38 For Sad Time, And Glad Times, And All Times Pass Over
IT is the afternoon of a wild and tempestuous winter day—a day for glowing coal fires, and drawn curtains, and easy chairs, and cozy ingle nooks. Long lines of sleet lash the windows sharply as steel, the wind whistles shrilly down the streets, half beating the breath out of the unwary, and goes whooping through the streets of New York like a March wind gone mad. Shutters bang, loose casements rattle, ancient tenements totter before the face of the blast. Few are abroad—the pavements are brittle and slippery as glass, street lamps twinkle gustily athwart the sleet and wind. Stores are closing early only the lager-bier saloon at the corner, with it’s dazzling display of gas, looks brisk and cheerful, and seems to drive a thriving trade.
“And I hope to goodness gracious she’ll take a stage down town, and not get her death trying to save ten cents,” murmurs a watcher, flattening her nose anxiously against a window-pane; “it’s an awful afternoon.”
It is. The wind sweeps by with a whoop and a howl as she says it, a fresh dash of sleety rain beats noisily against the panes. The watcher leaves the window, and gives an admonitory poke to an already brilliant coal fire, another touch here and there to a trimly-set table, places the small cane rocker more geometrically straight in the center of the hearth-rug, and turns the lamp up yet a trifle higher, for it is nearly dark at five o’clock. It is a comfortable little room, with a warm-looking red carpet, some cane chairs, white curtains, a piano in a corner, a litter of books and magazines, and a pile of needlework in a basket. It is an apartment big enough for two, for three, perhaps fitting tightly—no more. But as only two persons are ever in it, this is hardly an objection. “And less coal does to warm it,” says, sagely, Jemima Ann. It is Jemima Ann who moves about now, in a flutter of nervous unrest, waiting for her young lady, who has not yet returned from her day’s work. And no queen recently come into her kingdom was ever prouder of that dominion than is Jemima Ann of this furnished “floor through” in the third story of a third-rate New York house, in a very third-rate street. For it is their own, their very own, and they are together, and happy, and free, and she helps to keep it is not only sole housekeeper and manager, but also part bread-winner. That pile of white plain sewing there in the basket is hers, thrown down while she gets tea. And hard and trying times’ have come and gone ere they found themselves safely moored in this small haven of rest.
They have been adrift for weary months in New York city before fortune steered them here, and into safe and pleasant work. True, they have never known want, nor anything approaching to it, but suspicious eyes have looked at them, insolent voices have spoken to them; they have been unprotected, and lonely, and full of fear. But all that is past, and hardly to be regretted now, as they look back. It was one phase of life, imagined before, but never seen; it is over, and not likely to return.
Eight months have gone since they left Havre—nearly ten since Lady Valentine fled from her husband and in all that time she has heard little of the life and the people left behind.
“What be you a-goin’ to call yourself when we get to New York?” said to her, one day on shipboard, Jemima Ann.
“Call myself?” Dolores says, vaguely, looking up from the book she is reading.
“What name will you go by? Not Lady Valentine, I hope,” says Jemima, laughing. “No one will believe that.”
“Lady Valentine! No,” Dolores says, with a shudder; “I hate that name. No. Let me see. I might take yours, only Hopkins is not pretty. Let me think.” She looks at Jemima half smiling. “Suppose I go back to the old name I had as a child—Trillon? It will do as well as any. How many I seem to have borne in my time. Yes; the name by which you knew me first, my Jemima, you shall call me by again. I am, from the hour we land, Mrs. Trillon.”
The sea voyage does her a world of good. Depression, melancholia, drop from her as a garment; she brightens in spirits, gains in health and strength, looks like her own blooming self once more. The relief is so unutterable of this almost accomplished escape. For now that the Atlantic flows between them, she fears Vane Valentine no longer. To discover her in New York will be a difficult task, even for him; to force her to return to him, an impossibility. And she is scarcely more than twenty years old—and life so easily puts on its most radiant face when one is free, and twenty years old! They land, and try boarding at first—Mrs. Trillon, and her friend, Miss Hopkins—there is to be no more the distinction of mistress and maid. They find a boarding-house, and, after a few days’ delay, begin to look about them for work. Both are failures. Life in a noisy, gossiping second-rate boarding-house is not to be endured; a month of it is as much as Dolores can bear. Neither is work to be had for the asking; they are not adapted, these two, to many kinds of work.
“Let us try housekeeping, Jemima Ann,” suggests Mrs. Trillon, looking up one day from the big daily, whose page of advertisements she is poring over with knitted brows. “Here are no end of furnished apartments for ‘light housekeeping.’ Let us try light housekeeping, Jemima Ann. I fancy it will cost us no more than we are paying here, and it will certainly be more private and more clean.”
Jemima Ann hails the happy thought; she puts on her bonnet and sallies forth in the quest. But New York is a large city, advertisements are deceptive, and land ladies sour.
Another week goes by, much shoe-leather is worn, many door-bells are rung, and many, many weary stairs mounted before anything is found suitable to limited means and rather fastidious tastes. Then references are demanded, and references they have none. At last the tiniest of all tiny French flats is discovered—a minute parlor, two dimly-lit closets, called bedrooms, a microscopic kitchen, and dining-room—all neat and clean, and at a high price, but within their united means. Best of all, the janitress—a pleasant-faced matron—consents to take her month’s rent in advance and waive references. She likes the looks of her, she smilingly tells Jemima Ann. Here they come early in September, and here they have been ever since. They find it agreeable enough at first; it is like playing at housekeeping in a doll’s house. Jemima Ann cooks the most delicious little dishes, and proves herself a very jewel of a housekeeper. Lady Valentine is charmed with everything—the dots of rooms, the wonderful little kitchen range, that seems hardly too large to be put in her pocket—the absolutely new life that begins for her. Even the street is not without a charm of its own—a dusty, stuffy street enough, with a commingled odor of adjacent breweries and stables hanging about it, a sidewalk noisy with children all the day long, a favorite haunt of organ-grinders, with weary matrons holding babies, and sitting on door-steps in the cool and silent eventide. The charm is surely in nothing but its entire novelty, but Dolores likes to sit behind the Nottingham lace curtains of the little parlor, and take it all in. Life in this phase she has never seen before, and she is among them, if not of them, for all time now. But still work comes not, and work they soon must find. Their united hoard, increased by the sale of Dolores’ jewels, is melting away—let Jemima Ann cater never so cautiously. Their rooms are secured for this month at least, before it ends work must be found. Winter is approaching, and “winter is no man’s friend.”
“We must keep together, come what may,” says Dolores, decidedly, “that at least is as fixed as fate. Work or no work, part we shall not, my Jemima.”
“No, my pretty, I hope and pray not.”
“Let me see,” says “Mrs. Trillon,” tapping her pretty chin with her pencil, that reflective frown, so often there now, knitting her brows, “my work must be teaching if I can get it. I can teach music, vocal and instrumental—that is my one strong point. French, of course, German after a fashion, and l could give lessons in crayon and pencil drawing, and water colors. Embroidery, too, of every kind, we were thoroughly drilled in at Villa des Agnes.” Here her gravity suddenly gives way over the list of her accomplishments, and her joyous young laugh rings out. “It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, cataloguing my wonderful talents after this fashion. I ought to make out a list of terms for to-morrow’s Herald, and inform the public that the highest bidder can have me cheap. Heigho! one laughs, but it is no joke after all. I will advertise, Jemima Ann, and try my fortune twice.”
She does; after a score or more attempts an advertisement is drawn up. It is a repugnant task, this cold-blooded chronicling of what she can do; it sounds boastful and blatant, read over. One is written at last, that Jemima Ann pronounces perfection, and which Mrs. Trillon finds the best she can do—and it is sealed up in an envelope, and dropped, before Jemima seeks her vestal couch, in the nearest letter-box.
There follows an interval which Jemima Ann employs in looking out for work for herself. Dolores tries to dissuade her. “If I get a situation as governess,” she says, “it will suffice for us both. Your work will be to keep this little house bright and cozy.”
But Jemima is as resolute when she likes as her young mistress. “No, Miss Snowball,” she says earnestly, “that would never satisfy me. I must do something for my keep—sewing if I can get it—as well as you. I will have plenty of time for the housekeeping. There ain’t no kind of plain sewing I ain’t up to, I guess, and Mis’ Scudder, our landlady, has took a kind o’ fancy to me from the first, and she reckons she can get me something to do pretty soon.”
Mrs. Scudder proves to be as good as her word. She gets Jemima Ann “slop” shirt making, and plenty of it; coarse work, and wearily unremunerative prices, but still a help; and from thenceforth Jemima is as busy as a bee and as happy as a queen.
But Dolores’ ambitious advertisement seems as bread cast upon the waters. Many days elapse and it does not return. Answers there are, and terms are stated, and applications are personally made; but, somehow, nothing comes of these negotiations; the reference question stands in the way again. Pretty young widows, highly accomplished, without references, are not desirable preceptresses for innocent youth, and a fair, sweet face, and gentle, graceful manners, fail to compensate.
At last, in November, when blank despair is coming upon her, one impulsive lady falls in love at sight with her pathetic pale face and great wistful blue eyes and low, sweet-toned voice, and braves fate and references, and engages her as French and music teacher to her two boys on the spot. Even without a reference she can do no particular harm to Willy and Freddie, aged ten and twelve. She is closely watched for a little, and is found to be a painstaking teacher, even more gentle and winning than she looks.
“Nothing succeeds like success.” Her first employer speaks of her pretty paragon to her friends, and speedily three other engagements follow. And now, all day long, behold Dolores, draped in waterproof and vail, a roll of music in her hand, fully established as a “trotting governess,” and adding dollars and dollars monthly to their humble menage.
About Christmas she is engaged as finishing governess to Miss Blanche Pettingill, sole daughter of the house and heart of Peter Pettingill, Esquire, of Lexington avenue, millionaire and woolen manufacturer, the wife of whose bosom literally hangs herself with diamonds, and blazes with them at her big parties up in the brown stone palace in this one of New York’s stateliest avenues. There is a villa at Newport, a homestead up the Hudson, a winter place in Florida, and the enchanted princess who is to have all this one day is nineteen years old, and rather an ignoramus than otherwise, and has suddenly wakened up to that fact, and made up her mind to atone for lost time by studying under the pretty, and gentle, and obscure Madame Trillon.
“Pa says he would give ten thousand dollars to have me able to play, and sing, and talk French as you do, Mrs. Trillon,” says the princess, with a despairing sigh; “I wish to goodness he’d have thought of it half a dozen years ago. He has been so busy making money ever since I can remember, and ma’s been so busy spending it, that they neither of them had time to attend to my education. And here I am an heiress and everything, and hardly an accomplishment about me. And when a person is nineteen, and in society, studying languages, and doing pianoforte drudgery, is no end of a bore.”
Mrs. Trillon sympathizes, does her best, and spends three hours daily in the Lexington avenue mansion, secluded in Miss Blanche’s boudoir. For it is to be a profound secret from all the world that this polishing is being given to Miss Blanche.
“That is what I like Mrs. Trillon for,” remarks Miss Pettingill to Mrs. Pettingill, “she knows how to hold her tongue. And yet she is sympathetic, you can see she appreciates the situation, and is trying to do her very best for me. And she has the most elegant and aristocratic manners. I only wish I could ever be like her.”
“Mrs. Trillon is a person, I guess, who has seen better days,” responds mamma.
“I should rather think so,” Miss Blanche cries, energetically. “She plays and sings perfectly splendid, and talks French like a native. She never speaks of herself, but I know she must have a story, and a romantic one, if a person could only get at it. But I never can ask questions of Mrs. Trillon.”
It is at the Pettingill mansion that Dolores is this wild and blustery March afternoon, while Jemima Ann stirs the fire and looks expectantly out of the window, and waits for her coming home. It is late when she comes, neither wet nor weary from the howling storm, but all laughing, and with cheeks and eyes bright with the frosty wind.
“Oh, my own dear,” cries Jemima, “you are half dead, I know. I do hope you rode down town in the stage.”
“No, I didn’t,” returns Dolores, laughing. “I rode, but not in the stage. They sent me in the carriage; Miss Pettingill would have it so. They are really the best-natured people in the world. They wished me to stay all night, and as I would not, insisted on the carriage. Is supper ready? For I am hungry, although I had tea and cakes at five o’clock. It must be nearly nine now.”
“Jest twenty minutes to,” says Jemima, bustling about. “Take off your things, my deary, and sit here in the rocker and warm your feet. Supper’s all ready, and it will be on the table in ten minutes.”
“How cozy it is here,” Dolores says, with a delicious sense of rest well earned, and of the long evening to come, with two or three new magazines to speed its flight. “What a dear little home we have, and what a queen of housekeepers is my Jemima Ann. It is very splendid up there in the Pettingill palace, but I really do not think I would care to exchange. I like our duodecimo edition of housekeeping best.”
Supper is served—two or three delicate little dishes, and tea brewed to the point of perfection. Outside, the whistling and lashing of the March night accents the sense of comfort and warmth.
“There is to be a prodigious party up at the Pettingill’s next week,” says Dolores, as they sit and discuss their repast. “Quite a mammoth gathering of the plutocracy of New York, and I am to go and play the accompaniments of Blanche’s songs. She has not much courage about performing in public, although she really has a very nice voice, and absolutely insists that I shall play the accompaniments. I do not like it, but I cannot refuse, they are so extremely nice to me, and Blanche is such a dear, simple-minded, good-natured little soul. The piano is to be placed in a sort of bower of tall flowering plants, and I shall be pretty well screened from the company. I must get a dress for the auspicious occasion—white trimmed with black, I suppose, and jet ornaments, to keep up my character of a widow in half mourning. I find the whole thing rather a bore, but I cannot disappoint Miss Pettingill.”
So, in the lamp-lit, fire-lit little parlor they sit together and chat over the doings of the day. These evening home-comings are delightful to both—Dolores snugly ensconced in the rocker, Jemima with her sewing at the table. There is talk, and music—and the shrill beating of rain and sleet without, and perfect peace, monotonous perhaps, but very grateful, within.
“If it will only last,” Dolores says, looking dreamily into the fire; “at times it seems almost too good. Peace is the best thing in all the world, Jemima Ann better than love, with its fever, better than wealth, with its cares. If it will only last!”
*****
It is the night of the great ball up on Lexington avenue. The big brown corner house is all a-glitter with gas. A lengthy row of carriages wind down the stately street, a little crowd has gathered to see the guests go in, music resounds. Mrs. Pettingill, all a-light with those famous diamonds, like an Indian idol, receives her friends. Miss Blanche, in a wonderful dress from Paris, stands near, looking flushed and nervous, and wishing, more than ever before, pa’s wealth could buy for her Mrs. Trillon’s beautiful, gracious, graceful manners. Mrs. Trillon is up-stairs in the boudoir, where, by her own desire, she is to be left until summoned for those songs. Miss Pettingill has had but one flurried moment with her.
“It will be even worse than I thought,” she exclaims, in a panic of nervous apprehension, “there is an Englishman coming, somebody very great, a nobleman, I believe, and I wish he was safely back in his own country. He is coming with the Colbarts—he is their guest while in New York. It was bad enough before, goodness knows; it will be dreadful—dreadful to have to sing before him.”
Dolores laughs.
“I really do not see why. Let us hope the nobleman is no musical critic. What is his name?”
“There is ma calling,” cries excitable Miss Pettingill. “I wish—I wish ma wouldn’t insist upon my singing, but she does, and I know—I feel I shall break down and disgrace myself forever.”
She flies away, and Dolores settles for a quiet hour or two over a new book. The swelling music floats up to her, sounds of laughter and gay voices reach her now and then, but the story she reads absorbs her presently, and when at last the message comes that it is time to go down, she starts up, surprised to find it so late.
“And you need not go through the crowded room,” says Miss Pettingill’s maid, who comes for her, “although,” with an honest admiring glance at the crisp new dress and ornaments, the golden curled hair and flower face, “there is not a lady down there that looks prettier than you, Mrs. Trillon. I can take you right to the piano without passing among the people at all.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Trillon says, “that will be best.”
They go, and manage to make their way almost unnoticed to where the big Steinway stands. Tall shrubs, and a very bower of ferns and lofty plants, almost completely screen the instrument and the performer. Blanche comes up in a flutter of apprehension and nervousness. From where she sits Dolores can see far down the dazzling vista of light, and flowers, and thronged rooms, herself invisible.
” Courage!” she whispers, brightly; “imagine we are alone, and it is our daily music lesson.”
She strikes the first chords of the symphony, and Miss Blanche bursts into song.
A little group follows the heiress and listens to her song. Dolores glances through her verdant bower as she plays, thinking of other nights and scenes like this in far-off lands, when she was queen of the revels. Of that other ball that seems so far off now, at Lady Ratherripe’s, where Colonel Deering was her devoted slave, and she came upon that never-to-be-forgotten scene between her husband and Camilla Routh. A chill, creeping feeling makes her shiver in the perfumed warmth as she recalls it; some of the shame, the pain, the anger, the hunted feeling of that night returns to her.
And yet it is as a dream now—a bad dream, that is over and gone. That life is at an end forever. There is no longer a Dolores, Lady Valentine—only a Mrs. Trillon, who teaches for a salary, and walks the New York streets in shabby dresses, and lives in a poky five roomed flat, and plays Miss Blanche Pettingill’s accompaniments for so much per night. That life has come and gone like a dream, and she is quite content—or tries hard to think she is—to let life go on indifferently like this.
The song ends, and with no disastrous breakdown. There is a soft murmur of thanks and pleasure, and Blanche breathes again. But the respite is only for a moment.
“Here is——”
Dolores does not catch the name, lost in the last vibrating chords she strikes, but a flutter goes all at once through the little circle behind her.
“Oh!” cries Blanche, with a gasp of very real horror, “it is the Englishman and ma! Now I know she will make me sing again!”
Dolores half laughs at the anguish of the tone, the tragic terror of the look, and peeps with considerable curiosity through her leafy screen. She sees coming down the long, brilliant room Mrs. Pettingill, in her diamonds and moire antique, on the arm of a tall, dark gentleman, who does not look in the least like an Englishman. And as she looks the room spins round, the gas-lights flash out and blind her, a mist comes before her eyes, her heart absolutely stops beating.
For the man on whose arm Mrs. Pettingill leans, the English “nobleman” coming straight to where she sits, is—Sir Vane Valentine!
