CHAPTER XI

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SOME REFLECTIONS ON COMPARATIVE CHARACTER--OF HOUSES AS WELL AS MEN--TEMPTATION, AND THE LEGENDS OF THE "LURLEY" AND THE "FROZEN HAND"--A LUNCH AT TAYLOR'S, AND AN ARRANGEMENT.

In the "great day of final assize," when beneath the one unerring Eye and Hand all the drosses of life and circumstance shall be melted away and all the films and disfigurements removed from action and intention,--there will be many things, we have reason to believe, shown in a widely different light from that in which human eyes have looked upon them. Human character will surprise the beholders, if it does not produce the same effect even upon the subject under examination. Many a poor wretch who has been stumbling along through life, unfortunate and apparently guilty, of no seeming use either to himself or the world, will be found to have filled a place of necessity not suspected--to have done much good and very little harm--and to have been acting from motives quite as pure as those that in other hearts have produced such different effects. Many a "good" man will be stripped so bare of the garments woven around him by circumstances or his own self-righteousness, and so many of his best deeds will be proved to have proceeded from selfish, interested and unholy motives, that every success and every word of past approbation will be a reproach, and his naked soul will stand shivering in the chilling breath of God's displeasure.

It is not exactly certain that _houses_ will come to judgment; but if they do, there will be the same marked difference in the estimation in which many of them have been held by the community surrounding them, and the truth of their influence shown in the "sunlight of the eternal morning." Some miserable tenant-house in Bermondsey or the Swamp, overcrowded with human rats, its atmosphere so noisome that fever floated on every breath and the passer-by from Belgravia or Murray Hill put his perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils to escape the deadly infection,--may be found to have been far less injurious to the neighborhood than the corner-house on Park Lane or the double-front of brown stone within the shadow of Dr. Spring's church on Fifth Avenue. Within the one the miserable occupants may have festered in body and rotted in soul--harming only themselves and the physical atmosphere meanwhile, and victims of the horrible aggregation of poverty in great cities; while within the other a maelstrom of pleasant dissipation has been whirling, to which the victims came in their own carriages with full liveries, the waves as they circled sending up jets of cooling spray and redolent of perfumes from the flowers of sunny lands--but continually widening its circle of evil attraction and drawing in those who thenceforth had no power of resistance against the banded demons of wine, of play and of lascivious enjoyment, who lurked beneath the waters, eager for their prey.

The fable of the "Lurline" is the story of human life and temptation; and yet few of the thousands who have read it in the old German legend of the "Lurleiberg" or the charming "Bridal of Belmont" of the author of "Lillian," or who have gazed at it for hours when presented upon the stage in the shape of "Ondine" or the "Naiad Queen,"--have fully realized its significance. To most it has been merely a pretty conceit or an effective spectacle; to the close student it is an absorbing picture of the enthralment of human energies. Sir Huldebrand of Kingstettin is a true as well as a valiant knight, and he has a golden-haired and white-handed ladie-love in the neighboring castle of the Baron of Steinbrunnen. He has a hope, a love, a faith, a duty; and on the day when he fares forth from Kingstettin and takes his way to the river bank, he has mirth as well as all these, for Karl, his merry servant, is beside him. But the day is hot and sultry, and he dismounts from his horse and lies down to sleep beside the Lurleiberg. He has granted himself rest and indulgence. Half in his sleep and half in his waking thought he sees the stream rippling below the banks and circling in pleasant eddies by rock and mossy edge, while the water-lilies nestle down their soft cheeks to the lapping water in the sheltered nooks, and the willows bend down and kiss the stream with the swaying tips of their hundred fingers, and little gleams of golden sunshine steal through the branches and touch the soft ripples here and there with such tints of transparent light as the pencil of painter never mastered. Oh, how deliciously sweet and dreamy is that half wakeful feeling of repose and indulgence! And then the music rises--gentle and almost undistinguishable at first from the singing ripple of the water--then clearer and more distinct, but with still a tinkling ripple in every cadence, and the name of the listener insensibly blended. Flattery has come with indulgence, and the subtle wine of its intoxication is mounting to his brain. Then he turns dreamily on his couch of moss, and looks over the bank into the river. Above the water white hands are circling and snowy bosoms are gleaming, and in the midst is one form of matchless rounded beauty, with a face of angelic splendor, her eye-lids gemmed with the tear-drops of an awakened affection, and her waved brown hair caressed by the tide as it sweeps backward. All the white hands are beckoning to him, and all the coral lips are uttering those low musical words in which his name is blended. The brain of the knight grows dizzy--chains of which he only feels a pleasure in the slight pressure, twine around his limbs. Voluptuous enjoyment takes the place of energy--he is himself no longer. He cannot even laugh--he can only sigh--Karl has gone chasing some Lurline of his own, far down the meadow. Ermengarde, who has been for hours leaning out of the high window at Steinbrunnen, and looking anxiously for her expected lover--is nothing to him now. His promised aid to Sir Rudolph to-morrow, with helm on brow and lance in rest, against the invader who threatens the lands of both with ravage, is nothing to him now. Love and duty are alike forgotten. The temptation has done its full work through indolence and indulgence, and the knight is lost. The brown-haired Lurline is worth all earth and heaven. Let all the rest go, without a sigh or a regret--be his the murmur of the river, the delicious music embodying his name, and the beckoning of the white hands towards him! He does not leap into the water, as some have held: he merely bends nearer to the verge, then slips down with eager eyes and outstretched hands; the white arms twine around him; the music sounds for one moment more sweetly but more sadly than ever, as the waves close above the pair so unholily wedded; then the ripples sing on and all is quiet beauty as before--calm and quiet beauty, as if no tomb had closed above the energies of a human soul.

Sir Huldebrand may come back again, after a time, as the legend is fond of making him do. He may even marry the golden-haired Ermengarde and sire children to heir his lands and perpetuate his name. But the knight is himself a wreck, with all his best energies burnt out in those weird orgies beneath the water; and his bridal vow is a hollow one, for when he utters it he hears the shriek of the Lurline blending with the wedding music, and his nightly couch is to be henceforth a torture of unrest--his ride by day a mere hopeless fleeing from the ghosts of dead pleasures.

Something of the same character is that other wild legend which has grown into song and drama--sprung from the Norse branch of the great German mind,--that of the "Ice Witch" or the "Frozen Hand." Here the Viking Harold is less wrecked by temptation than by circumstance; but the result of the enthralment is the same. The ice of the Pole closes around him with the same fatality as the waters of the Rhine around his brother and prototype. Surrounded by the white arms of Hecla in her palace of ice, he ceases to lament the bride who is awaiting him in the far South; and he has not even a thought of regret to cast towards his perished companions and the stout ship that once bore him so proudly, her brown ribs now bleaching whitely on the Arctic shore. He too returns, after a long period, but he brings with him the fatal gift of his Northern bride--_a hand of ice_. He may be strong and brave still, as he was when he went away; but he is no longer the peerless and envied warrior. Men look upon him with a ghostly shudder, and women shrink back from his chilling presence. Not even Freja can thaw away all the ice that has gathered in his veins. He may chastise the robber Ruric from the hills, and sleep once more in the warm embrace of Isoldane; but who knows that at some midnight hour the old curse may not return upon him and the hand he stretches in love and fondness strike death to the hearts that are dearest? Not the same--changed, changed--as is every man who has once yielded to the great temptation of his existence.

All this, which may be purely irrelevant matter, has grown out of a visit paid by some of the characters in this narration, to a fashionable restaurant and saloon on Broadway, and the belief that in some of those houses temptation is lurking in so insidious and deadly a form that they are doing a thousand times the injury inflicted by the acknowledged haunts of vice. Special allusion may or may not be made to the gorgeous but tawdry room in which the three sat down to discuss their _a la mode_ beef, coffee and biscuits. Any one of the fashionable houses to which ladies habitually resort without male protection, for a noonday lunch when shopping,--may serve as a type of all the rest; and not one of them but may be passed with a shudder, by husbands who wish their wives to remain like Cesar's, not only chaste but above suspicion,--and by fathers who do not desire the peach-bloom too early rubbed off from the innocence of their fair daughters.

At this marble table, where the cloth is being so carefully spread by the white-napkined waiter who has a steaming cluster of dishes on a salver on the table opposite,--there may be a little party, like that of our three friends, dropped in on the most proper of errands--that of merely procuring a bit of lunch in the midst of a day of business, without going home for it or visiting the table d'hote at a hotel; but at the next table and the next there is something different. Here sit a party of three giddy girls, without male protection, innocent enough in their lives and intentions, but boldly exposing their faces to the rude gaze of any of the libertine diners-out who may happen to be at the tables opposite, and returning that gaze, when met, with a smile and a simper that merely means scorn and self-confidence but may be easily construed into a less creditable expression. And at this table, only two removed, discussing a _pate de foix gras_ which may or may not have come from Strasburg of the Big Goose Livers, and washing down his edibles with a glass of liqueur that fires the blood like so much molten lava,--sits a boldfaced man, fashionable in dress and perfumed in hair and whiskers, whose gaze is that of the evil eye upon the reputation of any woman, and who has no better occupation than lounging in any place of public resort, to spy out the beauties of female face and figure and the weaknesses in the fortifications that surround female virtue. And here--at one of the opposite row of tables, her cup of coffee and plate of French trifles in pasty just being set down before her--here is a sadder spectacle than either. The wife of a wealthy merchant, yet young, beautiful and attractive, but with a frightened look in her dark eye and a nervous glancing round at the door every time it opens, which too well reveals her story to the close observer. She is waiting for her _lover_--harsh word in that connection, but the true and only one; her lover, whose acquaintance she may have made through unforbidden glances in this very room, and whom she has permitted to approach her, slowly but surely, as the serpent stole upon Eve in Eden, until she has fallen completely into his power, losing honor, self-respect, everything that a true wife most values, and probably supporting the wretch in a course of gambling and dissipation, with money wrung on one pitiable pretext or other from the grudging hand of her betrayed husband.

It is enough!--let the curtain fall. But oh, heart of man, put up the prayer that other and holier lips once uttered: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!" And may not the _houses_ indeed come into judgment?

We have no concern whatever with the pleasant small-talk which floated over the little table at Taylor's, from the lips of Tom Leslie and his two female companions; nor is there any need to pause at this juncture and remark whether the strange glance of Josephine Harris on being introduced to the young man on the street, was repeated or returned. The trio seemed to be a very happy one, Miss Bell Crawford a little starched at first towards a man who had been flung into her way so ambiguously, but rattle-pated Joe firing off occasional fusillades of odd sayings, and Tom, the prince of _preux chevaliers_, falling into the position of an old acquaintance with marvellous rapidity. Their lunch was nearly over, when the mischievous face of Joe, who had been making running comments upon some of the people on the other side of the room, good-naturedly wicked if not complimentary--lit up with a conceit which set her hazel-gray eyes laughing away down to the depths of her brain. At the same moment the quick eyes of Bell Crawford saw that the hand of the merry girl was rummaging in her pocket, and _her_ face became anxious. Before the latter could speak, however, the hand of Joe came out with the treasure she had been seeking--a torn half column, or less, of the _Herald_. The moment Miss Crawford saw the slip, her anxiety seemed to be redoubled, and she reached over to Joe, as if to take the paper, with the words, half-pleading, half-pettish:

"Don't, Joe--pray don't!"

"Oh, but I must!" said the mischievous girl, taking care that her companion should not reach the slip. "I cannot think of throwing away such an excellent opportunity. I say, Mr. Leslie, you are not an unscrupulous destroyer of female innocence--one of those dreadful fellows we read about in the books, are you?"

"Oh, Joe, I am ashamed of you!" said Bell Crawford, and she lay back in her chair, very near to a fit of the sulks.

"Really," said Tom Leslie, blushing a little in spite of himself, though without knowing precisely why--"really, Miss Harris, I am afraid I am not the best of men, but I hope I do not deserve any such terrible appellation."

"There, I told you so, Bell, I knew he wasn't!" went on the wild girl, as if she had been asking a solemn question and receiving a conclusive answer. "We can trust him--he says we can, and I am going to put him to the test at once. Suppose, Mr. Leslie, that a couple of distressed damsels--"

"What a ninny you are making of yourself!" put in Miss Crawford, in a tone not very far from earnest.

"Suppose that a couple of distressed damsels," Josephine Harris went on, without heeding her in the least, "about to pass through a gloomy and desolate wood, on the way to an enchanted castle, should appeal to you to accompany them and give them the benefit of your courage and your--yes, your respectability, in the adventure; would you go with them, even if you were obliged to abandon a game of billiards and forfeit the smoking of two cigars for that purpose?" and she threw herself back in her chair, screwed her face into the expression supposed to belong to a grand inquisitor, and waited for a reply.

"I would do my devoir like a true knight," said Leslie, making a mock bow over the table, with his hand on his heart, "even if I forfeited thereby not only two cigars but four and the playing of two whole games of billiards."

"Generous knight!" said Joe, still preserving her melodramatic tone, "we trust you--we enlist you into our service, 'for three years or during the war!' Read!" and she solemnly handed over the slip of paper, on which Leslie perceived the following advertisement, marked around with black crayon, and under the general head of "Astrology":--

"THE STARS HAVE SAID IT! MADAME ELISE BOUTELL, from Paris, whom the stars favor and to whom the secrets of the unknown world are revealed, may be consulted on any of the great events of life, at No. -- Prince Street, near the Bowery, every day, between 10 A.M. and 6 P.M. Let ignorance be banished, and let the light of the world unknown dawn on the darkened minds. Persons who attempt deception in visiting Madame Boutell, will find all disguise unavailing; but all confidences are safe, as strict secrecy is observed."

"Well?" added Leslie, looking up inquiringly, after reading the mysterious announcement.

"Well?" said the mad girl, mimicking him. "Is _that_ all the effect it produces upon you? Do your knees not shake and does not your hair start up on end when you think of it, so that your hat--if your hat was not unfortunately hung upon the hook yonder, would require to be held on by main force?"

"How _can_ you be so absurd?" suggested Bell, who really feared that the pronounced behaviour of her friend might draw too much attention to their table, as there was indeed some danger of its doing.

"Bah!" said Joe, "I _couldn't_ be absurd! I was 'never absurd in my life,' as Sir Harcourt Courtley says. But Mr. Leslie!--what have I said? You look pale--ill!" and the face of the young girl tamed instantly to an expression of genuine alarm, not at all unwarranted by the circumstances. The face of Tom Leslie had indeed undergone a sudden change. His usual ruddy cheek seemed ghastly white, his eyes stared glassily, and there was a quick convulsive shiver running over his frame which did not escape the notice of either of his two companions. The kind heart of Josephine Harris at once hit upon a solution for the otherwise strange spectacle. She had said some awkward word--touched some hidden and painful chord connected with past suffering or experience; and she felt like having her tongue extracted at the root for the commission of such a blunder.

What _was_ the cause of this sudden emotion? The explanation may not be so difficult to any thoughtful reader of this story as it was to the two young girls who sought it. Tom Leslie had merely read over the mendacious advertisement, at first, with the same indifference given to thousands of corresponding humbugs; and at the first reading he had not noticed the place at all. At the second reading, his mind took in the direction: "No. -- Prince Street, near Bowery," and at the same moment he comprehended the words, "Madame Elise Boutell, _from Paris_." Tom Leslie was every thing else than a coward; and yet he had shuddered before at the sight and the memory of the "red woman:" he whitened and shuddered now. What if another meeting with that mysterious woman was at hand?--if the scenes of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard were about to be re-enacted? The French name and the words "from Paris," the place, which seemed to him undoubtedly the same of his adventure with Harding--all made up a presumption of identity that was for the moment overwhelming.

But those who show surprise or emotion quickest are not slowest to recover from its effects. Whatever he felt, nothing more was to be shown the two ladies. Reaching for a glass of ice-water standing upon the table, Leslie drank the whole of it off at a draught, and the electric shock at once restored the tone to his system and brought back the red blood to his face. With a laugh he said:

"I really beg ten thousand pardons for alarming you, but these slight attacks are constitutional, and they need not cause the least fear. That is over, and I am as well as ever. What was it you were saying, Miss Harris?"

"Thank heaven that you _are_ better!" said the kind-hearted girl. "I was really for the instant apprehensive that something I had said might have awakened some painful recollection. I was trying to get you, at that moment, to understand the terrible significance of this advertisement."

"Well," said Leslie, laughing, "what am I to understand? That you have been testing the skill of this seeress, or that you are about to do so?"

"There you go!" said Joe Harris. "Now you are on the _other_ side of the fence! Excuse my similes, but I have not always been cooped up in this humdrum city--I occasionally pay visits to the country. A moment ago you grew pale at the name of the mighty Madame Boutell, whose cognomen sounds a good deal like the Yankee 'doo tell!' I admit; and now you are laughing at her!" The young girl had by this time recovered from her good-natured anxiety and regained her habitual vivacity, and she rattled on to the great edification of her auditors, and happily without attracting any additional notice from the people at the other tables. "Yes, sir, Miss Crawford and myself are about to consult this modest exponent of the mysteries of the stars, though about what we have not the least idea. _I_ have not, at least; have _you_, Bell?"

"Not the ghost of an idea," was the answer of Miss Crawford.

"Ghost is good, in that connection," rattled on the gay girl. "You see I have never yet consulted a fortune-teller, and I am afraid I shall soon be too old to do it to advantage. I lost my faith in Santa Claus, a good many years ago, and long before my stocking was too big to hang up; and I cried over the discovery for a fortnight. Suppose I should lose my faith in fortune-telling before I ever had any experience in that direction--wouldn't it be dreadful?"

"But why this lady in particular?" asked Leslie, who was at the moment studying a theme which no man knows more about to-day than was known in the days of Aristotle--that of chances and coincidences.

"Oh," said Joe, fumbling in her pocket for other slips, and drawing them out and exhibiting them with great gravity, to the infinite amusement at least of Leslie. "Oh, I have been preparing myself, and found the best. Here is a 'Madame R.,' who has 'just arrived in the city and taken a room at No. 7 Pickle Place.' That would never do, you see. 'Taken a room' is too suggestive of limited accommodations and no carpet on a very dirty stair. Then here is another, in which 'Madame Francena Guessberg' promises to 'give information about absent friends' and to 'show the faces of future husbands.' Most of my friends who are absent I never wish to hear of again; and as to the husbands, I shall see them all soon enough, if not too soon."

"Hem!" said Leslie, though scarcely knowing why he made that comment.

"That is all," continued the wild girl. "All the rest are insignificant or impossible, except--no, here is one who promises to 'call names.' Now if there is any thing in the world that I don't like except when I do it myself, it is 'calling names.' And now see Madame Boutell. There is nothing of the petty or the insignificant about _her_. She has the 'stars' at command, and is about to open the 'unknown world.' She is _the_ woman, of course! Knows all about the 'great events' of life. Can't be humbugged, and keeps a secret as a steel-trap holds a rat. And now, will you go with us, and protect us, and--Mr. Harding said you were a newspaper man,--will you take down a full, true and circumstantial account of all that occurs? That is what I have been trying to get at for this quarter of an hour. Will you go with us?"

"You are going to-day, then?" asked Leslie.

"Miss Harris insisted upon my accompanying her, and I half consented to do so," said Miss Bell Crawford, apologetically.

"Fiddlestick!" said the merry riddle. "Don't try to beg out of it, Miss Bell! She sent her carriage home, Mr. Leslie, so that we need not be seen going there with it; and there we were going, two lovely and unprotected females, when providence raised up a champion in the person of our new friend."

"Who hopes yet to be an _old_ friend, and who will go with you, with the greatest pleasure," said Leslie. "At the same time"--reflecting a moment--"at the same time I must be as prudent about myself, for certain reasons, which I will explain some day if you wish it--as Miss Crawford has been about her carriage. Oblige me by remaining at the table here and trifling with some creams, chocolate and a few bon-bons, while I leave you for a few minutes--not more than fifteen or twenty. At the end of that time I shall be ready to accompany you."

Giving the necessary orders and throwing a bill to the waiter, Tom Leslie passed rapidly out into the street and walked quite as rapidly up Broadway, until he turned again down Broome Street, which he had quitted with Harding but a little while before. Had he _more_ to do with the Police?

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