VIII.
THE walk from the post-office to West Pomegranate Street is not very short, but Helen was at the Miss Amys’ door before she knew. The elder Miss Amy came herself to answer the bell. She recognised Helen presently through her veil, and welcomed her with a decayed-gentlewoman-politeness, explaining that she and her sister kept no servant when their lodgers were out of town. Helen had begun to say, after the preliminary parley about health and the weather, that she had come to see if she could take board with them, when the younger Miss Amy came in. She shook her head in response to the elder Miss Amy’s reference of the matter to her, and said she was sorry, but it was a mistake: they only let their rooms furnished now, and people must find table-board at some of the neighbouring houses. At Helen’s look of disappointment, she said she knew it was very disagreeable going out to meals; but their lodgers were nearly always gentlemen, and they did not mind it.
“Is the lady who wishes the rooms a young person?” asked Miss Amy.
Helen saw that they thought she was looking up a place for some one else, and that they were far from imagining her errand to be on her own behalf. They saw in her an amiable young lady, interesting herself for some one who was out of town perhaps, and wished to come in for the winter. It cost Helen more to set them right than she could have believed; the first steps downward in the world are not so painful from the surprise of your equals as from that of people on the level to which you descend.
“It’s for myself that I want the rooms,” said Helen, and both the Miss Amys said “Oh!” and then were silent, till Helen asked if they could recommend her to some good place where she could find both board and lodging under the same roof. The Miss Amys thought a while. All the neighbouring places were very large boarding-houses, and the company very promiscuous. “I don’t think you would like it, Miss Harkness,” said the younger Miss Amy.
“I’m afraid it isn’t a question of what I shall like, any more,” said Helen bravely. “It’s necessary that I should economise, and if I can get a room there cheaply, I must not be fastidious.”
“Oh!” said the younger Miss Amy a little more expressively than before.
“Still,” continued the young girl, “I should like it better if I could find some place where there were not many other boarders.”
The elder Miss Amy looked at the younger with a blankness for which the glare of her spectacles was mainly responsible, and asked, “How would Mrs. Hewitt’s do?”
“Mrs. Hewitt’s might do,” assented the younger sister. “Her rooms are good, and the Smileys liked her table. But Miss Harkness would find it very different from what she’s been used to.” She seemed to add this caution with a certain indefinable insinuation, that the change might be a useful lesson.
“Oh, no doubt,” said Helen, “but I shall not mind, if—”
“It’s quite a proper place in every way,” continued the younger Miss Amy, “and the neighbourhood unexceptionable. If you can get the use of the parlour to see your friends in, it would be desirable.”
“You won’t keep all your acquaintance,” she added, “but some will remain true. We retained all that we wished.”
“Yes,” said Helen drily, not choosing that Miss Amy should assume their equality in that fashion. The Miss Amys had, in fact, declined to their present station from no great social eminence, but the former position had been growing in distinction ever since they lost it, and they had so long been spoken of as “such gentlewomen,” that they had come to look back upon it as something quite commanding; and there was a note of warning for Helen in the younger Miss Amy’s remark, as if all persons must not expect to be so fortunate as they. “I should like,” said the young girl with some stateliness, “very much to see Mrs. Hewitt. Will you give me her address?”
“I will write it on one of our cards,” said Miss Amy, who found with difficulty, in a portable writing-desk on the table, a card inscribed with The Misses Amy in the neat pencilling of a professional card-writer. The reception-room of these ladies was respectable in threadbare brussels, and green reps; a fire of English cannel coal, in the grate, seemed to have been a long time laid, and the lumps of coal would have been the better for dusting. The house was clean, but it had the dusty smell, which small city houses have at the end of summer before their furnace fires are lit, and Helen had found the Miss Amys not such nice Miss Amys as she had thought them in former days, when she had come to their house to call upon some friends there. When the card was inscribed with Mrs. Hewitt’s address, she rose to receive it.
She felt strangely depressed, and the tears came into her eyes as she pulled down her veil and hurried away. She had packed a bag before leaving Beverley, with the purpose of not going back that night, for she had not thought but that she should go at once to the Miss Amys, and had resisted all entreaties that she would return and tell the Butlers about it. She would not have gone to the Miss Amys now on any account, and yet she felt somehow hurt at not finding their house open to her in the way she had imagined. She had a cowardly satisfaction in thinking that she could easily get the six o’clock train to Beverley after she had seen Mrs. Hewitt.
Like the elder Miss Amy, that lady answered her door in person when Helen rang, and taking the card, with the explanation that Helen gave her, led the way to her reception room. It took shape from the swell-front; and the rocking-chair, into which Mrs. Hewitt sank, stood between the two windows, by which she could easily command the life without, up street and down. What had been the fireplace was occupied by a register; over the mantel hung the faded photograph of an officer in uniform; in the corner was a whatnot, with shells and daguerreotypes in cases, and baskets of sewing on its successive shelves; against the wall, opposite the windows, stood a sewing-machine; the carpet was a tapestry of moss pattern in green colour; the window shades had a band of gilt around their edges, relieved in green, and the reps of the sofa and chairs were green. Simple and few as these appointments were, they had an unreconciled look, as if they had not been bought to match, but were fortuitous combinations on which some one else had lost money.
Mrs. Hewitt asked her to sit down, but Helen remained standing, and said that she was a little pressed for time, and must ask at once if she could have a room with board.
“I don’t know as I’ve got anything ’twould suit you, but we can look,” said Mrs. Hewitt, apparently disappointed in not being first allowed to talk it all over. “Did you want something on suit, or singly?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Helen.
“Do you want more than one room?”
“O no! I only want one.”
The landlady preceded Helen up the stripe of linen that covered half the narrow carpeting on the cramped staircase. “Parlour,” she announced on arriving at the first landing, as she threw open the door of a large room furnished in much-worn brown plush. “Goes with the rooms on this floor; I always let ’em on suit. Now, if you wanted anything on suit—”
“I only want one room, and I don’t care for a private parlour,” said Helen.
The landlady glanced up the next flight of stairs. “That whole floor is let to one family — lady and gentleman and little boy — and then there’s only a room on the top floor besides,” said Mrs. Hewitt.
“I’ll look at it, please,” said Helen, and followed the landlady up. The room had a pretty bed and bureau; it was very neat, and it was rather spacious. “Is there any one else on this floor?” asked Helen, feeling sure that the cook and second-girl must be her neighbours.
The landlady pushed open the door across the little passage-way. “There’s an art-student in this room,” she said.
“Art-student?” gasped Helen.
“Young lady from Nashua,” said the landlady.
“Oh!” cried Helen, remembering with relief that art-students in our time and country are quite as apt to be of one sex as another, and thinking with a smile that she had been surprised not to smell tobacco as soon as Mrs. Hewitt had said �
�art-student.” She reflected that she had once been an art-student herself, and wondered what the sketches of the young lady from Nashua were like. “What would be the price of this room?”
The landlady leaned against the side of the bed. “Seven dollars,” she said in an experimental tone. “I used to get my ten and twelve dollars for it, right after the war.”
“I will take it,” said Helen, who found it much less than she feared. “And I should like to come at once.”
“To-night?” asked the landlady, looking at Helen. “Yes, if the room’s ready.”
“Oh, the room’s ready. But — did you bring a trunk?”
“I forgot! It’s at the station. I can send for it.”
“O yes, the express is right round the corner from here. You just give ’em your check. But you better not lose any time. They ‘re late sometimes, any way.” —
“Very well,” said Helen, childishly pleased at having transacted the business so successfully. “I will take the room from to-day, and I will pay you for the first week now.”
“Just as you please,” said Mrs. Hewitt.
Helen drew out her porte-monnaie, and said, “The Miss Amys can tell you about me.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” answered Mrs. Hewitt, politely. She had perhaps been perplexed to know how she should hint anything ‘about references to this young lady who took an attic room with such a high and mighty air. “Their card was sufficient.”
When Helen came back from her errand to the express office, and went to her room, she laid aside her things and made herself at home in it She did not know in the least what her life was to be there; but she felt that this, whatever it was not, was escape and independence, and beginning. A rapid calculation had shown her that her payment of seven dollars a week would not encroach much upon her capital, and somehow she would earn enough money to meet her other expenses. She could not sit still; she rose and opened her closet and found it deep and convenient; she pulled out the bureau drawers, and they were very sweet and clean. She discovered a little cupboard with shelves where she thought she would put her books. The room was very complete; there was even a hook in the ceiling by the window where some one must have hung a bird-cage. Helen was happy, without accusing herself, for the first time since her father died. She smiled to herself at her landlady’s queerness, and was glad, as young people are, to be housed along with a character. She wondered how the art-student looked, and who the family could be. At the sound of the tea-bell she felt the emotion of a healthful hunger.
There was a dish of cream toast, very hot and fragrant; hotter, and more fragrant still, there was a dish of oysters, delicately stewed and flavoured; in a plated basket in the centre of the table was a generous stack of freshly sliced lady-cake. “From Copeland’s,” Mrs. Hewitt explained, when she passed it. “Mr and Mrs. Evans are out to tea, and I thought we wouldn’t wait for Miss Root. She’s late sometimes. Did you like your oysters?”
“Delicious!” said Helen.
“Yes, I think there’s nothing like a drop — not more than a drop — of sherry in your stew, just when it comes to the stew. I don’t believe in any thickenin’ myself; but if you must have it, let it be cracker crumbs: flour makes it so kind of slippy.” Mrs. Hewitt went on to enlarge upon many different kinds of dishes, and then from whatever obscure association of ideas, she said: “When you firsts came in to-day, before I fairly looked at the Miss Amys’ card, I thought you’d been buryin’ a husband.
I don’t see how I could took you if you had. Widows are more trouble in a house! Boston family?”
“What?” cried Helen.
“Your folks Boston people?”
“O yes,” replied the girl, and she submitted with what grace she could to the inquisition into her past that followed. “I’ve never lived anywhere else;” and nothing seemed stranger than this when she came to think it over in her room. Here in the heart of Boston, she was as remote from the; Boston she had always known as if it were a thousand miles away; from herself of the time when she lived in that far-off Boston she seemed divided by centuries. Into what a strange and undreamt-of world she had fallen! She did not dislike it. On the contrary, she thought she should be rather content in it.
Without definite aims as yet for the future, she fancied that she should try to be wholly of her present world, and ignore that in which she used to live. Already she felt alien to it so far as to wish that the Butlers would not send people to call on her, nor come much themselves. She knew that she could adapt herself to her circumstances, but she dreaded the pain of their inability to realise her in them, and felt that their unhappiness about her would be more than she could bear. She planned a geographical limit within which she could live a long time and not meet any one whom she had known, and she resolved next day to begin her exploration of her solitude. The dark gathered into the room, and the window showed a black frame against the sky before she thought of lighting her gas. She was shaking her match out, as women do, when a light tap at her door standing ajar startled her, and then the door was pushed open, and the figure of a tall girl stood on the threshold. “Miss Root: Miss Harkness, I believe,” said the figure. “Will you lend me a match, please? I waited for you to light your gas so as to be sure you had matches before I bothered you. It’s such a long journey down-stairs.”
Helen smiled in her most radiant way, and got the matches, saying as she held them forward, “Won’t you come in, please?”
“No, I thank you,” said Miss Root, taking one match only. “I begin badly. But you won’t find me a great borrower. Have you got everything you want in your room?”
“Yes, everything, I believe,” said Helen, sweeping it with a comprehensive glance.
“You’ll find Mrs. Hewitt pretty prompt. You won’t have anything to complain of, unless you mind being talked to death. Good-night,” and drawing the door to after her, Miss Root returned to her own room.
Before she slept, Helen heard the street door open and shut, and then voices ascending to the third floor: a lady’s voice, and a gentleman’s voice, and a sleepy little boy’s voice.
“Well, this is the last time we shall take Tom to the theatre,” said the lady’s voice — the voice of spent nerves.
“Yes,” said the gentleman’s voice. “We shall confine ourselves to the circus after this, Tom.”
“Circuses are the best, any way,” said the child’s voice.
“Hush! Don’t speak so!” cried the lady.
“Why, they are, mamma,” insisted the boy.
“This is a question of morals, not of opinions, Tom,” said the father. “You ‘re not to prefer circuses when they ‘re inflicted as a punishment.”
They had now reached their door, as it appeared, for a light flashed into the hall below as from gas turned up.
The lady’s voice was heard again: “His forehead’s burning hot! If that child should have a fever — Here, feel his forehead!”
“Forehead’s all right!” responded the heavier voice.
“I shall give him three of aconite!” cried the lady.
“Give him three thousand, but put him to bed,” assented the gentleman.
“Will you shut the door?” implored the lady. “Waking the whole house!”
“I haven’t refused, my dear,” said the gentleman. “Why do you always—”
The door closed, expressively, and not, as Helen fancied, by the gentleman’s hand. “The Evanses,” she inferred. She fell asleep wondering if she could indeed be the same girl who had talked that morning to Lord Rainford on the rocks at Beverley.
IX.
HELEN saw the Evanses in going to breakfast. They came down-stairs just after her, Mr. Evans leading his boy by his extended forefinger, and Mrs. Evans coming behind, and twitching something about the child’s dress into place, as mothers do.
“Mrs. Hewitt,” said Mr. Evans, as they sat down at table, “I have been some time in your house, but you must have older friends than I, and I don’t understand why t
he law has honoured me as it has.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you ‘re talkin’ about,” said Mrs. Hewitt, pouring the coffee.
“Well, I don’t, myself,” returned Mr. Evans, “and I thought I would get you to explain. You don’t find yourself unusually infirm of mind, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Hewitt candidly.
“And you haven’t experienced anything like a return of extreme youth?”
“What is the man after?” cried Mrs. Hewitt.
“Then why should you be taken care of in any special manner, and why should I, of all people, be called upon to take care of you? Here’s a paper,” Mr. Evans continued, taking a document from his pocket, “that I found slipped under my door this morning. It makes a personal appeal to me, in the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to become your trustee. Of course, it’s very flattering and all that, but I’d much rather not. You must allow me to resign, Mrs. Hewitt. I never did understand business very well, and—”
“How’d they ever get into this house without my knowing it? That’s what I should like to find out!” said Mrs. Hewitt, gazing absently at the paper which Mr. Evans had given her.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“Pshaw!” cried his landlady. “You don’t say you never was trusteed before? And boarded round as much as you have!”
“Trusteed! Is it so common a thing as to have a participial form? Then I needn’t have any scruples about resigning?”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 198