Witch Winnie: The Story of a "King's Daughter"

by Elizabeth W. Champney

OLOMON MEYER, who collected the rents at Rickett's Court, was looked upon by the tenants as the landlord, though he distinctly disclaimed that honor, explaining that he was only the agent, empowered merely to receive money, never to disburse. According to Mr. Meyer the landlord was a heartless miser, whom he had entreated to make repairs and to lower rents, but who always turned a deaf ear to such appeals. If he, Solomon Meyer, only owned Rickett's Court, there would be no end to the reforms which his tender heart would cause him to institute; as it was, there was no hope for anything of the kind; his orders were explicit—if tenants could not pay, they must leave.

Many of the tenants believed that Mr. Meyer was really the owner of their building, and that the landlord whom he represented as responsible for all their discomfort was purely imaginary, but in this they wronged the agent. Solomon Meyer had no scruples against telling a lie whenever it would serve his purpose, but here the truth did very well. Rickett's Court had a landlord who, although he was not the inhuman wretch which Solomon represented him, still cared nothing for his tenants, and, while the agent had never suggested any reforms or repairs, might well have guessed that they were needed. Adelaide Armstrong would have been shocked beyond expression if she had known that the true landlord of Rickett's Court was no other than her own father. Mr. Armstrong would have been no less shocked if he had known of the abuses for which he was really responsible. He had never seen his own property. It had been represented to him as a profitable investment, and had proved so. He was only in New York for brief intervals each year, and he left the entire management of Rickett's Court to Solomon Meyer, well pleased with the returns which he rendered, and not suspecting that they were less than the sums wrung from the tenants.

He had mentally set aside Rickett's Court as Adelaide's property, and he used its proceeds to defray her expenses. There was a neat little surplus left over each quarter-day, which he placed in the savings bank to her credit, and with which he intended to endow her on her marriage. But of all this Adelaide of course knew nothing. Mr. Armstrong's more important business ventures were in western railroad speculations. These absorbed his attention, and needed the closest application of his faculties. He was glad of this. The East had grown distasteful to him since the loss of his wife and infant son. He felt that he might have been a different man if his wife, whom he tenderly loved, had lived; and Adelaide had never ceased to mourn her mother, whom she could not remember. "What shall I ever do," she frequently asked, "when I finish school? If I only had a mother to be my companion and counselor! but I shall be so lonely, and so unfit to take care of myself!"

The circumstances which I relate in this chapter because they belong here in sequence of time, did not come to my knowledge until long after their occurrence.

Mr. Armstrong came on from the West the evening of our fair. He was weary and much occupied by matters of business, and he did not attend it, much to our regret. He lent a kindly ear to Adelaide's description of it, for he was fond and proud of his beautiful daughter, and he liked to see her a leader in everything.

He manifested apparently little interest, however, in what she had to tell him of Rickett's Court. "There, there, Puss!" he said, lightly, "you must not get fanatical, and rant. I hardly think things are as bad down there as you make them out."

"But, papa," Adelaide interrupted, "I went there myself. I saw it with my own eyes. It is horrible to think that human beings should be obliged to live in such filth and misery. I think the landlord of Rickett's Court ought to be prosecuted. I wish I knew that old Rickett! I would give him a piece of my mind."

"I've no doubt of it; but spare me, Puss, since my name is not Rickett."

He must have felt a sharp twinge of conscience as he spoke, while his daughter's words could not have failed to make an impression on the false Rickett. He had read in the cars a little book entitled "Uncle Tom's Tenement," by Alice Wellington Rollins, and Helen Campbell's "Prisoners of Poverty." He wondered if their pictures of tenement life were indeed true. A few days later he listened to some remarks of Mr. Felix Adler's on tenement reform. He knew what Mr. Charles Pratt was doing in Brooklyn, and his better man told him that now was his opportunity. Why should he not put the plumbing in his tenement in decent repair; it might not cost much more, after all, than to bribe the inspector to report it as all right—a proceeding which Solomon Meyer advised. He could at least drain the sink in the court, and do away with the unchristian smells which now drove the chance visitor from the vicinity. And if he should have the rooms cleaned and whitewashed, he might even pose before the public as a humanitarian landlord, and so gain the cooperation of some of the philanthropists of the day for some other schemes which he had in mind.

He visited the court with a plumber, and found it in worse condition than he had imagined. There was a leak from the sewer in the back basement. All of the rooms were foul with vermin, and rats scuttled back into the walls through great holes. Many of the tenants had left, for various reasons. The opening of the Home of the Elder Brother was in great part responsible for the emptying of Rickett's Court, for the better class of its tenants had embraced this great opportunity to place their children in good surroundings. So many children had been transferred from Mrs. Grogan's care to the Home by their mothers that Mrs. Grogan, finding her occupation gone, betook herself to petty larceny and was arrested.