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Page 64
Fausta took my news, however, with a start which frightened me. All her
money, but a shilling or two, was in the trunk. To place money in trunks
is a weakness of the female mind which I have nowhere seen accounted
for. Worse than this, though,--as appeared after a moment's examination
of her travelling _sac_,--her portfolio in the trunk contained the
letter of the aunt whom she came to visit, giving her her address in
the city. To this address she had no other clew but that her aunt was
Mrs. Mary Mason, had married a few years before a merchant named Mason,
whom Miss Jones had never seen, and of whose name and business this was
all she knew. They lived in a numbered street, but whether it was Fourth
Street, or Fifty-fourth, or One Hundred and Twenty-fourth, or whether it
was something between, the poor child had no idea. She had put up the
letter carefully, but had never thought of the importance of the
address. Besides this aunt, she knew no human being in New York.
"Child of the Public," I said to myself, "what do you do now?" I had
appealed to my great patron in sending for the officer, and on the whole
I felt that my sovereign had been gracious to me, if not yet hopeful.
But now I must rub my lamp again, and ask the genie where the unknown
Mason lived. The genie of course suggested the Directory, and I ran for
it to the clerk's office. But as we were toiling down the pages of
"Masons," and had written off thirteen or fourteen who lived in numbered
streets, Fausta started, looked back at the preface and its date, flung
down her pencil in the only abandonment of dismay in which I ever saw
her, and cried, "First of May! They were abroad until May. They have
been abroad since the day they were married!" So that genie had to put
his glories into his pocket, and carry his Directory back to the office
again.
The natural thing to propose was, that I should find for Miss Jones a
respectable boarding-house, and that she should remain there until her
trunk was found, or till she could write to friends who had this fatal
address, and receive an answer. But here she hesitated. She hardly liked
to explain why,--did not explain wholly. But she did not say that she
had no friends who knew this address. She had but few relations in the
world, and her aunt had communicated with her alone since she came from
Europe. As for the boarding-house, "I had rather look for work," she
said bravely. "I have never promised to pay money when I did not know
how to obtain it; and that"--and here she took out fifty or sixty cents
from her purse--"and that is all now. In respectable boarding-houses,
when people come without luggage, they are apt to ask for an advance.
Or, at least," she added with some pride, "I am apt to offer it."
I hastened to ask her to take all my little store; but I had to own that
I had not two dollars. I was sure, however, that my overcoat and the
dress-suit I wore would avail me something, if I thrust them boldly up
some spout. I was sure that I should be at work within a day or two. At
all events, I was certain of the cyclop�dia the next day. That should go
to old Gowan's,--in Fulton Street it was then,--"the moral centre of the
intellectual world," in the hour I got it. And at this moment, for the
first time, the thought crossed me, "If mine could only be the name
drawn, so that that foolish $5,000 should fall to me." In that case I
felt that Fausta might live in "a respectable boarding-house" till she
died. Of this, of course, I said nothing, only that she was welcome to
my poor dollar and a half, and that I should receive the next day some
more money that was due me.
"You forget, Mr. Carter," replied Fausta, as proudly as
before,--"you forget that I cannot borrow of you any more than of a
boarding-house-keeper. I never borrow. Please God, I never will. It must
be," she added, "that in a Christian city like this there is some
respectable and fit arrangement made for travellers who find themselves
where I am. What that provision is I do not know; but I will find out
what it is before this sun goes down."
I paused a moment before I replied. If I had been fascinated by this
lovely girl before, I now bowed in respect before her dignity and
resolution; and, with my sympathy, there was a delicious throb of
self-respect united, when I heard her lay down so simply, as principles
of her life, two principles on which I had always myself tried to live.
The half-expressed habits of my boyhood and youth were now uttered for
me as axioms by lips which I knew could speak nothing but right and
truth.
I paused a moment. I stumbled a little as I expressed my regret that she
would not let me help her,--joined with my certainty that she was in the
right in refusing,--and then it the only stiff speech I ever made to
her, I said:--
"I am the 'Child of the Public.' If you ever hear my story, you will
say so too. At the least, I can claim this, that I have a right to help
you in your quest as to the way in which the public will help you. Thus
far I am clearly the officer in his suite to whom he has intrusted you.
Are you ready, then, to go on shore?"
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