When Miss POTTS and Mr. SIMPSON rejoined Mr. DIBBLE, in the office of
the latter, across the street, it was decided that the flighty young
girl should be made less expensive to her friends by temporary
accommodation in an economical boarding-house, and that the Gospeler,
returning to Bumsteadville, should persuade Miss CAROWTHERS to come and
stay with her until the time for the reopening of the Macassar Female
College.
Subsequently, with his homeless ward upon his arm, the benignant old
lawyer underwent a series of scathing rebuffs from the various
high-strung descendants of better days at whose once luxurious but now
darkened homes he applied for the desired board. Time after time was he
reminded, by unspeakably majestic middle-aged ladies with bass voices,
that when a fine old family loses its former wealth by those
vicissitudes of fortune which bring out the noblest traits of character
and compel the letting-out of a few damp rooms, it is significant of a
weak understanding, or a depraved disrespect of the dignity of
adversity, to expect that such families shall lose money and lower their
hereditary high tone by waiting upon a parcel of young girls. A few
Single Gentlemen desiring all the comforts of a home would not be
considered insulting unless they objected to the butter, and a couple of
married Childless Gentlemen with their wives might be pardoned for
respectfully applying; but the idea of a parcel of young girls! Wherever
he went, the reproach of not being a few Single Gentlemen, or a, couple
of married Childless Gentlemen with their wives, abashed Mr. DIBBLE into
helpless retreat; while FLORA'S increasing guilty consciousness of the
implacable sentiment against her as a parcel of young girls, culminated
at last in tears. Finally, when the miserable lawyer was beginning to
think strongly of the House of the Good Shepherd, or the Orphan Asylum,
as a last resort, it suddenly occurred to him that Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, a
distant widowed aunt of his clerk, Mr. BLADAMS, had been known to live
upon boarders in Bleecker Street; and thither he dragged hastily the
despised object on his arm.
Being a widow without children, and relieved of nearly all the
weaknesses of her sex by the systematic refusal of the opposite sex to
give her any encouragement in them, Mrs. SKAMMERHORN was a relentless
advocate of Woman's Inalienable Rights, and only wished that Man could
just see himself in that contemptible light in which he was distinctly
visible to One who, sooner than be his Legal Slave, would never again
accompany him to the Altar.
"I tell you candidly, DIBBLE," said she, in answer to his application,
"that if you had applied to be taken yourself, I should have said
'Never!' and at once called in the police. Since SKAMMERHORN died
delirious, I have always refused to have his sex in the house, and I
tell you, frankly, that I consider it hardly human. If this girl of
yours, however, and the elderly female whom, you say, she expects to
join her in a few days, will make themselves generally useful about the
house, and try to be companions to me, I can give them the very room
where SKAMMERHORN died."
Perceiving that FLORA turned pale, her guardian whispered to her that
she would not be alone in the room, at any rate; and then respectfully
asked whether the late Mr. SKAMMERHORN had ever been seen around the
house since his death?
"To be frank with you," answered the widow, "I did think that I came
upon him once in the closet, with his back to me, as often I'd seen the
weak creature in life going after a bottle on the top shelf. But it was
only his coat hanging there, with his boots standing below and my muff
hanging over to look like his head."
"You think, then," said Mr. DIBBLE, inquiringly, "that it is such a room
as two ladies could occupy, without awaking at midnight with a strange
sensation and thinking they felt a supernatural presence?"
"Not if the bed was rightly searched beforehand, and all the joints well
peppered with magnetic powder," was the assuring answer.
"Could we see the room, madam?"
"If the shutters were open you could; as they're not;" returned the
widow, not offering to stir; "but ever since SKAMMERHORN, starting up
with a howl, said 'Here he comes again, red-hot!' and tried to jump out
of the window, I've never opened them for any single man, and never
shall. I couldn't bear it, DIBBLE, to see one of your sex in that room
again, and hope you will not insist."
Broken in spirit as he was by preceding humiliations, the old lawyer had
not the heart to contest the point, and it was agreed, that, upon the
arrival of Miss CAROWTHERS from Bumsteadville, she and FLORA should
accept the memorable room in question.
Upon their way back to the hotel, guardian and ward met Mr. BENTHAM,
who, from the moment of becoming a character in their Story, had been
possessed with that mysterious madness for open-air exercise which
afflicted every acquaintance of the late EDWIN DROOD, and now saluted
them in the broiling street and solemnly besought their company for a
long walk. "It has occurred to me," said the Comic Paper man, who had
resumed his black worsted gloves, "that Mr. DIBBLE and Miss POTTS may be
willing to aid me in walking-off some of the darker suicidal
inclinations incident to first-class Humorous Journalism in America.
Reading the 'proof' of an instalment of a comic serial now publishing in
my paper, I contracted such gloom, that a frantic rush into the fresh
air was my only hope of on escape from self-destruction. Let us walk,
if you please."
Led on, in the profoundest melancholy, by this chastened character, Mr.
DIBBLE and the Flowerpot were presently toiling hotly through a
succession of grievous side-streets, and forlorn short-cuts to dismal
ferries; the state of their conductor's spirits inclining him to find a
certain refreshingly solemn joy in the horrors of pedestrianism imposed
by obstructions of merchandise on side-walks, and repeated climbings
over skids extending from store doors to drays. Inspired to an
extraordinary flow of malignant animal spirits by the complexities of
travel incident to the odorous mazes of some hundred odd kegs of salt
mackerel and boxes of brown soap impressively stacked before one very
enterprising Commission house, Mr. BENTHAM lightened the journey with
anecdotes of self-made Commission men who had risen in life by breaking
human legs and city ordinances; and dwelt emotionally upon the scenes in
the city hospitals where ladies and gentlemen were brought in, with
nails from the hoops of sugar-hogsheads sticking into their feet, or
limbs dislocated from too-loftily piled firkins of butter falling upon
them. Through incredible hardships, and amongst astounding complications
of horse-cars, target companies, and barrels of everything, Mr. BENTHAM
also amused his friends with circuits of several of the fine public
markets of New York; explaining to them the relations of the various
miasmatic smells of those quaint edifices with the various devastating
diseases of the day, and expatiating quite eloquently upon the political
corruption involved in the renting of the stalls, and the fine openings
there were for Cholera and Yellow Fever in the Fish and Vegetable
departments. Then, as a last treat, he led his panting companions
through several lively up-hill blocks of drug-mills and tobacco firms,
to where they had a distant view of a tenement house next door to a
kerosene factory, where, as he vivaciously told them, in the event of a
fire, at least one hundred human beings would be slowly done to a turn.
After which all three returned from their walk, firmly convinced that an
unctuous vein of humor had been conscientiously worked, and abstractedly
wishing themselves dead.[1]
The exhilarating effect of the genial Comic Paper man upon FLORA did
not, indeed, pass away, until she and Miss CAROWTHERS were in their
appointed quarters under the roof of Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, whither they went
immediately upon the arrival of the elder spinster from Bumsteadville.
"It could have been wished, my good woman," said Miss CAROWTHERS,
casting a rather disparaging look around the death-chamber of the late
Mr. SKAMMERHORN, "that you had assigned to educated single young ladies,
like ourselves, an apartment less suggestive of Man in his wedded
aspects. The spectacle of a pair of pegged boots sticking out from under
a bed, and a razor and a hone grouped on the mantle-shelf, is not such
as I should desire to encourage in the dormitory of a pupil under my
tuition."
"That's much to be deplored, I'm sure, CAROWTHERS," returned Mrs.
SKAMMERHORN, severely, "and sorry am I that I ever married, on that
particular account. I'd not have done it, if you'd only told me. But,
seeing that I married SKAMMERHORN, and then he died delirious, his
boots and razor must remain, just as he often wished to throw the
former at me in his ravings. Once married is enough, say I; and those
who never were, through having no proposals, must bear with those who
have, and take things as they come."
"There are those, I'd have you know, Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, to whom proposals
have been no inducement," said Miss CAROWTHERS, sharply; "or, if being
made, and then withdrawn, have given our sex opportunities to prove, in
courts of law, that damages can still be got. I'm afraid of no Man, my
good woman, as a person named BLODGETT once learned from a jury; but
boots and razors are not what I would have familiar to the mind of one
who never had a husband to die in raging torments, nor yet has sued for
breach."
"Miss POTTS is but a chicken, I'll admit," retorted Mrs. SKAMMERHORN;
"but you're not such, CAROWTHERS, by many a good year. On the contrary,
quite a hen. Then, you being with her, if the boots and razor make her
think she sees that poor, weak SKAMMERHORN a-ranging round the room,
when in his grave it is his place to be, you've only got to say: 'A fool
you are, and always were,'--as often I, myself, called at him in his
lifetime,--and off he'll go into his tomb again for fear of
broomsticks."
"FLORA, my dear," said Miss CAROWTHERS, turning with dignity to her
pupil, "if I know anything of human nature, the man who has once got
away from here, will stay away. Only single ghosts have attachments for
the houses in which they once lived. So, never mind the boots and razor,
darling; which, after all, if seen by peddlers, or men who come to fix
the gas, might keep us safe from robbers."
"As safe as any man himself, young woman, with pistols under his head
that he would never dare to fire if robbers were no more than cats
rampaging," added Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, enthusiastically. "With nothing but
an old black hat of SKAMMERHORN'S, and walking-cane, kept hanging in the
hall, I haven't lost a spoon by tramps or census takers for six mortal
years. So, make yourselves at home, I beg you both, while I go down and
cook the liver for our dinner. You'll find it tender as a chicken, after
what you've broke your teeth upon in boarding-schools; though
SKAMMERHORN declared it made him bilious in the second year, forgetting
what he'd drank with sugar to his taste, beforehand."
Thus was sweet FLORA POTTS introduced to her new home; where, but for
looking down from her windows at the fashions, making-up hundreds of
bows of ribbons for her neck, and making-over all her dresses, her
woman's mind must have been a blank. What time Miss CAROWTHERS told her
all day how she looked in this or that style of wearing her hair, and
read her to sleep each night with extracts from the pages of cheery
HANNAH MORE. As for the object nearest her young heart, to say that she
was wholly unruffled by it would be inaccurate; but by address she kept
it hidden from all eyes save her own.
[Footnote 1: Ordinary readers, while admiring the heavy humor of this
unexpected open-air episode, may wonder what on earth it has to do with
the the Story; but the cultivated few, understanding the ingenious
mechanics of novel-writing, will appreciate it as a most skilful and
happy device to cover the interval between the hiring of Mrs.
SKAMMERHORN's room, and the occupation thereof by FLORA and her late
teacher--another instance of what our profoundly critical American
journals call "artistic--elaboration." (See corresponding Chapter of
the original English Story.)]