New Bed-Time Stories

by Louise Chandler Moulton

From the window of a large but rusty-looking house on one of the avenues, two children looked down at the throng below, as they had been looking all day. They were in the fourth story of the house, and they could not see into the street very distinctly, but still the movement and the bustle interested them, and their mother was thankful that they had it to watch.

She herself was sewing, catching the last glint of the sunset light for her work, as she had the first ray of the dawning. She had been a beautiful, high-bred woman; indeed, she was so still, though there was no one to note the unconscious elegance of her gestures or the graceful lines of her curving figure and bent head. She was very thin now, and very poorly clad, but a stranger would have felt that she was a lady, and wondered how she came in the fourth story of this house,—a great house, which had been handsome, too, in its day, but which was now let out to innumerable lodgers, mostly of the decent sort of honest, hard-working, half-starved poor people. Not with such neighbors had Mrs. Vanderheyden’s lot been formerly cast, nor for such uses as this had the old house itself been designed. It had been a stately mansion in its time, belonging to the estate of a good old Knickerbocker family, which was quite run out now. But there was one great comfort in this house: it had been so well built that its thick walls shut out all alien noises effectually, and made solitude possible even in a tenement house. Perhaps Mrs. Vanderheyden had thought of this when she chose her abode there.

There was something in the faded grandeur of the old mansion that harmonized with the lingering grace of her own faded beauty. Its lofty walls were wainscoted with carved oak, almost black with time; and any imaginative person would have been likely to people it with the ghosts of the beautiful girls whose room no doubt this was in the old days. There, between those windows, hung, perhaps, their great, gleaming mirror, and into it they looked, all smiles and blushes and beauty, when they were ready for their first ball. But Mrs. Vanderheyden’s two little girls did not think of the other girls who might have lived there once. They were too young for that, and too hungry. Ethel, the elder, was only ten; and shy little Annie, beside her, scarcely seven. They saw a sight, however, from the window at which they stood, that interested them more than any vision of the past would have done.

The avenue on which they lived was in a transition state. Trade had come into it and lodging-houses had vulgarized it, and yet there were some of the rich old residents who still clung to the houses in which their fathers and mothers had lived and died. There was one such directly opposite; and to look into the parlor over the way, and see there all the warmth and brightness and beauty of which they themselves were deprived, had been one of the chief enjoyments of the little Vanderheydens ever since they had been in the house. They were all that Mrs. Vanderheyden had left, these two girls. Wealth was gone, friends were gone, father and father’s home, husband and husband’s home—hope itself was gone; but she was not quite alone while she had these two for whom to struggle—to live or to die, as Heaven would. It was for their sakes that she had worked from dawning till nightfall, though she had felt all the time what seemed to her a mortal sickness stealing over her. Their breakfast and dinner had been only bread, of which she herself had scarcely tasted; but to-morrow would be Christmas, and it should go hard with her but she would give them better fare then. A dozen times during the day one or the other little voice had asked anxiously,—

“Shall we surely, surely, have dinner to-morrow, because it is Christmas Day?”

And she had answered,—

“Please Heaven, you surely shall. My work is almost done;” and then she had stitched away more resolutely than ever on the child’s frock she was elaborately embroidering. The children meanwhile were feeding upon hope, and watching a scene in the house over the way, where, as they thought, all that any human creature could possibly hope for had already been given. Busy preparations had been made in that other house for Christmas. There was a great Christmas-tree in one corner, all full of little tapers, and a large, fair, gentle-looking woman had been engaged much of the afternoon in arranging gifts upon it. Now, with the twilight, a boy and girl had come in and were watching the lighting up of the Christmas-tree.

“It’s so good of them not to pull the curtains down,” Ethel said, with a sigh of delight. “It’s almost as good as being there—almost.”

“I do suppose that’s the very grandest house in all New York,” little Annie said, in a tone of awe and admiration.