It was the twilight of Christmas evening,--that twilight which always
seems so early, since nobody is ever quite ready for it. The pale
gray of the winter’s sky was scarcely flushed by the low-lying sunset
clouds, though sometimes you could catch a gleam of their scant
brightness as you turned westward.
The streets of New York were crowded, as usual, but everybody seemed
even more than usually in a hurry. The air was intensely cold, and
nipped the noses of those who were late with their Christmas shopping;
but, in spite of it, men and women still jostled each other upon the
sidewalk, or stopped to look at the tempting displays of holiday goods
in the shops. Everybody, it seemed, had some small person at home who
must be made happy to-morrow.
From the window of a large but rusty-looking house on one of the
avenues, two children looked down at the throng below, as they had been
looking all day. They were in the fourth story of the house, and they
could not see into the street very distinctly, but still the movement
and the bustle interested them, and their mother was thankful that they
had it to watch.
She herself was sewing, catching the last glint of the sunset light
for her work, as she had the first ray of the dawning. She had been a
beautiful, high-bred woman; indeed, she was so still, though there was
no one to note the unconscious elegance of her gestures or the graceful
lines of her curving figure and bent head. She was very thin now, and
very poorly clad, but a stranger would have felt that she was a lady,
and wondered how she came in the fourth story of this house,--a great
house, which had been handsome, too, in its day, but which was now
let out to innumerable lodgers, mostly of the decent sort of honest,
hard-working, half-starved poor people. Not with such neighbors had
Mrs. Vanderheyden’s lot been formerly cast, nor for such uses as this
had the old house itself been designed. It had been a stately mansion
in its time, belonging to the estate of a good old Knickerbocker
family, which was quite run out now. But there was one great comfort in
this house: it had been so well built that its thick walls shut out all
alien noises effectually, and made solitude possible even in a tenement
house. Perhaps Mrs. Vanderheyden had thought of this when she chose her
abode there.
There was something in the faded grandeur of the old mansion that
harmonized with the lingering grace of her own faded beauty. Its lofty
walls were wainscoted with carved oak, almost black with time; and any
imaginative person would have been likely to people it with the ghosts
of the beautiful girls whose room no doubt this was in the old days.
There, between those windows, hung, perhaps, their great, gleaming
mirror, and into it they looked, all smiles and blushes and beauty,
when they were ready for their first ball. But Mrs. Vanderheyden’s two
little girls did not think of the other girls who might have lived
there once. They were too young for that, and too hungry. Ethel, the
elder, was only ten; and shy little Annie, beside her, scarcely seven.
They saw a sight, however, from the window at which they stood, that
interested them more than any vision of the past would have done.
The avenue on which they lived was in a transition state. Trade had
come into it and lodging-houses had vulgarized it, and yet there were
some of the rich old residents who still clung to the houses in which
their fathers and mothers had lived and died. There was one such
directly opposite; and to look into the parlor over the way, and see
there all the warmth and brightness and beauty of which they themselves
were deprived, had been one of the chief enjoyments of the little
Vanderheydens ever since they had been in the house. They were all that
Mrs. Vanderheyden had left, these two girls. Wealth was gone, friends
were gone, father and father’s home, husband and husband’s home--hope
itself was gone; but she was not quite alone while she had these two
for whom to struggle--to live or to die, as Heaven would. It was for
their sakes that she had worked from dawning till nightfall, though she
had felt all the time what seemed to her a mortal sickness stealing
over her. Their breakfast and dinner had been only bread, of which she
herself had scarcely tasted; but to-morrow would be Christmas, and
it should go hard with her but she would give them better fare then.
A dozen times during the day one or the other little voice had asked
anxiously,--
“Shall we surely, surely, have dinner to-morrow, because it is
Christmas Day?”