University of Virginia Library

26. CHAPTER XXVI.
ROMANCE IN FACE OF REALITY.

One glance at the young woman who had so abruptly and cheerfully addressed
her convinced Nestoria that she was an entire stranger.

The new arrival was stylish, and even rather boldly showy; and yet she
was not unpleasing in either person or demeanor. She was slightly above the
middle height of her sex, and seemed all the taller because she was slender
almost to leanness; but she was noticeably easy and willowy in her movements,
and, one might concede, graceful. Her dark-red hair was abundant and tastefully
arranged; her tawny-hazel eyes were bright, and her complexion dazzlingly
fair; her features were regular enough, and her teeth were of sparkling
whiteness. Notwithstanding her brusque, confident address, and a certain
twinkle of affectation and sentimentality which perked about the corners
of her flexible mouth, her appearance was on the whole so much in her favor
that it would have been difficult to decide at first glance whether she were or
were not a person of good society and of culture. In age she might have been
anywhere from twenty to twenty-three.

“I never was here before,” said Nestoria, after one startled glance at this
sociable apparition.

“You needn't be ashamed of being here,” replied the other with a prompt
tartness, which, slight as it was, militated against her claims to high breeding.
She had noticed the girl's involuntary recoil as if to fly, and had attributed it
to mortified vanity at being caught in a Fulton Market oyster-shop, and had
felt offended thereby. “I often take my morning refreshment in this place,”
she continued, in a curiously stilted tone which was intended to be dignified and
impressive. “The people who eat here are just as nobly-natured as the minions
of wealth who tread the high-piled velvety carpets of Delmonico's. Patrick,
bring me a stew and coffee.”

“I am not ashamed to eat here,” replied Nestoria, coloring under a reproof
which seemed to her harshly hostile. Then, feeling keenly that she was
hopelessly wretched and doubting whether she were not darkly criminal, she
added in a mournful whisper, speaking to herself rather than to this stranger.
“Any place on earth is good enough for me.”

The other had already opened her copy of the “Spasmodic” and settled
herself to read the harrowing tale of “Angela's Revenge;” but on hearing
this utterance of an undisguisable despair, she looked up in wonder and with
an expression of honest though sentimental interest.

“And have you seen better days?” she asked in her affected, melodramatic
monotone, whimsical enough surely, but not devoid of sincerity.

Nestoria made no answer, but she thought of a lost home and a lost love,
and the tears brimmed her eyes.

“Poo-o-or cheild!” murmured the subscriber to the “Spasmodic.” “Has
the da-a-ark hand of misfortune been so insupportably heavy on thee?”

She mouthed her words like an actress in a fourth-rate theatre. She was
little less than ludicrous, and yet she meant to be truly sympathetic, and was
doing her best to console.

The homeless one still made no reply; her whole soul was busied in striving
to quell her emotion; she was obliged to fight hard to repress sobs and
convulsive twitchings.

“Poo-o-or, poo-o-or distressed spirit!” continued the stranger, stretching a

hand across the table and laying it on a quivering shoulder. “Canst thou
not tell me thy sorrow?'

“I have nothing to tell,” replied Nestoria, crushing more emotions in one
breath than the other had known in her whole life.

“Let us swear to respect each other's secrets,” exclaimed the sympathizer,
with an enthusiasm which was strongly tinctured with romantic joy. “You
have a secret of deep and dark misfortune, and you shall not divulge it even
to me, nor will I ask it. I also have my burden of woe. But let silence enfold
it. Why don't you eat your stew?”

“I will,” said Nestoria, and made a resolute attempt so to do, not from
hunger, but to beat off faintness.

The stranger meanwhile devoured crackers, oysters, and chopped cabbage
with appetite, having no doubt found them by experience to be very supporting
under burdens of woe.

“Shall I meet you here again?” she presently inquired.

“I don't know,” replied Nestoria. “I don't know where I shall live.”

“No home, no labor, no object in life, no anchor of duty, no star of hope
in the future?” sighingly queried the other.

“I want a home,” said the friendless girl, looking up with a glimmer of
hope in her piteous eyes. “Can you show me a place where I can live and
work by myself? A cheap place?”

“Let us be frank with each other,” exclaimed the tawny-eyed one, throwing
out her hand in a manner which she conceived to be gracefully expressive
or noble and generous emotion. “My name is Imogen Eleonore Jones. What
is yours?”

“I wish you would be satisfied with calling me Nettie,” answered Nestoria,
after hunting through her mind for a false name, and deciding that she could
not assume one.

“I will,” promised Miss Jones with delight. “Then you really, really
have a secret! How fascinating and how pathetic! You shall never lack a
friend while I live, and never, never will I ask your family name, nor interrogate
you of your sorrow. You want to abide and labor alone. What can
you do? Can you teach school? Oh, no, never! Then you would be seen
and known; you would be the cynosure of the insolent, prying public eye;
you can't teach.”

“I can paint fans,” suggested Nestoria despairingly, for just then that industry
seemed a feeble resource.

“Paint fans,” repeated Miss Jones. “But can you sell them after you
have painted them?” she added with a practical sense which did not seem to
be foreign to her real character, notwithstanding her melodramatic tones and
phrases. “Well, if you can't, I can, or at least I will. I will hawk them from
mart to mart, and bring you the proceeds of your æsthetic travail. Come
with me. There is a chamber vacant next to mine. You shall abide in it,
and I will be your lone sentinel. Have you any money?”

“I have eighty dollars,” replied the confiding Nestoria.

“It will last a while,” said Miss Jones after a moment of business-like reflection,
during which she cast up some small computation in her head. “And
meantime we will beat the airs of fortune with your exquisite painted fans.
What are you doing?”

“I am going to pay for my breakfast,” explained Nestoria, fumbling for
her purse.

“I thought perhaps you were drawing a poniard,” observed Imogen Eleonore
Jones, with a slight air of disappointment. “I was about to hold your
hand, and exhort you to hope on, hope ever. But don't pay. Put up your little
treasure. Let me defray the expenses of this fortunate interview. I have
a salary of nine hundred dollars for teaching, and I have five hundred or so
in bank, the savings of three long years. I insist upon paying for both.”

Nestoria submitted; a salary of nine hundred dollars seemed immense to
her; if she had possessed it, she would have undertaken to relieve the poor of
an entire city.

“Now let us buy some fruit,” continued Miss Jones, when she had wiped
out the two modest accounts. “This is my matutinal marketing, as well as
my matutinal walk. I come hither to purchase peaches for my noon collation,
because they are cheaper here than on the stalls up town. I take a light
breakfast; then I take a light lunch of fruit and rolls; then I try every day to
afford one good meal, my dinner. One has to economize, you know, on the
salary of an instructor,” she explained with a courage for which we must
honor her, so humiliating is that word “economy” to many people of narrow
incomes. “Now don't you buy anything for yourself,” she insisted. “I will
market for two to-day. All I want is that you should carry your own paper
of peaches, like a true, high-minded woman, who is conscious of her own
dignity.”

“I will carry both the parcels,” offered Nestoria, putting out her little
hands.

“No, you shan't carry mine,” declared Miss Jones. “And you shan't
carry yours either,” she added, while the tears of sympathy sprang into her
eyes. “You look so pale and weak I won't let you. Have you any baggage?”

“I have lost everything,” replied Nestoria.

“Lost everything! And your dress is damp too!” exclaimed Imogen
Eleonore. “Why, you are wet clean through!” Then in a really awe-stricken
whisper, “Did you try to drown yourself?”

Nestoria pressed her veil over her mouth with a shaking hand, and made
no reply.

“I wish I could kiss you,” whispered Miss Jones, imperfectly suppressing
a sob. “I wish all these people were not here staring. I want to kiss you.”

After wavering to and fro a moment in her willowy way, she suddenly
bent forward and placed a kiss on the green barege which covered Nestoria's
forehead. In response a low, suffocated murmur came through the veil,
“Thank you.”

“Now let us go,” said Imogen Eleonore, taking her protégée gently by
the arm. “We will take the street-cars. I generally walk up, for the exercise;
but we will ride to-day.”

By the time they were seated in a car this odd young woman had recovered
her composure, and with it some of her stilted fashions of thought and
utterance.

“Do you know why I thought you were drawing a poniard from your
bosom?” she asked in a sepulchral murmur. “See here. I was perusing it
as I came down to the market.”

Unfolding her copy of the “Spasmodic,” she took out of it another fearfully
and wonderfully illustrated production, a specimen half-sheet of the
“Weekly Turtle Dove,” and read in her melodramatic fashion the following

elegant extract: “ `Allyne Castleton left the room, but returned again to look
upon the sleeping object of his dreams, who had been that night so strangely
restored to him, when he mourned her as sleeping beneath the fragrant roses
of a hillside burial-place in sunny Naples. The soft, rich, velvet-piled carpets
gave back no sound of his footsteps as he returned to his chamber-door, and
he saw with horror his beautiful cousin Isabel, bending over his loved Angela,
draw a gleaming dagger of exquisite workmanship from her bosom and lift
her hand as if she would bury it to the hilt in the slumber-soothed bosom.
The rest of this story will be found in'—well, that's all,” said Imogen Eleonore.
“But that was the passage which filled my mind when I started so at beholding
you put your hand into your neck. I expected as much as could be to see
you produce a two-edged dagger with a handle of wrought and jewelled
ivory.”

Nestoria's only response to this talk was a slight recoil from the “Weekly
Turtle Dove.” The story of an attempt to “murder sleep” brought back to
her the horrible tragedy of the previous night. In spite of her efforts at self-control,
she trembled as if she were in the chill fit of a fever.

Imogen Jones drew a sigh of mingled compassion and satisfaction. She
had not a doubt that her companion carried hid in her bosom a “gleaming
dagger of exquisite workmanship,” wherewith to cut short surcease of sorrow,
should it prove too burdensome. Such wretchedness enchanted her melodramatic
imagination, and she actually envied Nestoria the distinction of possessing
it.

“Poo-o-or thing!” she whispered. “Thou art indeed heavy laden. But
fear not and fail not. I will guard thy secret and companion thee. None
shall find thee out, nor harm thee. We will walk the ways of life unseen together.
But, oh, what a light the works of genius cast upon this mystery of
existence! Had it not been for my familiarity with the chefdoeevers of fiction,
I should not have been able to at once divine your woes and put forth toward
them the tendrils of my sympathy. I read every story I can find. I have
piles and piles of the `Spasmodic' and the `Turtle Dove.' They will help
you while away the long, long hours of your mysterious seclusion.”

After what seemed to Nestoria a prodigious journey through a labyrinth of
streets and turnings, Miss Jones imperiously shook her parasol at the conductor,
and stopped the car.

“We are now near my abode,” she whispered mysteriously. “Let us
alight.”