THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 8ERTRAND SMITH - ACRES OF SOOKS PACIFIC AVENUJf NEW YORK A NOVEL. BY EDGAR FAWCETT, Author of "An Ambitious Woman," "A New York Family, "Women Must Weep," "An Heir to Millions," "The House at High Bridge," "A Gentleman of Leisure," etc. F. TENNYSOX XEELY, PUBLISHER . LONDON. XEW YORK. Copyright, 1898, by "F. TENNYSON NEELY, in United States and Great Britain. All Rights Reserved. 5 7 TO HENRY JAMES: With the touch of a Velasquez you have painted many portraits. No living Briton or American ranks above you in your art* And so with reverence for the depth and reach of it, I venture to make you my modest offering, as one to whom your gifts have been for years a delight, and by whom your fame, now strengthening with time, was long ago foretold. E. F. Venice, April, J898. NEW YORK. I. IT was one of those lovely April nights that sometimes bend over New York with the sparkle of winter in their stars and the blanduess of late spring in their large-flow ing breezes. Clock was answering clock throughout the vast town; and each, in big tolls, or low throbs, or far away fairy trebles, counted eleven strokes before it ceased. A j'oung man paused at the gateway of Abingdou Square park. A few people were scattered here and there among the benches, dusky shapes of either sex. A tree or two in the little triangular park sent out plaintive rustles. If you had a turn for analogies you might have thought their boughs were shuddering at all the bitter poverty near by. For Abingdon Square, though far from being a grossly squalid quarter, is still girt with haunts of pinching want. Near it is Bethune Street, and Bank Street, and Horatio Street, and Jane Street, and many another shabby biding-place of those for whom life means only struggle and fear. But the sweet, cool star light romanticized all dinginess. Hudson Street and Eighth Avenue, sweeping to left and right, lost their daytime look of commonness, and the ungainly cars had become merely fire-specked ghosts of themselves, with ghosts of jaded horses to draw them. Now and then rose long, mellow booms from craft on the neighboring river, dying softly away like mystic laments that seemed to de plore something which they could not explain, to ask something of the immense, shadowy, life-packed city which it either could not or would not answer. The young man, though strong of frame, was tired, and he leaned on the old iron railing at the edge of the gateway. 4 NEV7 YORK. Just then a policeman, burly in his official buttons, with an auburn cataract of mustache, came sauntering up. "Can't loaf on the railing like this. Either go in or out." "I I was going in," hesitated the young man. Then, as he was about to pass through the gateway, a hand caught his arm. "Oh, it's you?" said the policeman, with a veiled sneer. "You'd better get home, George Oliver. We don't want no fellers like you loafin' round here." The young man faced the policeman, though not at all defiantly. He was tall and of compact build a figure so clean-limbed, broad-chested, slim of waist, spare of thigh, that his ill-fitting rusty clothes could not hide these phj'sical graces. Beneath his slouched hat was a glimpse of curly brown hair. His face, full of fatigued pallor, had few flaws in its regular moulding. Yet it was not a face that made you think of beauty no doubt half bo- cause of its fleshly thinness and half because of its grave, fagged, troubled look. He had not passed his twenty- fifth year, though then and there he seemed ten years older. "You know me, officer?" he said very quietly. "I thought I'd changed too much for that." "You've changed some yes. But I knowed ye. I've seen ye round here sev'ral times. When did ye get out?" "Three weeks ago." "Sent up for three years, wasn't ye?" "Yes. But good conduct Oh, never mind, though. I'm out now, and much it profits me! Even if work wasn't so hard to get nowadays, I don't suppose I could find anything decent to do. The brand of the jailbird is on me." George Oliver spoke these words in a cold, slow mono tone. But the next moment his dark eyes very dark blue they really were, but black in the lamplight kindled a little as he ran them over the policeman's features, naturally genial, though now puckered into a dogged, suspicious cramp. "Oh, I remember you perfectly. You're Garrety. NEW YORK. 5 You were on this same beat when I was going to the New York College." The other nodded, with haughty solemnity. "I guess that's so. And they used to say your father, 'fore he died, was a kind of a gentleman, one o' the broken-down sort. ' ' "He was. He died when I was seventeen. He came to this country in 1867, from England. He had success in business at first. Then bad health overtook him, and he moved from West Ninth Street, over between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, to lodgings in "West Twelfth Street, a short walk from here. It was a better part of the town then than it is now. My mother's there yet. . I'm living there, too, since I left Sing Sing. She's not in any need ; her wants are small. There's eleven hundred a year in surance money." Garrety measured the speaker with a gaze of incredu lous scorn. George Oliver did not seem in the least offended by it. Ever since his release from prison he had never met any one who knew him and yet treated him at all differently. His pride, in a certain sense, had long ago been deadened; there were times when every manful impulse in his soul struck him as having lost the faintest power of assertion. The libers of his native virility were like some elastic substance that could no longer spring back when pulled, like some ball that failed to rebound. He had been speaking with a certain careless apathy. He did not expect to be believed. Everybody who knew him either doubted what he said in such a way that he guessed distrust or in such a way that distrust was flaunt- ingly manifest. Garrety chose a kind of middle course. " 'Leven hundred dollars a year, eh? That coat ye got on, and them pants, and them shoes, don't show it. You ain't dressed like a tramp, but then you ain't dressed first-class." A strange dignity flashed up in George Oliver, and then quickly faded. It was hardly explainable save per haps by a slight back-throwing of the head, and yet his observer noted it and inly scoffed at it. But the young man's next words were patient, stolid and colorless as before. 6 NEW YORK. "I don't touch a cent of that money (though I could have it all, if I chose) except for the barest necessities washing, car fare, and a few small needs like that. If I did otherwise it would take from my mother's comforts in the end. As it is, she has all that she requires, and a companion to watch her as well. I sleep there and get my meals there, but that's about all. My poor mother never really knows me." "How's that? Never knows ye?" growled Garrety, as if each new word fed his skepticism, and as if he were telling himself that this ex-convict wished to palm off on him "a pack o' lies." George Oliver's garrulity bad something primitive and elementary in its lack of all reserve. This officer of the law was a human being, such fact for the time sufficed him. His social instincts, repressed for three years, and always with gruff contempt as a prime factor of the sub jugation, broke out now with a random, weed-like wildness. At twenty-two, with his education and his sense of dis tinct superiority, he would not have dreamed of mention ing his own affairs, the antecedents of his father, the name of his mother, to an illiterate person like this policeman. But now all had changed. The world, the new world on which he had emerged from prison walls, was made up of two classes those who despised him to the verge of shutting their ears against him altogether, and those who did not despise him enough to let him hear the sound of his own voice. It had been stifled so many months, that voice, in the austere glooms of cell and corridor, under the cold frowns of keepers! He felt a certain vanity in using it; often he did so mechani cally, as an athlete, long debarred from exercise, will loosen or tighten his muscles for the very joy of hearing them creak, of seeing them swell and dwindle. His can dors, as at present, were often irrepressible as they were pathetic and unartificial. He loved his regained free dom, and sometimes had almost hysteric desires to test it. Calamity, that terrible socialist, had taught him scorch ing precepts. He had often hungered, during these three past weeks of liberation, for the vital flesh and blood testimony that he was no longer a caged and driven and dominated slave. NEW YORK. 7 "No," he now went on, "my mother never knows me any more. She lost her mind after my trial and conviction. She thinks I am somebody else. Or, not quite that, but somebody very different from what I really am." "Umph," grunted Garrety. He surveyed the tall, lithe shape, the pallid face, the demeanor of humility and sincerity so clearly mingled, crestfallen yet somehow dignified, wistful yet somehow touched by courage. But concerning all men with records like George Oliver's, he was (and who shall say how unjustly?) a doubter to the bone. He had seen so many of them; he had so often looked straight into the rottenness below their most decorative and enticing plausibilities. He rolled the quid in his plump, florid cheek, spat on the ground with a hint of so treating the late recital of his interlocutor, and brought out, in a throaty, satiric mum ble : "O' course ye were innercent. The likes o' you al ways is!" "Innocent?" said George Oliver. Then, steadily, after a slight silence, he added: "No oh, no. I was guilty. At the trial I wanted to say so, but the lawyers kept me silent. I did all I was accused of doing, and got precisely the punishment I deserved." Garrety stared at him aghast. In all his experience of criminals (and it had been a wide one, dating back into a personal past of the grimiest character) he had never before heard so prompt and frank an admission from any body whom the prison shears and the degrading stripes had marked as their own. NEW YORK. II. A SPECIES of pity and even respect wakened in the cal lous nature of this listening policeman. Perhaps una ware of the softened note or two in his voice, he queried : "So ye got sent up square and just, eh?" "Yes. There might have been a little more mercy shown to my youth. Some people, I believe, thought there was too much. I was only twenty-two years old, you know." "That ivas young, wasn't it?" Garrety could not have told why, instead of muttering this sentence, he did not say something professionally curt and brusque, like "move on, now," or "get along with ye." But a queer spell thralled him one which he would have defined as mere curiosity, scarcely aware of humane sympathies at root of it. "You see," said George Oliver, with a ruminative look that seemed to seek some goal far off beyond one of the policeman's stalwart shoulders, "I got into the company of three men that were each ten years older than I. I'd left the college. I'd been out nearly two years; I gradu ated at about twenty, seventh in a big class. They were fellow-employees in the National Brooklyn Bank. It was my duty to make certain entries. Their names were Gleene and Brigham. But perhaps you remember." "M No. I guess I don't." Garrety stroked his fleshy chin with a hand each finger nail of which was a black arc of dirt. "I may have. But I guess I don't any more." "Gleene and Brigham each got twenty years. You see, they thought they'd be safe if they could have those entries made on two or three of the books in my hand writing my figures. They had erasing acids so it came out in the trial and they were ready to use them on my penmarks the minute I'd consent to write what NEW YORK. 9 they wanted where the acids made blanks. They first tempted me by being nice to me. I was flattered ; I hardly knew what drink was, and they gave me two or three suppers, where I lost my head and behaved silly. It was champagne; I'd seldom touched it before, and I liked it, as most boys do for, after all, twenty-two isn't much past boyhood. It seemed to me that the3 r stood so high at the bank, and were so kind to take a fancy to me like that. I came home, once or twice, befuddled with the wine, to my mother. She scolded me, and almost pxit me to bed poor mother! and yet, when I told her in whose company the thing had happened, and how fine the supper had been, she forgave me, or at least softened in her judgment of the whole folly. It went on like that for several months. I never suspected what they wanted. I never suspected when they had a woman, one evening, at a supper in a private room a woman whom I thought, then, the most charming lady I had ever seen. Gleene introduced her to me as his cousin, a widow, Mrs. Car son. It came out in the trial that her past record was horrible, and that her real name but this doesn't matter. "Well, Mrs. Carson and I got to know one another well. I thought her the sweetest and purest woman on earth. It wasn't love it was a coarser kind of fever. One day, over in Brooklyn, she told me that if she could not get five hundred dollars she would have to leave the city. This agonized me, but I felt I could do nothing. I was so crazed by the feelings she had roused in me that I would have begged my mother for the money if I had not known that she was powerless to give me so large a sum out of her insurance income, paid only by instal ments. Meanwhile Gleene and Brigham pretended not to know that I had ever seen Mrs. Carson after the first night on which I met her. She had slipped her address into my hand under the table, as if with the most im mense secrecy, and later she begged me not to tell her so- called 'cousin' that we had ever afterward crossed one another's paths. Gleene would be very angry, she said, and I believed her what villanous lies did I not believe, in those doomful days! Both Gleene and Brigham stood high at the Brooklyn bank. One was cashier, and 10 NEW YORK. the other was the vice-president's nephew. A little while after Mrs. Carson's imploring request, we three had an other supper together. It was in a private room in the Hoffman House. I met them downstairs by appointment, and drank with them at the bar there, just opposite that beautiful picture of Bouguerau's bathing nymphs. I think, sometimes that if I should see it again, great work of art that it is, I should try in some mad way to tear the canvas from the frame. For it reminded me aided by the fiery little glass of drink I took with them of " Here George Oliver, pausing suddenly, passed a hand once or twice with speed across his forehead. "But never mind that, either. It wasn't till we three were seated together in the gilded little room, and I saw the red wines and the yellow wines in their decanters, and observed that there was no lady present, no particular reason evident why such a feast as this should be spread for just us three, that a real doubt crept into my stupid young head. But, Gleene and Brigham were very shrewd. They talked about their recent successes in "\Yall Street, and said not to me, but as if they were careless whether I listened or no that by a certain turn in stocks that, day they must have made a great deal of money. And I thought of Mrs. Carson and her pleading face and tearful blue eyes, and wondered if either of them would lend me five hundred dollars. Then such a request seemed the height of boldness to me, for how on earth could I repay any sum like that? With my small salaiy it would have taken me months to repay even a hundred. "I forget just how they brought the conversation round to that one main point. The wine caused me to for get. But of course they began by making me realize that I could earn a large amount of money if I did for them a certain thing. I asked them, then and quite hotly and proudly, too if it was any thing wrong. Then I recollect feeling sure it was wrong, but that I would at once re ceive a thousand dollars in cash if I did it. A thousand dollars! The very thought of it set my head swimming more than did their champagne. And at length they told me what it was they wanted rne to do. "I was very angry at first. I longed to fling myself out of the room ; I felt as I would have felt if they had NEW YORK. 11 struck me across the mouth, or kicked me. I seemed to see my mother's face arid to hear her voice, as she called 'George, George come away.' "But another face pushed hers back Mrs. Carson's. I heard them through, and understood just how easy it would all be. Gleene, the cashier, could go into the Brooklyn bank at any hour of the night he wished; the watchman wouldn't dream of preventing him. He had, also, the keys of certain safes. A particular ledger my own was just where he could lay hands upon it. Would I go over there with them that night and make the en tries? They could have made the erasures with their acids, they explained, and made their own false entries afterward. But I would have detected this (or so they feared) and have raised an alarm about it. "Well, I did the vile thing, and before midnight I'd got my wage. But I never saw Mrs. Carson again. When I went to her house I found she had gone no one could tell me anything. It was just that; she had gone. There was my money, but I cursed it as Judas did his thirty silver pieces. I put it into a bank a New York one, not the Brooklyn one, where I was clerk and vowed I would not touch a cent of it till I could get some trace of her. After awhile I ventured to ask Gleene concern ing her. He laughed in my face when I called her his 'cousin.' 'She was no more to me than a street-lamp, ' he said scoffingly. And he said other things, and I felt like killing him when I saw how devilishly he had fooled me. Then I taxed him with the meanness and baseness of his behavior, but he only laughed again in mockery, and dared me to expose either himself or Brigharn, since I was as deep in the mud as they were in the mire. This was true enough. I had restless, tortured feelings for weeks afterward, and drew the money from the New York bank by a hundred or thereabouts at a time, and spent it in vicious ways, trying to lull my inward pangs. I hid it from my mother, but she saw the effects of it in my mode of life, and grieved greatly. It was nearly all spent when the crash came. Gleene and Brigham were arrested while trying to reach Canada. The police got hold of me more easily. . . . After that the Brooklyn 12 NEW YORK. prison mother's awful sorrow, and her harrowing visits then the trial, then Sing Sing, and now " He paused broken!}'. There was not an emotional quiver in his voice. It was all one colorless monotone. His eyes were fixed in a musing stare on the blank dim ness; he now seemed quite to have forgotten the police man's presence, as perhaps he had done quite awhile ago. Garrety gave a husky cough as he stopped speaking, and then slowly reached out a hand and laid it on his arm. "That's the way the thing happened, eh?" George Oliver started at the man's touch. Then he smiled faintly as he caught a certain look in Garrety 's eyes. "My talk runs on like this," he said, with a shade of apology in his voice. "You must excuse me; it's be ing so long shut up, I suppose, and having no one near me, except," here he stopped short, and ended with a slight sigh, "convicts like myself." "If what ye've said is true," said Garrety, "ye'dnever ought to been a convict. And I believe it is true, every word of it." His hand dropped from George Oliver's arm, and the latter instantly caught it. He strained it for a moment between tense fingers. His dark-blue eyes were shining moistly. "Thank you, ihank you," he said. "See here," proposed Garrety, the next minute, with a sidelong jerk of his head. "Ye look tired, and a drop o' something wouldn't hurt ye. I know a place not far off where we C9uld have a drink together in the family entrance, if it happens to be empty, and no blabbin' from the barkeepers, neither. Come along." As Garrety turned, the other plucked him lightly by one blue-braided sleeve. "Thank you again, officer, but I think I won't." His tones were very firm. "While I'm like this looking round for some sort of honest work, and terribly anxious in my mind, I'm sure it's best I should keep from all drink. I'm sure it's best unless I give right up altogether, you know, and drop down into the gutter itself that I shouldn't let that sort of danger ous comfort have its wa>- with me. I'll go straight home, now. Thank God I've got a bed there and cleanness and NEW YORK. 13 comfort beside. If it wasn't for this one brace to keep me from going all to pieces, I believe I'd throw up the whole game in no time, and either put a bullet through my brain or else get myself back to the hole I've just quitted. And drink, nowadays, would make me do one thing or the other, there's not the ghost of a doubt!" Soon Mr. Garrety stalked slowly and martially away. If he had wanted any fresh proof that the young man was a martyr, the fact of his having refused "a drink" would have clinched conviction. He did not move in a circle of society where alcoholic potations are often de clined when proffered. He went to the saloon of which he had just darkly hinted, and swallowed there a clan destine tumblerful of raw whisky. His sympathies, made inactive by experience, and lying under deep crusts of cynicism, had nevertheless been strongly moved. He thought George Oliver's case a fiercely cruel one. It did not occur to him, however, that the object of his pity was not by any means so great a criminal as himself. Now a roundsman, after twelve years' service on the "force," he forgot to consider that he was receiving from this very liquor seller whose draughts of whisky were always gratuitous a regular monthly sum as security against arrest for continuous breaking of the law both on week days and Sundays. He also forgot other payments from other liquor-sellers, and many a banknote of hush-money that harlotry had slipped into his hand. He was an evil, this Garrety, that but yesterday flourished in poisonous hardihood, and that to-day, as they tell us, has been dur ably exercised. At least until his return falsifies this affirmation, let us gratefully endeavor to believe it. Meanwhile George Oliver had passed homeward through the April starlight. He entered with his latch key the small brick house in West Twelfth Street, climbed two pairs of dark stairs, and opened the door of his neat little bedroom. There were four rooms on the floor. His mother had lived here for years, though several times the proprietor had changed. In all respects it was a second-rate boarding-house, exclusive of this one suite, for which Mrs. Oliver paid a moderate though very reg ular weekly amount. Her rnealb were served her by the 14 NEW YORK. landlady, and those of her faithful nurse as well. When George had come back from his long absence a new ar rangement had been made regarding his meals also, and he had been given his former quarters at the rear of the house. . Beyond was a sort of sitting and dining room, next the sleeping apartment of the "companion," and finally the front room, where Mrs. Oliver spent most of her time. "Mr. George!" The young man, with a despondent droop of his frame, had just seated himself, after lighting the gas, and was gazing at his small, white, cleanly bed. It was always a grateful sight, nowadays, that bed, though it evoked dreary memories of another, hard and harsh as the life he had lately left. "Mr. George!" He had not heard the first summons, perhaps because it was so gentle, like the little knock that went with it or perhaps because the roar from an onsweeping train of the neighboring elevated deadened it. He went at once and opened the door that led into the next room. "You, Lydia?" "Yes." "How is mother? I was just going to find you and ask." "After you went away, this evening, one of her attacks came on. It's very bad, this time." "Bad? How do you mean?" "Oh, you know how I mean! She wouldn't let me put her to bed. She insisted on waiting up for you. She's waiting now. I've had to dress her, and get the crown, and the jewels, and all that!" "Oh, yes, I see!" George covered his face, and for an instant the tremors that with a woman would have been tears, jarred his body. Lydia laid her hand on his shoulder. As it slid down his arm George seized and pressed it. His underlip shook as he spoke. "Good God, Lydia! To think that I made her like this!" "No, no," urged the other in a quick, soothing, fluty NEW YORK. 15 tone. "You can't be sure of that! Remember wh:it I told you the doctors have said when I asked them. Each one seemed to think the same that in any case it would have come upon her. And remember, we know that her mother and one of her aunts died insane." "But ihisjorm of insanity !" George shook his head mournfully incredulous. Then, as if pulling himself to gether: "I'll go in, Lydia. There's no other way, is there?" "Oh, no other. I could do nothing with her till dawn, if you didn't. She'd keep awake till sheer exhaustion, made her drop asleep and that wouldn't be for hours yet." "Very well." "You're tired," said Lydia, with soft sympathy. "Oh, no more than usual. I've been trudging around all day, looking for something to do. They all want rec ommendations, of course even the 'longshoremen's em ployers. And I can't give them mine. I've tried that too often. It always means one answer the door. Come, now, we'll go in." "One moment, please," said Lydia. "I oughtn't, perhaps, to tell you now, but it's better you should be prepared if anything happens suddenly." "Happens suddenly?" George repeated, while their eyes met. 16 NEW YORK. ni. LYDIA Lad beautiful eyes, large, and of starry and vel vety blackness. She was a mulatto, and about four years older than her mistress' son. Her features were not per fect, but the African coarseness was utterly absent in them, and the delicate carmine-tinted mouth, with its glimpses of dazzling teeth, rivaled in charm the curled thinness of nostril. At times her coloring was a perfection of damask richness, though usualb' there stayed but a dim hint of pink on the rounded olive of either cheek. But what gave her face its choicest attraction could not easily be put into words. One might safely call it, however, the intelligence of an awakened and enlightened soul. George Oliver's father, like many Englishmen, had been totally without prejudice against the negro race. Long ago a certain curiosity had spurred him, in his more prosperous days, to make trial of a full cultivating influence upon one of her degraded class. His wife, agreeable to the plan, stipulated that their adopted child should be a girl, and Lydia, a foundling, was brought to live with them while yet but two years old. Her edu cation cost Robert Oliver more money than he could spare; for he did not trust to the public schools when their doors began to admit negro children, but caused the girl to receive private tuition, in which music and French were comprised. Her career as a scholar was odd. At first she showed discouraging dullness; then some barrier seemed to break away in her brain, and she astonished by her deft aptitudes. "Perhaps her white blood is as serting itself," Robert Oliver would now say, and a little regretfully ; for he had desired to produce a living disclosure of the refinement and superiority which could be wrought in one of purely African blood. But his wife, though sympathetic with his designed experiment, had been charmed by the child's yellowish baby tintings, and NEW YORK. 1? had shrunk from the adoption of a ward whose personality might develop into thick-lipped and squat-nosed ugli ness. As it was, Lydia sweetly rewarded her benefactor, some time before his death, by appealing to him as a far more attractive young creature than he had expected to make her. She had grown into a dark, tall, slender damsel, with all the graces and felicities of deportment and con versation which many of her white sisters, having had equal advantages of training, conspicuously lacked. Her musical talent was marked, and her mastery of the piano distinct if far from thorough. She had a sweet contralto voice, and sang with taste and finish many songs which Mrs. Oliver who had once been an almost brilliant vocalist rejoiced to hear. This lady loved her with so maternal a fondness that she might easily have forgotten her racial stamp if the outward world had not so constantly reminded her of it. George always had treated her as a sister, and her form of address to him as "Mr. George" had latterly been quite of her own choos ing. As lie grew older, and during the years that im mediately followed his father's death, he found himself pronouncing the girl's mode of bringing up "& sad mis take. Others had already so pronounced it. Albert Josselyn, a cousin of the Olivers, quarreled with George's father because he invited himself and wife to dine one day, and had Lydia seated at table. The cousins never afterward spoke, but Mrs. Josselyn was much more indignant than her husband. She had been a dressmaker before her marriage, and a rather obscure one, but she was now the wife of a dry goods merchant who cleared his ten thousand a year. "I'm told," she bristled, "that a brother of mine is a rough-and-tumble miner, somewhere out in the wild west. But even if he eats with his bowie-knife and wears his boots outside his pants, Albert, I don't believe he'd stand having a negress dine at the same table with him." Other acquaintances of the Olivers, much more thought ful and dispassionate, resolved their verdict into this : "Lydia is just what her guardian calls her, an experi ment. And as such, she is a failure. With all her fine, 1$ NEW YORK. and pretty ladyhood she might much better have beeri taught a little arithmetic, spelling and geography, and left the normal associate of her own people. What, in heaven's name, have they now made of her? A kind of social monstrosity. If Robert Oliver could settle any fixed income on her after his death, it would be different. But when he and his wife die, and the hedging-in proc ess by which they have reared her is ended, how can her life be anything but a misery? Granted that they have made her a lady, and a very charming one. What self- rospecting white man would marry her? Is she fit to be a lady's maid? It's doubtful, for she's never been taught to humble herself in the least. As a common servant, too, she would be almost ridiculous. But provided she remains an honest woman she must put up with the most hateful stings and humiliations. Oh, it's all one of the results of forcing civilization! You can't do that kind of thing without committing wretched blunders. No doubt the poor girl is beginning to feel herself, what a lonely, pitiable person they've turned her into." Lydia, of late, had indeed been forced to look at life with all the lines of it sternly hardening. But the sor row of Mr. Oliver's death had first taken her mercifully out of herself, and then, not so long afterward, had come the worse calamity of George's ruin. This, too, had been simultaneous, or nearly so, with his mother's mental wreck. The last three 3 r earshad been to her an incessant self-surrender. There were times when she almost felt thankful for the vigilance and care-taking demanded of all her days. They kept her from brooding and repining from realizing into how strange an anomaly fate had fashioned her. "It's something," she now said to George, "that may happen very suddenly, and at any time. And, as I've told you, it's better you should be prepared. You know how quiet and docile your mother is, for days at a time?" "Yes." "But Dr. Win gate, who "was hero to-day, spoke quite frankly with me. He says that all the while her system is growing weaker, and that the end of paresis is nearly always a sudden paralytic stroke. She has paresis, you NEW YORK. 19 know, and in her it has taken a strange form, though one that is quite similar, after all, to the ordinary patient's great hopefulness of the future and belief in great pros perity, both present and to come." George was silent for awhile. "Poor Lydia!" ho at length said. "If that should happen 3'ou will be left without support of any kind. The insurance money goes with mother's life. I know you you know this. But have you thought of it?" "Yes." "And /should have stood between you and poverty penury! I would have done so, with all my will, and with all my affection and fondness, born in our dear old playfellow days, and fostered through the years that fol lowed! I would have done so, Lydia, if I hadn't turned out the infernal scamp and rogue "Hush, George," she said, grasping his hand for a moment with her slender fingers, and calling him by the unprefixed name of earlier times. And just then they both heard a distant voice. "Lydia!" it called, "Lady Lydia!" "Hear! Lady Lydia! Oh, I have an immense rank to night." The next words came after a strangled sob. "I'm Heiress Presumptive to the throne, in case you die childless. Come." She turned, glancing at him across one shoulder with her dusk, plaintive eyes. George waited a few seconds, after she had quitted the room, as though trying to nerve himself for what he must meet. Then he went forward into the presence of his poor demented mother. "My dear prince! I felt sure you would be late to night. Lady Lydia and I both told ourselves that you would surely be late. There is my hand to kiss. You see, I have on my crown and my robes of office, in which to welcome you. " "Yes, mother." Mrs. Oliver laughed. The pathos of her lunacy was infinite. George and Lydia stole glances at one another. Extremes meet; in their heart-wrung pity each, perhaps, felt the saturnine humor of this distraught woman's de lusion, and checked the hysteric impulse to echo her ludicrous yet awful mirth, 20 NEW YORK. "You may think it foolish in an invalid like myself to employ this almost idle piece of ceremony. But I could not go myself with you to the grand ball given by that grim Duke of Sing Sing" (here George and Lydia ex changed a quick look), "who is, by the way, one of my least lovable courtiers. Yet I have thought it best, and Lady Lydia has thought it best, for me to assume these robes" (they were the flimsiest of pink paper-muslin fineries), "and this crown, which you will recognize as one of our most precious royal belongings, in order to greet you on your return. " Mrs. Oliver had thus far spoken in a standing posture, but she now sank feebly back into her armchair. When George's crime first broke upon her there were only faint gray tinges in her hair; now it was white as snow. She had one of those fragile, windflower sorts of faces that grief always sags and furrows and blanches with such ghastly effect. Her tawdry crown of gilt paper made wofuller the ravaged face beneath it. A necklace and girdle of big, gaudy stage jewels flared from her thin throat and waist. "I see you are dressed to meet me, mother, " said George, as if dragging out each word. "It is very kind. " "Kind! Hear him, Lady Lydia! My boy, it is court etiquette! Once a queen, always a queen." And the crazed woman gave a laugh meant for one of amusement, perhaps, yet cracked and wailful, and dying in a short gasp. "His grace of Sing Sing," she went on, with the sud den petulant frown of the insane glooming her features and causing her lips fiercely to purse themselves, "owes us an apology for having kept you so long in his castle, my son. You were rash to visit him, even though this great ball ia evidently given with a wish to propitiate us for past misconduct. He is, when all is said, a rebellious fellow, and before long we shall find means to level his audacious pride. Oh, and we can find means, too, never fear! Long ago secret dispatches were brought us Ladj r Lydia has them telling of his efforts to head a revolt against our throne." "Your medicine," said Lydia, drawing near the self- NEW YORK. 21 believed monarch with a tumbler of liquid and a spoon. In these acute attacks the doctor had ordered a certain drug, to be taken at somewhat brief intervals apart. Mrs. Oliver drew herself up proudly in her chair. She stared for a moment at Lydia, with glazed and haggard eyes. "Taste it yourself first," she enjoined, with great haughtiness. "It is court etiquette." Lydia drew back the glass, and made a feint of tasting its contents. George stood watching, with a sick feeling of -horror. He could never get used to these eerie mani festations; they were pregnant for him with a mighty re proach. But for his breaking away from the loving and noble precepts of this same shattered brain, it might still have stayed unharmed through many peaceful years! Oh, the agony of such overthrow! And he had caused it all! He was the viper that had stung so cruellj' his was the poison that had wrought such heart-breaking wreck! Mrs. Oliver closed her eyes, soon after this, and let her head fall softly against the back of her chair. "Is she asleep?" George whispered to Lydia. "It may be. These attacks nearly always end in ex haustion." "I'll steal away, then," said George. His face was glistening with sweat-drops. "It's all such torture to me, Lydia you know why " And then Mrs. Oliver reopened her eyes and regathered herself into the former forlornly dignified pose. "We had forgotten to tell you, George, that we have lately discussed with Lady Lydia, our beloved ward, the question of our succession. You, of course, are our lineal heir. But since there is a chance of j*our not marrj'ing, and also a chance that you may marry without having issue, we have determined to make Lady Lydia heir presumptive to our throne. Long ago, if you re member, it was decided that the sovereign had power, in case the direct line became extinct, to appoint from among his subjects one whom he deemed worthy to wear the crown." And now, again rising, the speaker moved a few paces toward Lydia with steps that plainly tottered. She lifted both hands, and took from her white head the brittle bauble of pasteboard. Her motions were full of 22 NEW YORK. a delicate majesty. At the same moment a new slant of light on. her hollowed cheeks showed George that they were strangely, spectrally pale. "Bow your head, my dear, "she said to Lydia, who obeyed her. Then she placed the gilt thing on the girl's dark ripples of silky hair. In the moderate light of the room it became Lydia's swart beauty wonderfully, while she looked with a pained, deploring smile at George. "In the presence of my actual heir, Lady Lydia, I name you heiress presumptive to our realm, touching for this brief while your brow, my dear, with what is per haps the most sacred relic of our august house." The afflicted lady drew backward now, and clasped her hands in ardent admiration. Then, turning to her son, she continued; "Look, prince, is she not lovely? Why should you not make her, at some day, when I am laid with our forefathers, your consort queen. Surely a marriage like this " "Oh, no, no!" struck in Lj'dia, flushing with a sudden unconquerable shame, and impetuousl}' tearing the frail toy from her head. But hardly had her lips framed one cry when another, full of fright, left them. In an instant the foretold stroke came. George dashed to his mother and caught her as she was falling to the floor. He and Lydia thought, at first, that she had simply swooned. But all that night and all the next day she lingered unconscious. Then, toward evening, her faint breathings became a silence. "She is dead," George faltered very low, standing at Lj^dia's side while she stooped and kissed the white, waxen forehead. Then, still lower, he added : "And I have killed her." Though racked with sobs at the loss which meant for her an almost incomparable calamity, Lydia looked up at him and answered abidingly : "You should not go through the rest of your life with that thought! You should not, and you must not!" "The rest of my life!" he said, with the irony of de spair. "And how must I go through it, branded as I am? How except crawling and shambling and stumbling and cringing? For me there's no other way!" NEW YORK. 23 IV. AFTEK the quiet little funeral was over, and he and Lydia were again alone together, George regretted what seemed to him the parading selfishness of those bitter words. He said as much, and with a tang in his tones of gloomy remorse. "My fate, after all, is not so hard as yours I realize it," he told her. "Beside, it is de served; yours is not. " "You have no pity for youself, " she said. "None." "You don't believe in fate, then? that we are what we must be, and do what we must do? You think human will can make or mar a life, as it pleases?" "I don't think this, Lydia, and I do believe in fate. Not to believe in it seems like saying that you doubt if effect follows cause. But, nevertheless, when I look back on what happened three years ago, and remember how I let the clouds of my own wickedness slowly gather over every reminder of truth and honor and goodness my dead father, my devoted mother, you, our quiet and happy and virtuous little home then it seems to me as if my sin must have been purely voluntary a wanton, willful choosing between right and wrong. But I wanted to speak of your own plans for the future, Lydia. Have you formed any?" She gave a slight sigh. "There is but one thing for rne to do; I must go into service." "You a real servant! You're as much of a lady as any mistress you could find." Lydia slightly shuddered. "There's the horror of it," she murmured. "The horror of it?" he said quickly. "What do you mean?" Then he suddenly understood. 21 NF,W YORK. "If I were less of a lady," she went on, her voice quivering before it gained firmness, and the new lines of grief on her face giving to its mellow-tinted pallor a fresh and unwonted tragic beauty, "I might screw up my courage and be content with the prospect of menial r/ork. But my strength isn't equal to that; I've been too tenderly reared. Oh, the truth is, I've been reared in the most horribly unfortunate way!" She checked herself, biting her lips and lowering her soft, splendid eyes as though in guilty regret. "I follow you perfectly," said George, with deep sympathy. "My father and mother should both have considered " "No!" she broke in eagerly; "I have nothing for their memories but the most exquisite gratitude! They gave me a childhood full of unforgetablo joy; they made my girlhood sweet for me with hundreds of precious pleas ures. It was only when womanhood began that I looked in the face of my first sorrow your father's death." "Then came another my crime." She hurried on, ignoring his somber interjection. "Oh, no, if all the rest of my life were one misery, I should still be thankful to them both, as my blessed benefactors! And yet my rearing has been unfortunate I can't help but feel so now. Here I am, brought into direct contact with a world that has for me neither coun tenance, help nor hope. I cannot go and live with my own kind there are reasons why I cannot, reasons which are sternly separative, which I need not explain. And if I live with those who are not of my own kind I must do so only on the conditions of an abasement that will gall and wound. Your dear mother saw no difference. But everyone else saw it and told me of it, by acts and looks, if not by spoken words. Long ago I was forewarned of this absolute isolation. Now it has come it is here; and I must bear it as best I can." She was looking down again, her glance resting on her tawny hands, slender and shapely, as they lay half-folded in the lap of her black gown. Perhaps the deep-tinged rose of their taper nails fascinated her as a sort of sym bol ; its very charm told of that unique isolation to which she had just referred. NEW YORK. 25 "Poor Lydia!" said George, with a great kindliness of compassion. "/ can't blame the "world for ranking me an outcast, and you are just good and patient enough not to blame it. If I could only smooth the way for you as mother did! If I could only take up her work where she left it off! I'd still give you all the brotherly feeling I've ever had for you, and in return you'd be like the sister j'ou've always been, and in some pleasant home you could seem to outsiders a servant, while in reality you were the sister still. Dreams, dreams! But now," he broke off, with a forced yet energetic brightening of mien, "for the practical side. You may be lucky in find ing some employer who will fully recognize your excep tional position and comfort you, shield you, beyond your wildest present hopes." "I've thought of that!" she exclaimed; "I've prayed for it!" Her eyes burned with a melancholy longing, a slumberous gladness, as she raised them once more. "Oh, if there could be some such path as that out of the ter rible tangle !" "Let me think, " mused George, gaining relief from his own corosive anxieties in concerning himself with those of this old-time associate, this familiar and cherished friend. "You spoke of your own kind. You might be greatly aided by one of them " He saw a change cross Lydia's face, and swiftly pursued: "I mean, if you knew one, say of your own sex, who was at all lifted beyond the general class, like yourself." "I do not know one," she said decisively. "Here, it seems to me, they scarcely exist. In Europe, lam told, there are many, scattered about through its various countries. And here, of course, their admission into the public schools will soon accomplish much. But I have not shrunk, as I think you know, from going among them in charitable ways. Even against your mother's wish, though not disobediently, I have seen a great deal of their life here in this huge town." "Yes, I remember. " "A kind of race-instinct has spurred me to it, I imagine. And I have felt for them great compassion, great humane impulse. It has all been one of those more 26 NEW YORK. recent sorrows of -which I just spoke. For everywhere I have found such a terrible tyranny of caste. They have gained something here in New York; they can ride in street cars; they can send their children to the com mon schools; they can sit in theaters; they can drink (often more's the pity I) in certain saloons; they have white people as superintendents of certain of their asylums and hospitals. But in general their condition is still one of scorn, avoidance, neglect. The Jews of the old European Ghettos were far more persecuted, yet they were not more socially despised. I suppose hundreds of years must elapse before they will cease to engender, by the very fact of what they arc,, a shadow of the real equality which their share in the wide humanity of the world ought to give them." "They must have seen, in many instances, Lydia, that you were very far from being one of themselves." "Yes, and in many instances, too, they despised me for that same aloofness. Often it excited their con temptuous distrust. They connected it with something corrupt, licentious." "What insolence!" "Still, excusable. Oh, the enormous pity of it all! For me to go among them with their own blood evidently in my veins, and yet to possess the breeding and manners they had seen only in white women, has affected their foolish ignorance as a proof of my depravity. They imagine, poor things, that I couldn't be as decent and civilized as I am without some sort of mysterious bad ness having made mo so. And as for their own morals! Ah, it has set my heart bleeding again and again," cried Lydia, while her eyes lightened and her nostrils trem bled, "to see the actual swinishness in which many of them live! Their political liberty cost them oceans of tears, and now they must confront a new, inexorable slavery that of caste! Their young women grow up in the slums of the side streets passionate, hot-blooded creatures, full of powers for good, and yet from their birth breathing evil as they breathe the tainted air of their hovels. It is thought nothing for them to sin; their own parents conone and even smile at their loosest NEW YORK. :;? laxities. And with their young men it is the same. Always that horrible pressure pushes them to the wall. No wonder so many of them are thieves and house breakers. Dishonesty is e.rpt>