Chapter 2

Young ladies do not ask gentlemen to come and see them, no matter how
much they desire to make their acquaintance. I see it now; I did not
before. Will you—can you forgive me?”

I smiled; I could not help it. I could have taken her to my heart and
soothed her as I would a child, but the pallor of womanhood, which had
replaced the blush of the child, awed me and made my own words come
hesitatingly.

“Forgive you? You must forgive me! It was as wrong for me,” I went on
with a wild idea of not mincing matters with this pure soul, “to obey
your innocent request, as it was for you to make it. I am a man of the
world and know its _convenances_; you are very young.”

“I am sixteen,” she murmured.

The abrupt little confession, implying as it did her determination not
to accept any palliation of her conduct which it did not deserve,
touched me strangely. “But very young for that,” I exclaimed.

“So aunty says, but no one can ever say it any more,” she answered. Then
with a sudden gush, “We shall never see each other again, and you must
forget the motherless girl who has met you in a way for which she must
blush through life. It is no excuse,” she pursued hurriedly, “that nurse
thought it was all right. She always approves of everything I do or want
to do, especially if it is anything aunt would be likely to forbid. I
have been spoiled by nurse.”

“Was nurse the woman who came for me?” I asked.

She nodded her head with a quick little motion inexpressibly charming.
“Yes, that was nurse. She said she would do it all, I need only write
the note. She meant to give me a pleasure, but she did wrong.”

“Yes,” thought I, “how wrong you little know or realize.” But I only
said, “You must be guided by some one with more knowledge of the world
after this. Not,” I made haste to add, struck by the misery in her child
eyes, “that any harm has been done. You could not have appealed to the
friendship of any one who would hold you in greater respect than I.
Whether we meet again or not, my memory of you shall be sweet and
sacred, I promise you that.”

But she threw out her hand with a quick gesture. “No, do not remember
me. My only happiness will lie in the thought you have forgotten.” And
the last remnants of the child soul vanished in that hurried utterance.
“You must go now,” she continued more calmly. “The carriage that brought
you is at the door; I must ask you to take it back to your home.”

“But,” I exclaimed with a wild and unbearable sense of sudden loss as
she laid her hand on the knob of the door, “are we to part like this?
Will you not at least trust me with your name before I go?”

Her hand dropped from the knob as if it had been hot steel, and she
turned towards me with a slow yearning motion that whatever it betokened
set my heart beating violently. “You do not know it, then?” she
inquired.

“I know nothing but what this little note contains,” I replied, drawing
her letter from my pocket.

“Oh, that letter! I must have it,” she murmured; then, as I stepped
towards her, drew back and pointing to the table said, “Lay it there,
please.”

I did so, whereupon something like a smile crossed her lips and I
thought she was going to reward me with her name, but she only said, “I
thank you; now you know nothing;” and almost before I realized it she
had opened the door and stepped into the hall.

As I made haste to follow her, the sound of a low, “He is a gentleman,
he will ask no questions,” struck my ear, and looking up, I saw her just
leaving the side of the old nurse who stood evidently awaiting me half
down the hall. Bowing with formal ceremony, I passed her by and
proceeded to the front door. As I did so I caught one glimpse of her
face. It had escaped from all restraint and the expression of the eyes
was overpowering. I subdued a wild impulse to leap back to her side, and
stepped at once over the threshold. The nurse joined me, and together we
went down the stoop to the street.

“May I inquire where you wish to be taken?” she asked.

I told her, and she gave the order to the coachman, together with a few
words I did not hear; then stepping back she waited for me to get in.
There was no help for it. I gave one quick look behind me, saw the front
door close, realized how impossible it would ever be for me to recognize
the house again, and placed my foot on the carriage step. Suddenly a
bright idea struck me, and hastily dropping my cane I stepped back to
pick it up. As I did so I pulled out a bit of crayon I chanced to have
in my pocket, and as I stooped, chalked a small cross on the curbstone
directly in front of the house, after which I recovered my cane, uttered
some murmured word of apology, jumped into the carriage and was about to
shut the door, when the old nurse stepped in after me and quietly closed
it herself. By the pang that shot through my breast as the carriage
wheels left the house, I knew that for the first time in my life, I
_loved_.

IV.

SEARCHINGS.

“Patience, and shuffle the cards.”—CERVANTES.

If I had expected anything from the presence in the carriage of the
woman who had arranged this interview, I was doomed to disappointment.
Reticent before, she was absolutely silent now, sitting at my side like
a grim statue or a frozen image of watchfulness, ready to awake and stop
me if I offered to open the door or make any other move indicative of a
determination to know where I was, or in what direction I was going.
That her young mistress in the momentary conversation they had held
before our departure had succeeded in giving her some idea of the shame
with which she had felt herself overwhelmed and her present natural
desire for secrecy, I do not doubt, but I think now, as I thought then,
that the unusual precautions taken both at that time and before, to keep
me in ignorance of the young lady’s identity, were due to the elderly
woman’s own consciousness of the peril she had invoked in yielding to
the wishes of her young and thoughtless mistress; a theory which, if
true, argues more for the mind than the conscience of this mysterious
woman. However, it is with facts we have to deal, and you will be more
interested in learning what I did, than what I thought during that short
ride in perfect darkness.

The mark which I had left on the curbstone behind me sufficiently showed
the nature of my resolve, and when we made the first turn at the end of
the block I leaned back in my seat and laying my finger on my wrist,
began to count the pulsations of my blood. It was the only device that
suggested itself, by which I might afterward gather some approximate
notion of the distance we travelled in a straight course down town. I
had just arrived at the number seven hundred and sixty-two, and was
inwardly congratulating myself upon this new method of reckoning
distance, when the wheels gave a lurch and we passed over a car track.
Instantly all my fine calculations fell to the ground. We were not in
Madison Avenue, as I supposed; could not be, since no track crosses that
avenue below Fifty-ninth Street, and we were proceeding on as we could
not have done had we gained the terminus of the avenue at Twenty-third
Street. Could it be that the carriage had not been turned around while I
was in the house, and that we had come back by way of Fifth Avenue? I
could not remember—in fact, the more I tried to think which way the
horses’ heads were directed when we went into the house, the more I was
confused. But presently I considered that wherever we were, we certainly
had not passed over the narrow strip of smooth pavement in front of the
Worth monument, and therefore could not have reached Twenty-third Street
by way of Fifth Avenue. We must be up town, and that track we crossed
must have been at Fifty-ninth Street. And soon, as if to assure me of
this, we took a turn, quickly followed at a block’s length by another,
after which I had no difficulty in recognizing the smooth pavement of
the entrance to the Park or the roll down Fifth Avenue afterwards. “They
have thought to confuse me by an extra mile or so of travel,” thought I,
with some complacency, “but the streets of New York are too simply laid
out to lend themselves to any such easy mode of mystification.” Yet I
have thought since then how, with a smarter man on the box, the affair
might have been conducted so as to have baffled the oldest citizen in
any attempt at calculation.

When we stopped in front of the Albemarle I quietly thanked the woman
who had conducted me, and stepped to the ground. Instantly the door shut
behind me, the carriage drove off, and I was left standing there like a
man suddenly awakened from a dream.

Entering my hotel, I ordered supper, thinking that the very practical
occupation of eating would serve to divert my mind into its ordinary
channels. But the dream, if dream it was, had made too vivid an
impression to be shaken off so easily. It followed me to the hall in the
evening and mingled with every chord I struck.

I could scarcely sleep that night for thinking of the sweet child’s face
that had blossomed into a woman’s before my eyes, and what a woman! With
the first hint of daylight I rose, and as soon as it was in any degree
suitable to be out, hired a cab and proceeded to the corner of
Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue, where, according to my
calculations of the evening before, we had crossed the car track which
had first interrupted me in that very original method of computing
distance of which I have already spoken, a method by the way, which you
must acknowledge is an improvement on the boy’s plan of finding his way
back from the woods by means of the bread-crumbs he had scattered behind
him, forgetting that the birds would eat up his crumbs and leave him
without a clew. Bidding the driver proceed at the ordinary jog trot down
the avenue, I laid my finger on my wrist, and counted each throb of my
pulse till I had reached the magical number seven hundred and sixty-two.
Then putting my head out of the window, I bade him stop. We were in the
middle of a block, but that did not disconcert me. I had not expected to
gain more than an approximate idea of the spot where we had first turned
into the avenue, it being impossible to regulate the horses’ pace so as
to tally with that taken by the span of the night before, even if the
pulsations in my wrist were to be absolutely relied upon. Noting the
streets between which we had paused, I bade the driver to turn down one
and come back by the other, occupying myself in the meanwhile, in
searching the curbstone for the small mark I had left in front of her
door the night before. But though we drove slowly and I searched
carefully, not a trace did I perceive of that tell-tale sign, and
forsaking those two streets, I ordered my obedient Jehu to try the two
outlying ones below and above. He did so, and I again consulted the
curbstone, but with no better success. No mark or remnants of a mark was
to be found anywhere. Nor, though we travelled through three or four
other streets in the same way, did we come upon any clew liable to
assist me in my search. Clean discouraged and somewhat out of temper
with myself for my pusillanimity of the evening before in not having
braved the anger of my companion by opening the carriage door at the
first corner and leaping out, I commanded to be taken back to the hotel,
where for a whole miserable day I racked my brain with devices for
acquiring the knowledge I so much desired. The result was futile, as you
may imagine; nor will I stop to recount the various expedients to which
I afterwards resorted in my vain attempt to solve the mystery of this
young girl’s identity.

Enough that they all failed, even the very promising one of searching
the various photographic establishments of the city, for the valuable
clew which her picture would give me. And so a week passed.

“It is time this mad infatuation was at an end,” said I to myself one
morning as I sat down to write a letter. “There is no hope of my ever
seeing her again, and I am but frittering away the best emotions of my
life in thus indulging in a dream that is not the prelude to a reality.”
But in spite of the wise determination thus made, I soon found my
thoughts recurring to their old channel, and seized with sudden
impatience at my evident weakness, took up the letter I had been writing
and was about to read it, when to my great amazement I perceived that
instead of inditing the usual words of a business communication, I had
been engaged in scribbling a certain number up and down the page and
even across the bottom where my signature should have been.

“Am I a fool?” I exclaimed, and was about to tear the sheet in two, when
glancing again at the number, which was a simple thirty-six, I asked
myself where I had got those especial figures. Instantly there arose
before my mind’s eye the vision of a brown-stone front with its
vestibule and door. It was, then, the number of a house; but what house?
a _chateau en Espagne_ or a _bona fide_ New York dwelling, which for
some reason had unconsciously impressed itself upon my memory? I could
not answer. There on the page was the number thirty-six, and equally
plain in my mind was the look of the brown-stone front to which that
number belonged—and that was all.

But it was enough to awaken within me the spirit of inquiry. The few
houses thus numbered in that quarter of the city where I had lately
been, were not so hard to find but that a morning given to the business
ought to satisfy me whether the vision in my mind had its basis in
reality. Taking a cab, I rode up town and into that region of streets I
had traversed so carefully a week before. For I was assured that if the
impression had been made by an actual dwelling it had been done at that
time. Following the same course I then took, I consulted the appearance
of the various houses to which that number was assigned. The first was
built of brick; that was not it. The next one had pillars to the
vestibule; and that was not it. The third, to use an Irish bull, was no
house at all, but a stable, while the fourth was an elegant structure of
much more pretension than the plain and simple front I had in my mind or
memory. I was about to utter a curse upon my folly and go home, when I
remembered there was yet a street or two taken in my zig-zag course of
the week before, which I had not yet tested. “Might as well be
thorough,” I muttered, and bade my driver proceed down —— Street.

What was there in its aspect that dimly excited me at the first glance?
A dim remembrance, a certain ghostly assurance that we had reached the
right spot? As we neared the number I sought, I could not suppress an
exclamation of surprise. For there before me to its last detail, stood
the house which involuntarily presented itself to my mind, when my eye
first fell upon that mysterious number scribbled at the foot of the page
I was writing.

It was, then, no chimera of an overwrought brain, this vision of a
house-front which had been haunting me, but a distinct remembrance of an
actual dwelling seen by me in my former journey through this street. But
why this house-front above all others; what was there in it to make such
an impression? Looking at it I could not determine, but after we had
passed, something, I cannot tell what, brought back another remembrance,
trivial in itself, but yet a link in the chain that was destined sooner
or later to lead me out of the maze into which I had stumbled. It was
merely this; that as I rode along the streets on that memorable morning,
searching for that mark on the curbstone from which I hoped so much, I
had come upon a spot where the pavement had been freshly washed. With
that unconscious action of the brain with which we are familiar, I
looked at the sidewalk a moment, running even then with the water that
had been cast upon it, and then gave a quick glance at the house. That
glance, account for it as you will, took in the picture before it as the
camera catches the impression of a likeness, and though in another
instant I had forgotten the whole occurrence, it needed but a certain
train of thought or perhaps a certain state of emotion to revive it
again.

A noble cause for such an act of unconscious cerebration you will say, a
freshly washed pavement: _Le jeu ne faut pas la chandelle._ And so I
thought too, or would have thought if I had not been so interested in
the pursuit in which I was engaged, and if the idea had not suggested
itself that water and a broom might obliterate chalk-marks from
curbstones, and that the imps that preside over our mental forces would
not indulge in such a trick at my expense unless the play _was_ worth
the candle. At all events, from the moment I made this discovery, I
fixed my faith on that house as the one which held the object of my
search, and though I contented myself with merely noting the number of
the street as we left it, I none the less determined to pursue my
investigations, till I had learned beyond the possibility of a doubt
whether my conjectures were not true.

A perseverance worthy of a better cause you will say, but you are no
longer twenty-five and under the influence of your first passion. I own
I was astonished at myself and frequently paused in the pursuit I had
undertaken, to ask if I were the same person who but a fortnight before
laughed at the story of a man who had gone mad over the body of an
unknown woman he had saved from a wreck only to find her dead in his
arms.

The first thing I did was to ascertain the name of the gentleman
occupying the house I have specified. It was that of one of our
wealthiest and most respectable bankers, a name as well known in the
city—as your own for instance. This was somewhat disconcerting, but
with a dogged resolution somewhat foreign to my natural disposition, I
persevered in my investigations, and learning in the next breath that
the gentleman alluded to was a widower with an only child, a young
daughter of about sixteen or so, recovered my assurance, though not my
equanimity. Seeking out my friend Farrar, who as you know is a walking
gazette of New York society, I broached the subject of Mr.—excuse me
if I do not mention his name; allow me to say, Preston’s domestic
affairs, and learned that Miss Preston, “A naive little piece for so
great an heiress,” I remember Farrar called her, had left town within a
day or two for a visit to some friends in Baltimore. “I happen to know,”
said he with that careless sweep of his hand at which you have so often
laughed, “because my friend Miss Forsyth met her at the depot. She was
intending to be gone—two weeks, I think she said. Do you know her?”

That last question sprung upon me unawares, and I am afraid I blushed.
“No,” I returned, “I have not that honor but an acquaintance of mine
has—well—has met her and—”

“I see, I see,” broke in Farrar with his most disagreeable smile. Then
with a short laugh, meant to act as a warning, I suppose, added as he
walked off, “I hope your friend is in fair circumstances and not
connected with the fine arts. Music is Mr. Preston’s detestation, while
Miss Preston though too young to be much sought after yet, will in two
years’ time have the pick of the city at her command.”

“So!” thought I to myself; “my little innocent charmer is an embryo
aristocrat, eh? Well then, I was a greater fool than I imagined.” And I
walked out of the hotel where I had met Farrar, with the very sensible
conclusion to drop a subject that promised nothing but disappointment.

But the fates were against me, or the good angels perhaps, and at the
next comer I met an old acquaintance, the very opposite of Farrar in
character, who with a long love story of his own fired, my imagination
to such an extent that in spite of myself I turned down —— Street, and
was proceeding to pass her house, when suddenly the thought struck me,
“How do I know that this unapproachable daughter of one of our most
prominent citizens is one and the same person with my dainty little
charmer? Widowers with young daughters are not so rare in this great
city that I need consider the question as decided, because by a half
superstitious freak of my own I have settled upon this house as the one
I was in the other night. My inamorata may be the offspring of a
musician for all I know.” And inflamed at the thought of this
possibility—I remembered the piano, you see—I gave to the winds all my
fine resolutions and only asked how I could determine for once and all,
whether I had ever crossed the threshold of the house before me. Some
men would have run up the stoop, rung the bell and asked to see Mr.
Preston on some pretended business he could easily conjure up to suit
the occasion, but my face is too well known for me to risk any such
attempt, besides I was too anxious to win the confidence of the young
girl to shock her awakened sense of propriety by seeming to seek her
where she did not wish to be found. And yet I must enter that house and
see for myself if it was the one that held her on that memorable
evening.

Pondering the question, I looked back at the door so obstinately closed
against my curiosity, when to my satisfaction and delight it suddenly
opened and a man stepped out, whom I instantly recognized as a business
agent for one of the largest piano-forte manufactories in the city. “The
heavens smile upon my enterprise,” thought I, and waited for the man to
come up with me. He was not only a friend of mine but largely indebted
to me in various ways, so that I knew I had only to urge a request for
it to be immediately granted, and that, too, without any questions or
gossip.

You will not be interested in anything but the result, which was
somewhat out of the usual course, and may therefore shock you. But you
must remember that I am telling you of matters which young men usually
keep to themselves, and that whatever I did, was accomplished in a
spirit of respect only a shade less constraining in its power than the
love that was at once my impelling force, and my constant embarrassment.

To come, then, to the point, a piano was to be set up in that house on
that very day, Mr. Preston having yielded to the solicitations of his
daughter for a new instrument. My friend was to be engaged in the
transfer, and at my solicitation for leave to assist in the operation,
gave his consent in perfect confidence as to my possessing good and
sufficient reasons for such a remarkable request, and appointed the hour
at which I was to meet him at the ware-rooms.

Behold me, then, at half-past two that afternoon, assisting with my own
hands in carrying a piano up the stoop of that house which, four hours
before, I had regarded as unapproachable. Dressed in a workman’s blouse
and with my hair well roughened under a rude cap that effectually
disguised me, I advanced with but little fear of detection. And yet no
sooner had I entered the house and seen at a glance that the aspect of
the hall coincided with my rather vague remembrance of that through
which I had been ushered a week before, than I was struck by a sudden
sense of my situation, and experiencing that uncomfortable consciousness
of self-betrayal, which a blush always gives a man, stumbled forward
under my heavy burden, feeling as if a thousand eyes were fixed upon me
and my cherished secret, instead of the two sharp but totally
unsuspicious orbs of the elderly matron that surveyed us from the top of
the banisters. “Be careful there, you’ll knock a hole through that glass
door!” though a natural cry under the circumstances, struck on my ears
with the force and mysterious power of a secret warning, and when after
a moment of blind advance I suddenly lifted my eyes and found myself in
the little room, which like a silhouette on a white ground, stood out in
my memory in distinct detail as the spot where I had first heard my own
heart beat, I own that I felt my hands slipping from my burden, and in
another moment had disgraced my character of a workman if I had not
caught the sudden ring of a well known voice in the hall, as nurse
answered from above some question propounded by the elderly lady with
the piercing eyes. As it was, I recovered myself and went through my
duties as promptly and deftly as if my heart did not throb with memories
that each passing hour and event only served to hallow to my
imagination.

At length the piano was duly set up and we turned to leave. Will you
think I am too trivial in my details if I tell you that I lingered
behind the rest and for an instant let my hand with all its
possibilities for calling out a soul from that dead instrument, lie a
moment on the keys over which her dainty fingers were so soon to
traverse?

V.

THE RUBICON.

“I’ll stake my life upon her faith.”—OTHELLO.

Once convinced of the identity of my sweet young friend with the Miss
Preston at whose feet a two year hence, the wealth and aristocracy of
New York would be kneeling, I drew back from further effort as having
received a damper to my presumptuous hopes that would soon effectually
stifle them. Everything I heard about the family—and it seemed as if
suddenly each chance acquaintance that I met had something to say about
Mr. Preston either as a banker or a man, only served to confirm me in
this view. “He is a money worshipper,” said one. “The bluest of blue
Presbyterians,” declared another. “The enemy of presumption and anything
that looks like an overweening confidence in one’s own worth or
capabilities,” remarked a third. “A man who would beggar himself to save
the honor of a corporation with which he was concerned,” observed a
fourth “but who would not invite to his table the most influential man
connected with it if that man was unable to trace his family back to the
old Dutch settlers to which Mr. Preston’s own ancestors belonged.”

This latter statement I have no doubt was exaggerated for I myself have
seen him at dinners where half the gentlemen who lifted the wine glass
were self-made in every sense of the term. But it showed the bent of his
mind and it was a bent that left me entirely out of the sweep of his
acquaintanceship much less that of his exquisite daughter, the pride of
his soul if not the jewel of his heart.

But when will a man who has seen or who flatters himself that he has
seen in the eyes of the woman he admires, the least spark of that fire
which is consuming his own soul, pause at an obstacle which after all
has its basis simply in circumstances of position or will. By the time
the two weeks of her expected absence had expired, I had settled it in
my own mind that I would see her again and if I found the passing
caprice of a child was likely to blossom into the steady regard of a
woman, risk all in the attempt to win by honorable endeavor and
persistence this bud of loveliness for my future wife.