A Changed Heart: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

MRS. BUTTERBY'S LODGINGS.

The bleak blasts of a raw March afternoon swept through the city streets, cold and piercing, driving the dust in whirlwinds blindingly into the eyes of all it encountered.

In spite of the cold and the piercing wind, Broadway was not empty—Is Broadway ever empty, I wonder?—and business-men, buttoned up to the chin in overcoats, and with caps drawn over their frosty noses, tore along like comets, to home and dinner; ladies in silks, and velvets, and furs, swarm down the pave to meet them, and young and old, rich and poor, jostled and elbowed, and pushed and trod on one another's heels and toes, as usual in that thronged thoroughfare.

Moving among the ceaseless sea of human life, continually ebbing and flowing in Broadway, came a young woman, walking rapidly. I say "young woman" advisedly, for she was not a lady. Her black dress was gray and dingy, and frayed round the bottom; her black cloth mantle was of the poorest texture and simplest make, and her black straw bonnet was as plain and untrimmed as bonnet could be, and who could be a lady in such array as that? To a good many of the Broadway loungers, who devote their manly intellect to picking their teeth in front of first-class hotels, and stare at society going by for a living, her face was well known. It was a face not likely to pass unnoticed—not at all to be passed in a crowd; and more than once some of these expensively-got-up loafers had condescended to follow the young woman with the "deuced fine eyes;" but the black figure flitted along as if shod with the shoes of swiftness, and these languid admirers soon gave up the chase in despair.

I don't think she ever was conscious of this attention; she walked steadfastly on, looking straight before her, never to the right or left, her shawl drawn closely around her tall, slight figure, as much alone as if she had been on Peter Wilkins's desert island. To a home-sick stranger in New York, I wonder if Broadway, at the fashionable hour, is not the loneliest and dreariest of places? Hundreds of faces, and not one familiar or friendly countenance among them; not one smile or glance of recognition to the lonely and heart-weary brother or sister jostled about in their midst. The men and women who passed might have been a set of automatons, for all the interest the young person dressed in shabby mourning appeared to take in them, as she hurried on with that rapid step and that darkly-sullen face. For I am sorry to say this heroine of mine (and she is that) wore a look of habitual sullenness that was almost a scowl, and something fierce lay latent behind the flashing of those brilliant eyes, and bitter and harsh in the compressed lips. A passing physiognomist, not over-choice in his phrases, meeting her once in the street, had carelessly observed to a friend walking with him, that "there was a spice of the devil in that girl;" and perhaps the girl herself might have agreed with him, had she heard it.

Down town and west of Broadway, there is a certain unfashionable locality, known as Minetta Street. The houses are tall and dingy, and swarm with dirty children and noisy mothers; and it is dark and narrow, and utterly unknown on Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. Among the tall and dingy houses—all so much alike that they might have been cast in a mold—there is one with a white board in the front window of the ground-floor, bearing, in black letters, the name "Mrs. Butterby," and beneath this legend, "Lodgings." And in this bleak, windy twilight of this cold March day, the young woman dressed in black turns into Minetta Street, and walks into Mrs. Butterby's with the air of one having the right; for she is one of Mrs. Butterby's lodgers, this young person, and a lodger of some consequence, not only to the house, but to the whole street. And for this reason—she has a piano in her room! An old and battered piano, it is true, for which she only pays four dollars per month; but still it is a piano, and the wonderful harmonies her fingers evoke from its yellow keys, transfix Minetta Street with amazement and delight. She has the best room in Mrs. Butterby's house, the first floor parlor, front, and there is the faded remains of a Brussels carpet on the floor and a yellow-painted washstand in the corner, two cane-seated chairs, with three legs between them, a little table, with an oilcloth cover, and a sheet-iron stove; and these elegant luxuries all of which she has for the stipend of three dollars per week. There is a bed, too, and a small trunk, and the battered little high-backed piano, and there is almost room to turn round in the space which they leave. There is nothing like this elegant apartment in all Mrs. Butterby's house, and the other lodgers look into it with envious and admiring eyes. They are all young ladies, these lodgers—young factory-ladies, and young ladies in the dressmaking, and pantmaking, and vestmaking, and capmaking, and bookbinding lines of business, not to speak of an actress, a real actress, who performed in a Broadway theater, and whom they look upon with mingled awe and envy. But they like her better than they do the first-floor lodger, whom they unite in hating with a cordial hatred that would have delighted Dr. Johnson. They are all young ladies, but they stigmatize her as "that young woman," "that stuck-up thing," and would like to scratch those bright eyes of hers out of her head, though she never did anything to them in her life.

They knew very little about her, either Mrs. Butterby or her fair lodgers, although she had been two months in the house, except that her name was Miss Wade, that she earned her living as an embroideress, and that she put on a great many unnecessary airs for a New York seamstress. She embroidered slippers, that were pictures in themselves, on rich velvets and silks, with floss and Berlin wool, and spangles, and beads; and cobweb handkerchiefs, that might have been the wonder of a Brussels lace-maker. She worked for a fashionable Broadway establishment, who asked fabulous prices for these gems of needlework, and who doled out a miserable pittance to the pale worker, whose light glimmered far into the night, and who bent over the glistening fabric in the gray and dismal dawn. They heard all this in the house, and nothing more; for, except to the landlady, she had never, scarcely, exchanged a word with a soul in it—with one exception—she had spoken to the actress, who occupied the room above her own, and who was nearly as cold and unsociable as herself. "Birds of a feather," the young ladies said, when Mrs. Butterby told how Miss Wade had been in Miss Johnston's room (the actress was Miss Johnston, in every-day life, and Miss St. John on the bills), sewing spangles and gold braid on Miss Johnston's theatrical robes, and how Miss Johnston had taken Miss Wade to the theater, and had made her stay and take tea with her in her own room. No human being of the "earth earthy," can quite live without any one to speak to; the heart must turn to some one, let it be ever so proud and self-sustained, and the actress was made of less coarse and rough clay than the young factory-ladies, who went dirty and hoopless all the week, and flaunted in gaudy silks on Sunday.

Up in her own room, Miss Wade took off her bonnet, and sat down to work with her mantle still on, for the fireless apartment was perishingly cold. She had sat there for nearly an hour, and the cheerless March gloaming was falling drearily on Minetta Street, when there was a shambling footstep on the stairs, a shuffling, slip-shod, down-at-the-heel tread in the hall, and a rap at her door. Miss Wade, work in hand, opened it, and saw her portly landlady smiling in the doorway.

"Miss Johnston's compliments, Miss, and would you please to step up to her room, she says. Bless my heart! ain't you got no fire on, this perishing evening?"

"It was too much trouble to light it," Miss Wade said, shutting and locking her room-door, and going along the dark and dirty hall, up a dark and dirty staircase, into another hall, darker and dirtier still, and tapping at the first door she met.