CHAPTER II.SCENES IN THE GOTHAM CARAVANSARIE.
And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!O, such deformities!Endymion.
And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!O, such deformities!Endymion.
And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!O, such deformities!Endymion.
And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,
Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,
Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!
O, such deformities!
Endymion.
In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63, that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People, Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists, &c. &c., well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning, at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the day. Mark, we saynotorieties, for that is the word.
From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their parrot-mouthings of them!
Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and musky-ebon personalities beside thefair, frail form of some lean, rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.
Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared, in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”
Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or rathergoldenlocks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of the old Italian painters.
Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised this soulless and meddlesomenon-resistantruffian, in expressing their readiness to hang him, should he be caught within their territory.
Here the weak and puling sectary of some milk-and-water creed rolled up his rheumy eyes amidst the din, and sighed for horror of a “sad, wicked world.” Here the sharp animal eyes, the cool effrontery and hard-faced impudence of ignoramus Professors of all sorts of occult sciences, ologies, and isms, met you, with hungry glances that seemed searching for “the green” in your eye; and mingled with the whole, a sufficiently spicysprinkle of feminine “Professors,” of the same class, whose bold looks and sensual faces were quite sufficient offsets to the extreme etherialisation of their spiritualized doctrines.
Here, in a word, the blank and ever-shocking glare of harmless and positive idiocy absolutely would escape notice at all, or be mistaken for the solid repose of common sense, in contrast with the unnatural sultry wildness of the prevailing and predominating expression!
But this menagerie of mad people held caged, in one of its upper rooms, the object of immediate interest. On entering the apartment, which was an ordinary boarding-house bedchamber, a scene at once shocking and startling was presented. A female, seemingly about thirty-three, was stretched upon a low cot-bed, near the middle of the floor, while on the bed and upon the floor were scattered napkins, which appeared deeply saturated with blood, with which the pillow-case and sheet were also stained. A napkin was pressed with a convulsive clutch of the hands to her mouth, into which, with a low, suffocating cough, which now and then broke the silence, she seemed to be throwing up quantities of blood from what appeared an alarming hemorrhage.
A gentleman, whose neat apparel and fresh benevolent face somehow spoke “physician!” leaned over the woman, with an expression of anxiety, which appeared to be subdued by great effort of a trained will. He bent lower, and in an almost whispered voice, said:
“My dear madam, youmustrestrain yourself. This hemorrhage continues beyond the reach of any remedies, so long as you permit this violent excitement of your maternal feelings to continue. Let me exhort you to patience—to bear the necessary evils of your unfortunate condition with more patience!”
The only answer was a slow despairing shake of the head, accompanied by a deep hysterical groan, which seemed to flood the napkin at her mouth with a fresh effusion of blood, which now trickled between her fingers and down upon her breast.The humane physician turned, with an uncontrollable expression of horrified sympathy and alarm upon his face, and snatching a clean napkin from the table, gently removed the saturated cloth from the clutching pressure of her fingers, and tenderly wiping the blood from her mouth and person, left the clean one in her grasp.
“Be calm! be calm—I pray you! you must some day escape his persecutions. You have friends; they will assist you to obtain a divorce yet, and rescue your child from his clutches. Do, pray now, be calm!” The voice of the good man trembled with emotion while he spoke, and the perspiration started from his forehead.
At this instant the door was suddenly thrown open, and a tall, gaunt man, with a very small round head, leaden eyes, and a wide ungainly mouth, with a projecting under jaw, singularly expressive of animal stolidity, paused on the threshold and coolly looked around the room. The woman sprang forward at the sight, as if to rise, while a fresh gush of blood poured from her mouth, bedabbling her fingers and the sheet. The physician instinctively seized her to prevent her rising, but, resisting the pressure by which he gently strove to restore her head to the pillow, she retained her half-erect position, and with eyes that had suddenly become strangely distorted, or awry in their sockets, she glared towards the intruder for an instant, and then slowly raising her flickering hand, which dripped with her own blood, she pointed at him, and muttered, in a sepulchral voice, that, besides, seemed choking:
“That is he! see him! see him! There stands the monster who would rob me of my babe, as he daily robs me of money.” Here the blood gushed up again, and she was for a moment suffocated into silence, as the object of her denunciation stood perfectly unmoved, while a cold smile half lit his leaden eyes. This seemed to fill the apparently dying woman with renewed and hysterical life. She raised herself yet more erect, and still pointing with her bloody, quivering finger, while herhead tossed to and fro, and the distorted eyes glared staringly out before her, she spoke in a gasping, uncertain way, as if communing with herself. “The wretch taunts me! my murderer dares to sneer! O God! must this always continue? must that brute always follow me up and down in the land, to rob me of the money that I earn—to be my tyrant, my jailor! He will not give me money to pay postage even, out of that I earn abundantly, while he is earning nothing. He will not give me clothes to keep me decent, while I earn enough. He will not give my child shoes to wear, though he is trying to take her from me!”
“That is a lie, Etherial! you know I gave the child a new pair yesterday!” gruffly interposed the man at this stage of the deeply tragic soliloquy, while he stepped forward towards the bed. A choking scream followed, and the blood was spattered over the spread as she fell back screaming—
“Take him away! take him away! He is killing me with his brutality!” and then her head sank in sudden collapse upon the pillow, and the face, which had heretofore looked singularly natural in color, for one in such a dreadful strait from hemorrhage, turned livid pale, while the blood continued to pour upon the pillow from the corners of the relaxed mouth.
The poor physician, whose frame had been shivering with intense excitement during this interview, sprang erect, as the form of what he supposed to be a corpse fell heavily from his arms, and with the natural indignation of a feeling man, fully roused at what he considered the murderous brutality of the husband, rushed forward, and seizing him furiously by the collar, shook and choked him in a perfect ecstacy of rage, shouting, at the same time—
“Unnatural beast! monster! You have killed that poor child at last! murdered your own wife, whom you swore to nourish and protect! Infernal villain! you ought to be drawn and quartered—hanging is too good for you! You saw the terrible condition of the poor victim of your brutalities when you came, yet you persisted! In the name of humanity, I sendyou hence! Death is too light punishment for you!” and he hurled the unresisting wretch—who, by this time, had grown perfectly black in the face under the rough handling of this roused and indeed infuriate humanity—staggering out of the door—and closing it upon him, he proceeded to apply such restoratives as on an examination the real condition of the patient suggested.
A short and anxious investigation proved it to be rather a state of syncope than actual death; and, with a full return of all his professional caution, skill and coolness, he applied himself to the restoration of his patient, with a heart greatly relieved by the discovery that the result he so much dreaded was not yet, and hugging to his kindly breast the consolation “while there is life there is hope!” He paid no attention to clamorous knocks for admission and loud-talking excitement, which the violence of the preceding scene had no doubt caused in alarming the house. In a short time the good doctor cautiously unbolted the door and came forth from the room, treading as though on egg-shells. After leaving careful instructions with the landlady that his patient, who now slept, should under no pretence be disturbed, most especially by the husband, until his return, as her present repose might prove a matter of life and death, he left the house, promising to call again in two hours.
For one hour the woman lay calm and motionless on her gory bed, as if in catalepsy, when to a low, peculiar knock at the door, she sprang up, wide awake, and in the apparent full possession of her faculties.
“Who?” she asked, in a quick, firm tone, as she threw the hair back from her eyes.
To the low response, “I, love!” she stepped quickly from the bed and snatched a shawl from the back of a chair, and by several rapid sideway movements of her feet at the same time, thrust the bloody napkins which strewed the floor beneath the bed, where they would be out of sight, and by a movementalmost as swift, threw a clean “spread” over the blood-stained pillows and sheet, then drawing her large shawl closely over the stained dressing-gown in which she had risen, she rushed first to the glass, and smoothed her hair with an activity that was positively amazing, and then to the door, which she unbolted on the inside—showing that she must have risen to bolt it immediately as the doctor passed out—and admitted a man who was in waiting.
“Ah, my soul’s sister! my Heaven-bride! how is thy spiritual strength this evening?” and at the same time, as her yielding form sank into his outspread arms, he pressed her lips with his, adding, “I salute thy chaste spirit!”
“Brother of my soul, I was weary, but now I am at rest. I was wounded and fainting by the way, but the good Samaritan has come!” and she turned her eyes upward to his with a melting expression of confiding abandon.
“Angel!” accompanied by a closer and convulsive clasp, was the response.
“What do they say of poor me again, to-day, those cruel wicked people outside?” she asked, with eyes still reverentially upraised to his, as they moved slowly with clasped arms towards the cot, on the side of which they sat, she still leaning against his bosom.
“My good sister, they say what evil spirits always prompt men to say of the good, who, like the Prophets, are sent to be stoned and persecuted on earth. You should not regard such. There are those who know you in the spirit, to whom it has been revealed through the spiritual sense, that you are good and true, as well as in the right, and through such, you will find strength of the Father.”
“Oh, you are so strong in spiritual mightiness that you do not sympathise with the weaknesses of we humbler mortals! I wonder, indeed, how you can forgive them?” and her downcast eyes were furtively raised to his. The man wore his hair thrown back over his head and behind his ears. He drew himself upslightly at this, and stroked back his locks, then placing his hand with patriarchal solemnity upon her bowed head, proceeded in a somewhat louder tone. “My simple child—my soul-sister, I should say, you are hardly upon the threshold of the true wisdom. Your knowledge of the law of spiritual correspondence is yet too incomplete for you to understand how entirely good has been mistaken for evil, and evil confounded with good in the world. For instance—it is called evil by the ignorant world, for a brother man to caress thee in the spirit as I have caressed thee but now. The imaginations of a world that lieth in evil are impure. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks!’ The great doctrine of correspondence teaches that there are two lives—the spiritual and the animal. The passions of the animal are in the fleshly lusts; those of the spiritual are in no wise such, they are in the Heavenly sphere, they are of love and wisdom. Thus, my caress in this Heavenly sphere is of no sin to thee, for by and through it I convey to you, my spiritual sister, the strength of love and wisdom for which your heart yearns. Thus—”
As he stooped his head to renew the unresisted caress, the door flew open again, and the man with the wide mouth, the hideous chin and the leaden eye, stood again upon the threshold, and as the affrighted pair looked up they saw he was backed by the curious faces of half-a-dozen chambermaids, jealous of the honor of thehouse, flanked by the indignant landlady and a score of prying, curious, sharp-eyed faces, which might be recognised at a glance as belonging to those pickled seraphs of reform, known as “free-spoken” spinsters in New England.
“There, they are at it!” shouted the man with the gaping mouth. “I told you so! I told you that Professor was always kissing her!”
“Yes!”
“There they are, sure enough!”
“I always thought so!”
“The honor of my house!” bristled the landlady, striding forward. “I did not expect this of you, Professor!”
“Madam!” said the gentleman with his hair behind his ears, striding forward as he released the suddenly collapsed and seemingly lifeless form he had just held within his embrace, and which fell back now heavily upon the pillow-spread, which was instantly discolored by a new gush of blood from the mouth. “I was administering, with all my zeal, spiritual comfort to this poor, sick and dying sister, when you burst in! See her condition now!”
He waved his hand towards the tragic figure. “The Professor” occupied a parlor on the first floor, beside two bed-rooms adjoining this, and being on the palmy heights of his renown and plenitude of purse, it was not convenient for the landlady to quarrel with him at present. “Ah, if that is the case, Professor, I beg you to pardon us. The husband of this woman has misrepresented you and your beneficent motives, and accuses you of all sorts of improprieties. We came up, at his urgency, to see for ourselves, and the shocking condition in which we find her now, proves that the ravings of the husband are, as she has always represented them, insane.”
“I’ve seen you kissing her before!” roared the husband, advancing threateningly upon the Professor, who, however spiritual in creed, did not now appear particularly spirited, as he turned very pale, retreated backwards, and holding up his two trembling hands imploringly, exclaimed—“Hold! hold! my dear brother! It was a spiritual kiss! I meant you no harm, nor that angel who lies there dying! Our kiss was pure and holy as the new snow. Hold him! hold him! Don’t let him hurt me! I am a non-resistant! I am for peace!”
“Your holy kisses! I don’t believe in your holy kisses!” gnashed the enraged husband, still following him up with warlike demonstrations; but here the easily appeased landlady interposed once more, to save the honor of her house in preventing a fight.
“No blows in my house!” she shrieked, as she threw herself between the parties. “The Professor is a man of God,and shall not be abused here; shame on you, Aminadab, with your poor, persecuted wife there, dying before your face! Everybody will believe what she says about your persecutions now!”
“Bah, you don’t know that woman! she’s no more dying than you are!” grunted the fellow, whose wrath fortunately seemed to be of that kind that a straw might turn it aside. All the women rolled up their eyes and lifted their two hands at this speech.
“What a brute!”
“The horrid, murdering wretch! and she bleeding at the mouth, and from the lungs, too!”
“Lord save the poor woman’s soul, with a husband like that!”
And other speeches of like character were ejaculated by all the women present.
At this moment a fresh effusion of blood, accompanied by a low groan, from the mouth of the suffering patient, flooded the clean spread with its purple current, and the horrified females rushed from the room, screaming—
“He’s killed her at last, poor thing!”
“Where’s the doctor?”
“She’s dying of his brutality—run for the doctor!” At this moment, with a hasty and heavy step, that gentleman was heard advancing along the passage, followed by a crowd of pale, frightened-looking women. He strode into the room.
“What now?—what’s to pay?” and his eye fell on the trembling form of the brutal husband, who had by no means forgotten the rough handling he had received, and now skulked and quailed like a whipped cur, as his eye saw the instant thunder darken on the brow of the doughty doctor.
“You here again—you brutal fellow? I shall instantly bind you over to keep the peace toward this unfortunate woman, whose life you are daily endangering by your brutalities. Take yourself off, sir!” Aminadab waited for no second invitation, but availed himself of the open doorway.
Without noticing the spiritual professor, who had drawn himself into as small space as possible in one corner, the good man advanced to the side of his patient with an anxious, flurried manner.
“What can that besotted wretch have been doing to her again?” and he gently placed his fingers upon her pulse, and shook his head gravely as he did so.
“Very low! very low, indeed!—nearly absolute syncope again! This is horrible! How sorry I am that I was compelled to leave her for a moment.”
“Is she really in danger, doctor?” asked the spiritual professor, advancing with recovered assurance.
“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—
“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.
“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.
“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”
The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of his patient.
The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious judgment and sensibilities,seemed to offer the sole alternative to death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed, was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the two occasions we have mentioned.
As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures, but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation, he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.
The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings, he had been strongly interested.
She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any material sense, had never for an instant crossedhis pure soul. Now there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have recognised it.
Her arms, which he now remembered to have beenbarein all his late interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white, and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself this wandering of thought.
What! could it be that one so habitually pure in feeling as he, could permit the intrusion at such an hour of impure associations? Such things were unknown to his life, so disinterested, so spotless, so humane. What could it be that had caused such feelings to possess him thus unusually? It could not be possible she was conscious of the position in which her body was thrown. Was there some strange spell about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of these unnatural fires?
The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other objects in the busy street.
The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. He felt alarmed, nay, even guilty. He knew not why. We shall see!