Part 32 (2/2)
”Go and ask Athalia herself.”
”What! to-night? It is now ten o'clock, time all respectable citizens were in bed. It is too late.”
”No, it is never too late to begin to do good. It is just the hour that the lives of the inmates of such houses, as we propose to visit, begin.
From this till one or two o'clock, drinking, carousing, swearing, and all sorts of revelry and debauchery, and then----it is well that night has curtains. Now this house where we are to go, however, I take, from its location, to be one of a different character, one that maintains a show of respectability, yet is one of the most dangerous, for its victims are drawn from among a cla.s.s just as good as Stella has described Mrs. Morgan.”
”You think, then, that we may go there safely, at this hour of the night?”
”As safely, as respects our persons, as to church. As dangerously, as respects our morals, as the poor weak bird fluttering within the charmed circle of the fascinating serpent.”
”As to that I fear nothing.”
”So has said many a one. I say,
'He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil,'
or he will soon come to such familiarity that he will eat freely out of the same dish. No man is proof against the fascinations of a designing woman. But as we go doubly armed, for our cause is just, let us go, go at once, for I see you are excited about that name. It would be strange, if it should prove to be your niece.”
”Yes and stranger still, the way that we have been brought together, and to a knowledge of her, through our mutual sympathy for this little pedler girl, such an one as we may see every hour in the streets, without exciting a pa.s.sing thought. What a mysterious power governs all our actions, and how we are influenced and turned aside from the path we had marked out, by the most trivial circ.u.mstances. I had seen this little girl come in here and offer her little wares a score of times, without paying any attention to her or her movements, except to wonder how any mother could trust such a child, bright, good-looking, free spoken, forward--that is, precocious--among so many fops and libertines, who would take advantage of her some day, and by deceit and money work her ruin. Last night I had put on my gloves and hat, and was just walking out as she came in with her 'Please to buy this, sir,' and why I did not go out I cannot tell, but some unaccountable influence turned me back, and I picked up a paper and sat apparently absorbed in its contents, while my ear was open and mind awake to every word and movement of the libertine rascal who made a pretence of buying liberally, to induce her to go up to his room to get the pay. I followed, watched him to his room, heard the key turn in the lock, heard all his conversation, his vile proposals, and her virtuous rejection, with an energy, 'that she had rather starve and see her mother dead;'
and then I heard a struggle and I knew the villain was using his brutal strength upon a weak girl, and then I burst the door, and then--you know the rest.”
”Why did you not strike the villain dead at your feet?”
”That is savage nature.”
”Why not arrest and punish him, then, for his attempt at rape?”
”That is civilized nature.”
”What then did you do?”
”I forgave him, and bade him repent, and ask G.o.d to forgive him, as I did.”
”Lovetree, give me your hand, I give you my heart; I stand rebuked. I understand you now, that was Christian nature. Let us go.”
Reader, walk with us. We threaded our way along the crowded side-walk, pa.s.sing or meeting, between the Astor House and Ca.n.a.l street, not less than fifty girls; some of them not over twelve years old, many about fourteen or fifteen, some of them superbly beautiful, naturally or artificially, and all, such as the spirit, hovering over the poor s.h.i.+pwrecked mariner upon the stormy ocean, cries wildly to, as they sink, down, down, to death, ”lost, lost, lost!”
”Why, why, tell me why they are permitted to roam through the streets, plying their seductive arts? Where are your police? Where your city Fathers?--guardians of the morals of strangers and citizens! How can anything, male or female, remain pure in such an atmosphere of impurity?
Where are your laws? laws of love that lift up the fallen. Where all your high-paid, well-fed city guardians, who should watch the city youth, to keep them from becoming impure?”
Echo gave the answer, and it reverberated back and forth from granite wall to freestone, from marble front to red-burnt bricks, from dark cellar to gas-lighted hall, from low dens of death to high rooms of wealth and fas.h.i.+on, from law makers to law breakers; echo came back with that one word, ”Impure, impure, impure.”
How the throng go thoughtlessly onward. Do they ever think--think what a sirocco blast from the valley of the Upas tree, is sweeping over this city? Do mothers ever inquire, ever think whether it is possible for their sons to escape the contagion of such company as they keep in the great evening promenade of this mighty Babylon? Have New York mothers no feeling of fear for their sons? or has ”the pestilence that walketh in darkness,” obtained such strength that this is overcome? or has the plague spot grown so familiar to their eyes that they no longer seek to wash it out? If they have given up their sons, if they have surrendered the great street to the almost exclusive occupancy, at night, of painted harlots; have they also given up their daughters, surrendered them to the wiles of the seducer? do they let them go out without fear, even in company with their male friends, to be jostled upon the side-walks by midnight ramblers, and seated at the same table, at some of the great ”saloons,” side by side with those who win to kill, whose trade is death, whose life is gilded misery, though enticing as the siren's song?
Have they forgotten that we are all creatures of surrounding circ.u.mstances, subject to like influences, and liable to the same disease as those who breathe the same atmosphere, and if that is impure, those who breathe it may become so?
Even now, while I write, the ”New York Daily Tribune,” gives this ”Item”
<script>