“Good! Stop there, if you would rest thoroughly content. The serpent lifts his head in the third. Will you kindly send the valet?”
The girl confided to her fellow-servants in the service-room that the gentleman in Number So-and-so was very nice, but slightly cracked. He seemed to have been upset by a lot of old letters—and it was an odd thing that among all the rich people who lived in the hotel none seemed to be really happy. Now, if she, deponent, only possessed a fraction of their wealth, she would enjoy life to the limit.
Power did not change his attire that evening. He dined quietly in the restaurant, and strolled out into Broadway afterward. The loneliness of a great city, at first so repellent, was grateful to him now. The crowded streets were more democratic than the palatial saloons of the hotel, the air more breathable. But the flood of light in the Great White Way—though blazing then with a subdued magnificence as compared with its bewildering luster nowadays—was garish and harsh, and he turned into the sheltering gloom of a quiet side-street. He was passing a row of red-stone houses—bay-windowed, austere abodes, with porches surmounting steep flights of broad steps—when he saw an old, old man seated at the foot of one of these outer stairways. In summer, at that hour, every step would be occupied by people gasping for fresh, cool air; but in the depth of winter it was courting disease and death for anyone, especially the aged, to seek such repose.
The unusual spectacle stirred Power out of his mournful self-communing.
“Are you ill?” he said, halting in front of the patriarch.
“No, sorr,” came the cheerful answer, and a worn, deeply lined face was raised to his with a smile that banished the ravages of time as sunlight gilds a ruin. A street-lamp was near, and its rays fell on features which had once been strong and massive, but were now mellowed into the rare beauty of hale and kindly age. Silvery hair, still plentiful, and dark, keen eyes from which gleamed the intelligence and sympathy every clean-souled man may hope to gain if his years stretch beyond the span allotted by the prophet, made up a personality which would have appealed to an artist in search of a model.
“But you are taking a great risk by sitting on cold stone,” persisted Power.
“Sure, sorr, av it’s the will o’ God that I should die that way, it’s as good as anny other,” said the ancient. “All doores ladin’ to the next worruld are pretty much the same to me. I don’t care which wan I take so long as it lades me safe into Purgathory.”
Never before had Power heard so modest a claim on the benevolence of the Almighty.
“Are you tired of life, then?” he asked.