress. Whatever
she had once been, she was nothing but a poor, wasted shadow now.
"Mrs. Butterby said you sent for me," Miss Wade remarked, taking the
chair, and looking with a certain eagerness in her great eyes. "You
spoke to the manager, I suppose?"
Miss Johnston, who had seated herself on a wooden footstool, did not
look up to meet that eager, anxious gaze.
"Yes," she said, "but, I am sorry to say, I have been disappointed. The
company was full, he said, and he wanted no more novices. He would not
have taken me, had it not been at the earnest solicitation of a friend,
and there was no room or need for any more."
The sullen look that had left Miss Wade's face for a moment returned,
and a dark gloom with it. She did not speak; she sat with her brows
drawn into a moody form, staring at the ugly little black stove.
"A friend of mine, though," the actress went on, "who has considerable
influence, has promised to try and get you a situation in some other
theater. I told him you would certainly be successful, and rise rapidly
in the profession. I know you possess all the elements of a splendid
tragic actress."
If we might judge by the darkly-passionate face and fiercely-smoldering
eyes, the young woman who sat so gloomily staring straight before her,
was capable of acting a tragedy in real life, quite as fast as on the
stage. There was a certain recklessness about her, that might break out
at any moment, and which told fate and poverty had goaded her on to
desperation. When she spoke, her words showed she had neither heard nor
heeded the actress's last remark.
"And so goes my last hope," she said, with slow, desperate bitterness;
"the last hope of being anything but a poor, starved, beggarly drudge
all the days of my life! I am a fool to feel disappointed. I might know
well enough by this time, that there is nothing but disappointment for
such a wretch as I!"
The reckless bitterness of this speech jarred painfully on the hearer's
nerves. Miss Johnston looked at her half-pityingly.
"There is no need to despair," she quietly said; "the friend of whom I
have spoken will be successful, and I am certain you will be a great
actress yet. With me it is different. I will never rise above
mediocrity."
"You don't seem to care much," said Miss Wade, looking at her pale,
still face.
"I don't," said the actress, in the same quiet way.
"Have you no ambition at all, then?"
"No!"
She did not say it indifferently, but in a tone of hard endurance. Miss
Wade's large eyes were fixed curiously on her face.
"I think," she said, "you have seen a great deal of trouble, and that it
has crushed the ambition out of you. You were never born to be one of
Mrs. Butterby's lodgers! Pardon me if I am impertinent."
"You are not," the actress said, neither denying nor acknowledging the
charge. "Whatever I once was, I am Mrs. Butterby's lodger now, and a
poor actress, who must sew the spangles on her own dress."
She took off the bed a short pink gauze skirt, and a bunch of tinsel
braid, and began the womanly work of sewing, with her swift fingers.
"Are you to wear that to-night?" asked Miss Wade.
"Yes; it is the dress of a flower-girl."
"What is the play?"
"I forget the name," said the actress, indifferently; "it is a French
vaudeville, written expressly for us. I am Ninon, a flower-girl, with
two or three songs to sing. Will you come?"
"Thank you, I should like to go. It keeps me from thinking for a few
hours, and that in itself is a blessing. What a miserable, worthless
piece of business life is! I think I shall buy twenty cents worth of
laudanum, some of these days, in some apothecary-shop, and put an end to
it altogether."
The jarring, reckless tone had returned, and was painful to hear. The
actress sewed, steadily on, replying not.
"It is well enough for those girls," Miss Wade said; "those rough,
noisy, factory girls, brawny arms, and souls that never rise above a
beau or silk dresses; but for me and for you, who were born ladies--it
is enough to drive us mad! Look at me!" she cried, rising to her feet;
"look at me, Miss Johnston! Do I look like one born for a drudge? Do I
look like the women who fill this house?"
Miss Johnston looked up at the speaker, doing a little private
theatrical tragedy, with her pale, quiet face, unmoved. Perhaps she had
grown so used to tragedy that it had become stale and wearisome to her;
and the regal figure drawn up to its full height, the white face, and
flaring eyes, disturb her no more in her poor room, than Lady Macbeth,
in black velvet, with blood on her hands, did on the theatrical boards.
"No," she said, "you are not at all like the factory-hands, Miss Wade.
I never doubted you were born a lady."
"And a lady, rich and happy, flattered and courted, I should have been
yet, but for the villainy of a man. My curse upon him, whether he be
living or dead."
She began pacing up and down the floor, like any other tragedy-queen.
Miss Johnston, finding it too dark to sew, arose, lit a candle, stood it
on a wooden box that did service for a table, and composedly pursued her
work.
"How was it?" she asked; "is it long ago?"
"Long!" exclaimed Miss Wade; "it seems hundreds of years ago; though I
suppose scarcely seven have really passed since he fled, taking all he
possessed with him, and leaving my mother and I to beg, or starve, or
die, if we pleased. Of all the villains Heaven ever suffered to pollute
this earth, I think Philip Henderson was the worst!"
"Philip Henderson!" Miss Johnston repeated, looking up from her work;
"was that the name of the man who defrauded you?"
"He was my step-father--the villain! My own father I do not
recollect--he died in my infancy, leaving my mother wealthy--the
possessor of half a million nearly. She had married this man Henderson
before I was three years old; and I remember how pleased I was when he
first came, with the little baby-sister he brought me--for he was a
widower with a child not two years old. Shortly after my mother's second
marriage, we left Rochester, where I was born. Mr. Henderson purchased,
with my mother's money, of course, for he had none of his own, a
magnificent place up at Yonkers--a house like a castle, and magnificent
grounds. Everything was in keeping; the furniture, pictures, and plate
superb; a whole retinue of servants; the fastest horses and finest
carriages in the country. It is like a dream of fairy-land to me now to
look back upon. Olly and I (his daughter's name was Olive), as we grew
up, had a governess, and masters in the house, and played in bright silk
dresses among the pastures, and fountains, and graperies of our
palace-like home. The place was filled with company all the summer
through--nothing but balls and soirees, and dressing and dancing, and
fetes champetre; and in the winter, Mr. and Mrs. Henderson came down to
the city, leaving us in charge of the housekeeper and governess. It is a
very pleasant thing, no doubt, spending money as freely as if it were
water; but, unfortunately, even half a million of dollars will not last
forever. Mr. and Mrs. Henderson, and their two daughters--for I passed
as his child, too, and scarcely knew the difference myself--were all the
fashion for nearly ten years, and then the change began to come. I was
only thirteen, and not old enough to understand the stormy scenes
between Henderson and my mother--her passionate reproaches of his folly
and extravagance, his angry recrimination, and the ominous whisperings
of the servants. Suddenly the crash came--Henderson had fled, taking
Olly with him, and the few thousands that yet remained of our princely
fortune. He was over head and ears in debt; the creditors seized
everything--house, furniture, plate, and all--and my mother and I were
penniless. Miss Johnston, the shock killed her. She had always been
frail and delicate, and she never held up her head after. She was buried
before a month passed; and I, at the age of thirteen, was alone in the
world, and a pauper. But a child of that age cannot realize misery as we
can in after-years. I was fully conscious of present discomfort, but of
the future I never thought. My mother had left Yonkers immediately after
the creditors' seizure, too keenly sensitive to remain a beggar where
she had once reigned a queen, and came here to the city. She came here
to an old servant of hers, to whom she had been a kind friend in other
days, and the woman did not forget it. She was comfortable enough with
her husband and two children, and she kept me and sent me to learn the
business I now work at. I remained with her nearly six years, realizing
more and more every day what I had lost in losing wealth. She is dead
now. Her husband is married again and gone to California, and I am here,
the most miserable creature, I believe, in all this great desert of a
city."
She had been walking up and down all the time, this impetuous Miss
Wade, with rapid, excited steps, speaking in a rapid, excited voice, a
fierce light flaring in her large angry eyes. The actress had finished
her work; it lay on her lap now, her quiet hands folded over it, her
quiet eyes following the passionate speaker.
"Wade, I suppose," was her first remark, "was your own father's name.
When did you adopt it?"
"Only when I came here. The name of Henderson had long been odious to
me, but the family I lived with was too accustomed to it to change."
"And have you never heard from this man Henderson or his daughter
since?"
"I have heard of them, which is as good; and, thank God! retribution has
found them out! They are both dead--he committed a forgery, and shot
himself to escape the consequences; and Olly--she was always a
miserable, puling, sickly thing--died in a hospital. They have been made
an example of, thank Heaven! as they deserved to be."
She uttered the impious thanksgiving with a fierce joy that made the
actress recoil. But her mood changed a second after; she stopped in her
walk, the darkly-sullen look settling on her face again, and stared
blankly at the flaring candle, dripping tears of fat over the
candlestick. So long she stood that the actress rose and began folding
up the flower-girl's dresses, preparatory to starting for the theater.
"Are you going?" Miss Wade asked, coming out of her moody reverie.
"Yes, when I have had a cup of tea--it is drawing down stairs at Mrs.
Butterby's fire. Will you not take another?"
"No, thank you; I can't eat. I will wait here while you take it."
There was a newspaper on the bed. Miss Wade took it, and sat down to
read whilst she waited. The actress left the room, returning a moment or
two after, with a small snub-nosed teapot and a plate of buttered toast.
She was standing at a little open pantry pouring out the tea, when she
suddenly laid down the teapot, and turned round to look at her
companion. It was not an exclamation Miss Wade had uttered, it was a
sort of cry; and she was holding the paper before her, staring at it in
blank amaze.
"What is the matter?" Miss Johnston inquired, in her calm voice.
Miss Wade looked up, a sudden and strange flush passing over her
colorless face.
"Nothing," she said, slowly. "That is--I mean I saw the--the death of a
person I knew, in this paper."
She held it up before her face, and sat there while the actress drank
her tea and ate her toast, never moving or stirring. Miss Johnston left
the pantry, put on her bonnet and shawl, and took up her bundle as if to
go.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Wade," she said, "but it is time for us to go."
Miss Wade arose, with the paper still in her hand. Two bright spots, all
unusual there, and which strong excitement alone could bring, burned on
either cheek, and a strange dusky fire shone in her eyes.
"I do not think I will go to the theater to-night, Miss Johnston," she
said. "My head aches. I will take this paper, if you will let me, and
read it in my room for a little while, and then go to bed."
The actress assented, looking at her curiously, and Miss Wade passed
down the dark stairs to her own room. There was a lamp on the table,
which she lit, then she locked the door; and with that same red spot on
each cheek, and that same bright light in each eye, sat down with the
paper to read. But she only read one little paragraph among the
advertisements, and that she read over and over, and over again. The
paper was the Montreal True Witness, some two or three weeks old, and
the paragraph ran thus:
"INFORMATION WANTED.--Of Philip Henderson or his heirs. When last
heard from he was in New York, but is supposed to have gone to
Canada. He or his descendants will hear of something to their great
advantage by applying to John Darcy, Barrister-at-Law, Speckport."