 | CHAPTER X.
HOBBLESHANK AT HIS LODGINGS. The career of Puffer Hopkins |  |
10. CHAPTER X.
HOBBLESHANK AT HIS LODGINGS.
The interest with which Mr. Fyler Close watched the
flight of Hobbleshank was by no means diminished, when
he discovered faring forth from behind a stable-door, where
he had lain in ambush, and keeping, at an easy distance,
diligently in the track of the wrathful old gentleman, no
other than Ishmael Small. Speeding along in a very eccentric
route, sometimes on the pavement, again in the
middle of the road, and then, with one foot on the curb
and one in the gutter, Hobbleshank made his way through
the straitened purlieu of Pell street: Pell street that lies
just off of the great thoroughfare of the Bowery with a
world of its own, where great mackerel-venders' trumpets,
nearly as long as the street itself, are blown all day long,
where vegetable-waggons choke the way and keep up a
reek of greens and pot-herbs until high noon, and where, if
all the signs and omens that pervade the street—sights,
sounds and smells—are of any worth, the denizens lead a
retired life, with a lenten diet, ignorant of what the great
world beyond may think of beefless dinners or breakfasts
after Pythagoras.
Through this choice precinct they sped, Hobbleshank pushing
swiftly on, and his pursuer following at a distance with
equal pace, darting in at entry doors and out again in a
glance, to avoid discovery, if the old man should look back;
and so they soon entered the mouth of Doyer street—the
Corkscrew lane—through which it needs skilful pilotage
to bear one safely, every house a turn, and every curb-stone
set at a different angle, for thus, like a many-jointed snake
Doyer street creeps out of the damp and green-grown
marsh of Pell street, upon the open sunny slope of Chatham
Square.
Following the whim of the street, which must needs have
its way, they got forth into the broad region of the Square,
along which Hobbleshank speeded at a good round rate,
while Mr. Small regaled himself with an eleemosynary ride
on the foot-board of a hackney-coach, where he sat comfortably
balanced and keeping the old man in view until
they reached Mulberry street, when he dismounted,—just in
followed Hobbleshank warily into a building some dozen
or two paces off of the main street. It was a dark, ruinous,
gloomy-looking old house—built on a model that was lost
twenty years ago and never found again—and had a wide
greedy hall, that swallowed up as many chairs, tables and
other fixtures, as the various tenants chose to cast into it.
Up the broad rambling stairs Hobbleshank ascended,
and by the time he had attained a cramped room at
the head of the second flight, Mr. Small had accomplished
the same journey, crept along and clambered up a narrow
cornice in the throat of the hall, and gaining, by an exercise
of dexterity peculiar to himself, a small window in the wall,
was looking very calmly and reflectively through the same
at two aged women upon whose presence Hobbleshank had
entered.
One of them sate by the hearth: she was small and
shrivelled, with a pinched and wrinkled countenance; so
shrivelled and thin, and seemingly void of life-like qualities,
as if she hovered only on the borders of the world, and was
ready to go at any moment's summons. The other was stouter,
though she too was bowed with years and bore in her features
traces of many past cares; which she seemed zealous
to make known by larding her discourse with great sighs,
which she heaved at the rate of twenty a minute, while she
bustled about the chamber and busied herself in various
household offices.
These scarcely noticed the entrance of Hobbleshank, who
opened the door gently, and stealing in proceeded to a corner
of the room, where, taking a chair and turning his back
upon them, he bowed his head upon his hand and was
silent.
“I tell you—you have been a blessed woman, Dorothy—
that you have,” cried the elder, in a sharp wiry voice from
the chimney-corner, where she was painfully employed in
rubbing her withered palms together over the blaze, “a
blessed woman. There was my first born, Tom, with as
handsome a pair of blue eyes as mother ever looked at,
did n't he fall into the old Brewery well, and die there,
like a malt-rat, shouting for help, which came, of course, just
the minute after he was stifled. Always so—always so, I
tell you!”
“Whose roof was blown off in the great September gale
rejoined the other, heaving a sigh of course. “Whose son
was buried in a trance for three days and better, and when
he comes to again has to be taught his alphabet all over
like a suckling child? Your loss—Lord preserve us!—
was a drop in the bucket, so speaking, when the brewers
wound it up—nothing more.”
And the stout old lady laughed gently at the thought of
the brawny brewers tugging away at the rope for so lively
a hoist, and then fell straightway to sighing.
“Why, you talk like a simpleton,” answered the other
sharply, “a natural simpleton in a dotage: there was a
child of mine, Dorothy, you mind it well—you used to say
he had hawk's eyes—so wild and bright and glancing.
That boy went mad, I think, and struck at me—me, his
mother—and that you know too, for many's the look you've
taken at the old scar—me, who had watched his steps all
through infancy and childhood and boyhood, up to the very
manhood that gave him strength to strike: smote her down
to the earth—was it he or the fiend that did it?—and
would have snatched her life away, but for the men who
beat him off like a dog? There was Joe, too, my dear,”
continued aunt Gatty “that went down of a dark drearisome
night, in the wild Gulf Stream, crying Heaven's help!
in vain, and snatching at the waves, as old Buncle,
the ship-master, told me, like a madman.” The old
woman shook as in a palsy, and waved her head painfully
to and fro, as she recited these passages of past trouble.
“True, true, true,” said her companion, who had paused
in her labor and watched her for a moment, “true; just as
true as that Jacob—my Jacob, I used to call him,
but now he's anybody's or nobody's—was carried off to
prison by cruel men, ten times fiercer than your Gulf
Streams and your Tornadoes—had his limbs chained, and
was put to hewing great blocks of stone like a devil on
penance—taken away from good day wages and bound in
a jail—”
“Peace! you foolish praters!” exclaimed Hobbleshank,
starting up at this moment from the deep silence in which
he had been buried, turning toward them and lifting both
his arms tremblingly up, “Peace! while I read you a page,
a black page, out of the book of lamentations—that should
make the blood creep in your old veins like the brook-ripples
serene farm-house—with a father, a mother, yes, merciful
God! a young, happy, beautiful mother.” He paused and
bowed his head, but in a few minutes he proceeded, “and
a young child that has just crept out upon the bleak common
of this world of ours, lying in her bosom, as it might
be Adam and his spouse, in some chosen corner of their old
garden. Some devil or other secretly engulphs all the fortune
of that household, tortures with a slow, killing pain,
the father of the family, by ever-lending to him and ever-driving
him for horrid interests—making him toil and moil
in that great, inexorable mill of usury and borrowing: till
his brain turns—his old reason totters like a weak tower
that shakes in the wind:—he flies from his home wandering
to and fro, he knows not whither—straying back to it
at times, after long lunatic absences; and one day—there 's
a word that should prick your foolish old hearts like a
sword's point—coming suddenly back, he finds his fair
young wife dead—yes dead!—starved into a skeleton so
pale and ghastly that anatomists and men of death would
smile to look on it—and the boy—the boy that should have
gone with her, she loved him so, into the grave she had
traveled to through hunger, or have staid back to inherit
that roof that was his and cheer up this sad old heart that
is mine—snatched away, secretly, nobody could tell how,
or when, or whither—and the very nurse that should have
tarried to keep company with death in that house of sorrow
—was likewise fled; and I, an old, shattered, uncertain
poor creature, left alone in the midst of all this desolation—
as if it became me—and had only waited for me as its
rightful master and emperor. Well; God's blessing with
you—and if you have seen greater trouble than that, you
have borne it merrily and are miracles of old women to have
lived through it to this day!”
Saying this, the old man started up from his chair, and
staggering across the room, trembling in every limb,
he hurried into a small chamber at the end of the apartment
and cast himself upon his couch. The two old
women, abashed by the passion and energy of the speaker,
were silent for a while and moved not a limb. They both
sate looking toward the door where Hobbleshank had entered,
as if they expected him, momently to emerge.
“A sad tale; a sad tale, in truth,” at length said the
younger. “Was the boy never heard of?”
“Never, that I know, from that dark day to this,” answered
the other, mumbling as she spake and shrinking back into the
chimney, as if what she recalled stood shrouded before her
in a deadly form; “Search was not made for him, until
years after the mother's death—the worms' banquet had
been set and cleared away many a day—when the old man,
who had wandered away, as soon as the funeral was
over, the Lord knows whither, came back, and loitered
and lingered about his former residence, the old farm-house,
in the suburbs of the city, day after day, watching in
vain, hour by hour, for the forthcoming of some one who
could tell the history of what was past. The building is
closed and deserted, and has no historian but itself, or such
as would not tell, if they could, the fate of the lost child, or
the secret of his death, if dead he be.”
“And where is the nurse?”
“Absent; missing; drowned, or murdered, or dead in
due course of nature; nobody can tell. The house is deserted
and gone to decay, and is said to belong to a
wretched miser, whose right came, somehow or other,
through the child's death. There's the whole story, and
this old man, who came to live with me so long ago—even
before you knew me—and has never once spoken of it till
this night, is the only wreck of the troubles and cares and
crosses that howled about it, till they found entrance,
twenty years ago! Something has stirred him strangely,
or he would not have spoken this night.”
“Perhaps his mind is failing,” said the other: “for when
that 's ebbing away, it always uncovers what is at the bottom,
and brings to light things hidden in its depths for
years.”
“He may have seen some object associated with
old times that has touched him,” answered aunt Gatty
“visited, perhaps, the farm-house itself; or have chanced
upon some person connected with these terrible events.”
“It may be so. But let us to bed, my dear old friend,
and pray that the Spirit of Peace be in the old man's slumbers.”
“Amen!” said her companion: and extinguishing their
light, and carefully drawing a curtain before the chamber-window
where Hobbleshank lodged, that the morning beam
the quiet and darkness of night that wrapped them all
about.
Ishmael Small, who had greedily watched them all
through, after stretching his blank features forward into
the gloom of the apartment to catch any further word that
might chance to fall, crept down from his post of observation
and stole cautiously away.
| CHAPTER X.
HOBBLESHANK AT HIS LODGINGS. The career of Puffer Hopkins | |