Philander Doesticks - The Witches of New York

What a treasure, thought the “Individual,” would such an accomplished wife be in republican America, – how exceedingly useful in the case of her husband’s rivals for Custom-house honors, and how invaluable when creditors become clamorous. What a perfect treasure would a wife be who could turn a clamorous butcher into spring lamb, and his brown apron and leather breeches into the indispensable peas and mint-sauce to eat him with; who could make the rascally baker instantly become a green parrot with only power to say, “Pretty Polly wants a cracker;” who could transform the dunning tailor into a greater goose than any in his own shop; who could go to Stewart’s, buy a couple of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods, and then turn the clerks into cockroaches, and scrunch them with her little gaiter if they interfered with her walking off with the plunder; or who, in the event of a scarcity of money, could invite a select party of fifty or sixty friends to a nice little dinner, and then change the whole lot into lions, tigers, giraffes, elephants, and ostriches, and sell the entire batch to Van Amburgh & Co. at a high premium, as a freshly imported menagerie, all very fat and valuable.

Then he came down from this rather elevated flight of fancy, and filled away on another tack. Before he reached the house he had fully made up his mind that Madame Bruce, the Mysterious Veiled Lady, must be a stray Oriental Princess in reduced circumstances, cruelly thrust from the paternal mansion by the infuriated proprietor, her father, and compelled to seek her fortune in a strange land. He had never seen a princess, and he resolved to treat this one with all respect and loyal veneration; to do this, if possible, without compromising his conscience as a republican and a voter in the tenth ward, – but to do it at all hazards.

The immense fortune which would undoubtedly be hers in the event of the relenting of her brutal though opulent father, suggested the feasibility of a future elopement, and a legal marriage, according to the forms of any country that she preferred – he couldn’t bethink him of a Persian justice of the peace, but he did not despair of being able to manage it to her entire and perfect satisfaction.

Her undoubted great misfortunes had touched his tender heart. He would see this suffering Princess – he would tender his sympathy and offer his hand and the fortune he hoped she would be able to make for him. If this was haughtily declined there would still remain the poor privilege of buying a dose of magic, paying the price in current money, and letting her make her own change.

Having matured this disinterested resolve, he proceeded calmly on his journey, wondering as he walked along, whether, in the event of a gracious reception by his Princess, it would be more courtly and correct to kneel on both knees, or to make an Oriental cushion of his overcoat and sit down cross-legged on the floor.

This knotty point was not settled to his entire satisfaction when he reached that lovely portion of fairy-land near the angle of Broome and Thompson streets. The Princess had taken up her temporary residence in the tenant-house No. 513 Broome, which, elegant mansion affords a refuge to about seventeen other families, mostly Hibernian, without very high pretensions to aristocracy.

His ring at the door of the noble mansion was answered by a grizzly woman speaking French very badly broken, in fact irreparably fractured. This grizzly Gaul let him into the house, heard his request to see Madame Bruce, and then she called to a shock-headed boy who was looking over the bannisters, to come and take the visitor in charge.

Two minutes’ observation convinced the distinguished caller that the servants of the Princess were not particular in the matter of dirt.

The walls were stained, discolored, and bedaubed, and the floor had a sufficient thickness of soil for a vegetable garden; at one end of the hall, indeed, an Irish woman was on her knees, making experimental excavations, possibly with a view to planting early lettuce and peppergrass.

A glance at the shock-headed boy showed a peculiarity in his visual organs; his eyes, which were black naturally, had evidently suffered in some kind of a fisticuff demonstration, and one of them still showed the marks; it was twice black, naturally and artificially; it had a dual nigritude, and might, perhaps, be called a double-barrelled black eye. This pleasant young man conducted his visitor to the top of the first flight of stairs, where he said, “Please stop here a minute,” and disappeared into the Princess’s room, leaving her devoted slave alone in the hall with two aged washtubs and a battered broom. There ensued an immediate flurry in the rooms of the Princess, and the customer thought of the forty black slaves, with jars of jewels on their heads, who, in Oriental countries, are in the habit of receiving princesses’ visitors with all the honors. He hardly thought to see the forty black slaves, with the jars of gems, but rather expected the shock-headed youth to presently reappear, with a mug of rubies, or a kettle of sapphires and emeralds, and invite him in courtly language to help himself to a few – or, that that active young man would presently come out with an amethyst snuff-box full of diamond-dust and ask him to take a pinch, and then present him with that expensive article as a slight token of respect from the Princess.

“Not so, not so, my child.”

The great shuffling and pitching about of things continued, as if the furniture had been indulging in an extemporaneous jig, and couldn’t stop on so short a notice, or else objected to any interruption of the festivities.

Finally the rattling of chairs and tables subsided into a calm, and the boy reappeared. He came, however, without the tea-kettle full of valuables, and minus even the snuff-box; he merely remarked, with an insinuating wink of the lightest-colored eye, “Please to walk this way.”

It did please his auditor to walk in the designated direction, and he entered the room, when the eye spoke again to a very low accompaniment of the voice, as if he was afraid he might damage that organ by playing on it too loudly.

The anxious visitor looked for the Princess, but not seeing her, or the slaves with the pots of jewels, and observing, also, that the chairs were not too luxuriously gorgeous for people to sit on, he sat down.

A single glance convinced him that the Princess could have had no opportunity to carry off her jewels from her eastern home, or that she must have spent the proceeds before she furnished her present domicile. An iron bedstead, a small cooking-stove, four chairs, and a table, on which the breakfast crockery stood unwashed, was the amount of the furniture. A dirty slatternly young woman of about twenty-three years, with filthy hands and uncombed hair, and whose clothes looked as if they had been tossed on with a pitchfork, seated herself in one of the chairs and commenced conversation – not in Persian. It was one o’clock, P.M., but she attempted an apology for the unmade bed, the unswept room, the unwashed breakfast dishes, and the untidy appearance of everything. Before she had concluded her fruitless explanation, the boy with the variegated eye suddenly came from a closet which the customer had not noticed and was unprepared for, and said, in winning tones, “Please to walk in this room,” which was done, with some fear and no little trembling, whereupon the optical youth incontinently vanished.

At last, then, the imaginative visitor stood in the presence of royalty, and beheld the wronged Princess of his heart. He was about to drop on his bended knees to pay his premeditated homage, but a hurried glance at the floor showed that such a course of proceeding would result in the ineffaceable soiling of his best pantaloons; so he stood sturdily erect.