As Mr. Herbert Bly glanced for the first time at the house which was to
be his future abode in San Francisco, he was somewhat startled. In
that early period of feverish civic improvement the street before it
had been repeatedly graded and lowered until the dwelling--originally a
pioneer suburban villa perched upon a slope of Telegraph Hill--now
stood sixty feet above the sidewalk, superposed like some Swiss chalet
on successive galleries built in the sand-hill, and connected by a
half-dozen distinct zigzag flights of wooden staircase. Stimulated,
however, by the thought that the view from the top would be a fine one,
and that existence there would have all the quaint originality of
Robinson Crusoe's tree-dwelling, Mr. Bly began cheerfully to mount the
steps. It should be premised that, although a recently appointed clerk
in a large banking house, Mr. Bly was somewhat youthful and
imaginative, and regarded the ascent as part of that "Excelsior"
climbing pointed out by a great poet as a praiseworthy function of
ambitious youth.
Reaching at last the level of the veranda, he turned to the view. The
distant wooded shore of Contra Costa, the tossing white-caps and
dancing sails of the bay between, and the foreground at his feet of
wharves and piers, with their reed-like jungles of masts and cordage,
made up a bright, if somewhat material, picture. To his right rose the
crest of the hill, historic and memorable as the site of the old
semaphoric telegraph, the tossing of whose gaunt arms formerly thrilled
the citizens with tidings from the sea. Turning to the house, he
recognized the prevailing style of light cottage architecture, although
incongruously confined to narrow building plots and the civic
regularity of a precise street frontage. Thus a dozen other villas,
formerly scattered over the slope, had been laboriously displaced and
moved to the rigorous parade line drawn by the street surveyor, no
matter how irregular and independent their design and structure.
Happily, the few scrub-oaks and low bushes which formed the scant
vegetation of this vast sand dune offered no obstacle and suggested no
incongruity. Beside the house before which Mr. Bly now stood, a
prolific Madeira vine, quickened by the six months' sunshine, had alone
survived the displacement of its foundations, and in its untrimmed
luxuriance half hid the upper veranda from his view.
Still glowing with his exertion, the young man rang the bell and was
admitted into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and
well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him. An open piano, a
sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face
downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant rustle
of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion of refined
domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the homeless and
nomadic Bly. He was still enjoying, in half embarrassment, that vague
and indescribable atmosphere of a refined woman's habitual presence,
when the door opened and the mistress of the house formally presented
herself.
She was a faded but still handsome woman. Yet she wore that peculiar
long, limp, formless house-shawl which in certain phases of Anglo-Saxon
spinster and widowhood assumes the functions of the recluse's veil and
announces the renunciation of worldly vanities and a resigned
indifference to external feminine contour. The most audacious
masculine arm would shrink from clasping that shapeless void in which
the flatness of asceticism or the heavings of passion might alike lie
buried. She had also in some mysterious way imported into the fresh
and pleasant room a certain bombaziny shadow of the past, and a
suggestion of that appalling reminiscence known as "better days."
Though why it should be always represented by ashen memories, or why
better days in the past should be supposed to fix their fitting symbol
in depression in the present, Mr. Bly was too young and too preoccupied
at the moment to determine. He only knew that he was a little
frightened of her, and fixed his gaze with a hopeless fascination on a
letter which she somewhat portentously carried under the shawl, and
which seemed already to have yellowed in its arctic shade.
"Mr. Carstone has written to me that you would call," said Mrs. Brooks
with languid formality. "Mr. Carstone was a valued friend of my late
husband, and I suppose has told you the circumstances--the only
circumstances--which admit of my entertaining his proposition of taking
anybody, even temporarily, under my roof. The absence of my dear son
for six months at Portland, Oregon, enables me to place his room at the
disposal of Mr. Carstone's young protege, who, Mr. Carstone tells me,
and I have every reason to believe, is, if perhaps not so seriously
inclined nor yet a church communicant, still of a character and
reputation not unworthy to follow my dear Tappington in our little
family circle as he has at his desk in the bank."
The sensitive Bly, struggling painfully out of an abstraction as to how
he was ever to offer the weekly rent of his lodgings to such a remote
and respectable person, and also somewhat embarrassed at being appealed
to in the third person, here started and bowed.
"The name of Bly is not unfamiliar to me," continued Mrs. Brooks,
pointing to a chair and sinking resignedly into another, where her
baleful shawl at once assumed the appearance of a dust-cover; "some of
my dearest friends were intimate with the Blys of Philadelphia. They
were a branch of the Maryland Blys of the eastern shore, of whom my
Uncle James married. Perhaps you are distantly related?"
Mrs. Brooks was perfectly aware that her visitor was of unknown Western
origin, and a poor but clever protege of the rich banker; but she was
one of a certain class of American women who, in the midst of a fierce
democracy, are more or less cat-like conservators of family pride and
lineage, and more or less felinely inconsistent and treacherous to
republican principles. Bly, who had just settled in his mind to send
her the rent anonymously--as a weekly valentine--recovered himself and
his spirits in his usual boyish fashion.
"I am afraid, Mrs. Brooks," he said gayly, "I cannot lay claim to any
distinguished relationship, even to that 'Nelly Bly' who, you remember,
'winked her eye when she went to sleep.'" He stopped in consternation.
The terrible conviction flashed upon him that this quotation from a
popular negro-minstrel song could not possibly be remembered by a lady
as refined as his hostess, or even known to her superior son. The
conviction was intensified by Mrs. Brooks rising with a smileless face,
slightly shedding the possible vulgarity with a shake of her shawl, and
remarking that she would show him her son's room, led the way upstairs
to the apartment recently vacated by the perfect Tappington.
Preceded by the same distant flutter of unseen skirts in the passage
which he had first noticed on entering the drawing-room, and which
evidently did not proceed from his companion, whose self-composed
cerements would have repressed any such indecorous agitation, Mr. Bly
stepped timidly into the room. It was a very pretty apartment,
suggesting the same touches of tasteful refinement in its furniture and
appointments, and withal so feminine in its neatness and regularity,
that, conscious of his frontier habits and experience, he felt at once
repulsively incongruous. "I cannot expect, Mr. Bly," said Mrs. Brooks
resignedly, "that you can share my son's extreme sensitiveness to
disorder and irregularity; but I must beg you to avoid as much as
possible disturbing the arrangement of the book-shelves, which, you
observe, comprise his books of serious reference, the Biblical
commentaries, and the sermons which were his habitual study. I must
beg you to exercise the same care in reference to the valuable
offerings from his Sabbath-school scholars which are upon the mantel.
The embroidered book-marker, the gift of the young ladies of his
Bible-class in Dr. Stout's church, is also, you perceive, kept for
ornament and affectionate remembrance. The harmonium--even if you are
not yourself given to sacred song--I trust you will not find in your
way, nor object to my daughter continuing her practice during your
daily absence. Thank you. The door you are looking at leads by a
flight of steps to the side street."
"A very convenient arrangement," said Bly hopefully, who saw a chance
for an occasional unostentatious escape from a too protracted
contemplation of Tappington's perfections. "I mean," he added
hurriedly, "to avoid disturbing you at night."
"I believe my son had neither the necessity nor desire to use it for
that purpose," returned Mrs. Brooks severely; "although he found it
sometimes a convenient short cut to church on Sabbath when he was late."
Bly, who in his boyish sensitiveness to external impressions had by
this time concluded that a life divided between the past perfections of
Tappington and the present renunciations of Mrs. Brooks would be
intolerable, and was again abstractedly inventing some delicate excuse
for withdrawing without committing himself further, was here suddenly
attracted by a repetition of the rustling of the unseen skirt. This
time it was nearer, and this time it seemed to strike even Mrs.
Brooks's remote preoccupation. "My daughter, who is deeply devoted to
her brother," she said, slightly raising her voice, "will take upon
herself the care of looking after Tappington's precious mementoes, and
spare you the trouble. Cherry, dear! this way. This is the young
gentleman spoken of by Mr. Carstone, your papa's friend. My daughter
Cherubina, Mr. Bly."
The fair owner of the rustling skirt, which turned out to be a pretty
French print, had appeared at the doorway. She was a tall, slim
blonde, with a shy, startled manner, as of a penitent nun who was
suffering for some conventual transgression--a resemblance that was
heightened by her short-cut hair, that might have been cropped as if
for punishment. A certain likeness to her mother suggested that she
was qualifying for that saint's ascetic shawl--subject, however, to
rebellious intervals, indicated in the occasional sidelong fires of her
gray eyes. Yet the vague impression that she knew more of the world
than her mother, and that she did not look at all as if her name was
Cherubina, struck Bly in the same momentary glance.
"Mr. Bly is naturally pleased with what he has seen of our dear
Tappington's appointments; and as I gather from Mr. Carstone's letter
that he is anxious to enter at once and make the most of the dear boy's
absence, you will see, my dear Cherry, that Ellen has everything ready
for him?"
Before the unfortunate Bly could explain or protest, the young girl
lifted her gray eyes to his. Whether she had perceived and understood
his perplexity he could not tell; but the swift shy glance was at once
appealing, assuring, and intelligent. She was certainly unlike her
mother and brother. Acting with his usual impulsiveness, he forgot his
previous resolution, and before he left had engaged to begin his
occupation of the room on the following day.
The next afternoon found him installed. Yet, after he had unpacked his
modest possessions and put them away, after he had placed his few books
on the shelves, where they looked glaringly trivial and frivolous
beside the late tenant's severe studies; after he had set out his
scanty treasures in the way of photographs and some curious mementoes
of his wandering life, and then quickly put them back again with a
sudden angry pride at exposing them to the unsympathetic incongruity of
the other ornaments, he, nevertheless, felt ill at ease. He glanced in
vain around the pretty room. It was not the delicately flowered
wall-paper; it was not the white and blue muslin window-curtains
gracefully tied up with blue and white ribbons; it was not the spotless
bed, with its blue and white festooned mosquito-net and flounced
valances, and its medallion portrait of an unknown bishop at the back;
it was not the few tastefully framed engravings of certain cardinal
virtues, "The Rock of Ages," and "The Guardian Angel"; it was not the
casts in relief of "Night" and "Morning"; it was certainly not the cosy
dimity-covered arm-chairs and sofa, nor yet the clean-swept polished
grate with its cheerful fire sparkling against the chill afternoon
sea-fogs without; neither was it the mere feminine suggestion, for that
touched a sympathetic chord in his impulsive nature; nor the religious
and ascetic influence, for he had occupied a monastic cell in a school
of the padres at an old mission, and slept profoundly;--it was none of
those, and yet a part of all. Most habitations retain a cast or shell
of their previous tenant that, fitting tightly or loosely, is still
able to adjust itself to the newcomer; in most occupied apartments
there is still a shadowy suggestion of the owner's individuality; there
was nothing here that fitted Bly--nor was there either, strange to say,
any evidence of the past proprietor in this inhospitality of sensation.
It did not strike him at the time that it was this very LACK of
individuality which made it weird and unreal, that it was strange only
because it was ARTIFICIAL, and that a REAL Tappington had never
inhabited it.
He walked to the window--that never-failing resource of the unquiet
mind--and looked out. He was a little surprised to find, that, owing
to the grading of the house, the scrub-oaks and bushes of the hill were
nearly on the level of his window, as also was the adjoining side
street on which his second door actually gave. Opening this, the sudden
invasion of the sea-fog and the figure of a pedestrian casually passing
along the disused and abandoned pavement not a dozen feet from where he
had been comfortably seated, presented such a striking contrast to the
studious quiet and cosiness of his secluded apartment that he hurriedly
closed the door again with a sense of indiscreet exposure. Returning
to the window, he glanced to the left, and found that he was overlooked
by the side veranda of another villa in the rear, evidently on its way
to take position on the line of the street. Although in actual and
deliberate transit on rollers across the backyard and still occulting a
part of the view, it remained, after the reckless fashion of the
period, inhabited. Certainly, with a door fronting a thoroughfare, and
a neighbor gradually approaching him, he would not feel lonely or lack
excitement.
He drew his arm-chair to the fire and tried to realize the
all-pervading yet evasive Tappington. There was no portrait of him in
the house, and although Mrs. Brooks had said that he "favored" his
sister, Bly had, without knowing why, instinctively resented it. He had
even timidly asked his employer, and had received the vague reply that
he was "good-looking enough," and the practical but discomposing
retort, "What do you want to know for?" As he really did not know why,
the inquiry had dropped. He stared at the monumental crystal ink-stand
half full of ink, yet spotless and free from stains, that stood on the
table, and tried to picture Tappington daintily dipping into it to
thank the fair donors--"daughters of Rebecca." Who were they? and what
sort of man would they naturally feel grateful to?
What was that?
He turned to the window, which had just resounded to a slight tap or
blow, as if something soft had struck it. With an instinctive
suspicion of the propinquity of the adjoining street he rose, but a
single glance from the window satisfied him that no missile would have
reached it from thence. He scanned the low bushes on the level before
him; certainly no one could be hiding there. He lifted his eyes toward
the house on the left; the curtains of the nearest window appeared to
be drawn suddenly at the same moment. Could it have come from there?
Looking down upon the window-ledge, there lay the mysterious missile--a
little misshapen ball. He opened the window and took it up. It was a
small handkerchief tied into a soft knot, and dampened with water to
give it the necessary weight as a projectile.