Three People Part 1

Three People.

by Pansy.

CHAPTER I.

SOME BABIES.

"Tie the sash a very little looser, nurse, and give the loops a more graceful fall; there--_so_. Now he's a beauty! every inch of him." And Mrs. Hastings moved backward a few steps in order to get the full effect.

A beauty he was, certainly; others beside his mother would have admitted that. What baby fresh from a bath, and robed in the daintiest and most perfect of baby toilets, with tightly curling rings of brown hair covering the handsome head; with great sparkling, dancing blue eyes, and laughing rosebud mouth; with hands and feet and body strung on invisible wires, and quivering with life and glee, was ever other than a beauty?

The whole house was in commotion in honor of the fact that Master Pliny L. Hastings, only son and heir of the great Pliny Hastings, Senior, of Hastings' Hall, had "laughed and cried, and nodded and winked," through the entire s.p.a.ce of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights, and actually reached the first anniversary of his birthday.

A remarkable boy was Pliny Hastings. He didn't know yet that his father was a millionaire, but he must have surmised it, for, as far back as he could remember, his bits of sleeves had been looped with real pearls; rosewood and lace and silk and down had united to make his tiny bed; he had bitten his first tooth through on a sphere of solid gold--and all the wonderful and improbable contrivances for royal babyhood that could be bought or imagined, met together in that grand house on the Avenue for this treasured bit of humanity.

On this particular day baby was out in all his glory; he had made the circuit of the great parlors, stopping on his way to be tossed toward the ceiling, in the arms of first one uncle and then another. He had been kissed and cuddled by all the aunties and cousins, until his cheeks were rosy with triumph; and, finally, he had been carried, shouting with glee, high up on his father's shoulder, down to the dining-room, and occupied the seat of honor at the long table, where he crowed, and laughed, and clapped his hands over every plum that found its way into his dainty mouth. This conduct was interspersed, however, by sundry dives and screams after the coffee urn and the ice pitcher, and various unattainable things--for there were unattainable things, even for Pliny Hastings. Oh, the times and times in his young life that he had cried for the beautiful round moon, and got it not! And even gaslight and firelight had hitherto eluded his eager grasp; but he had learned no lessons from his failures, and still pitched and dived after impossibilities in the most insane fas.h.i.+on. To-day he looked with indifference on the gold-lined silver cup bearing his name and age, and wanted the great carving fork instead. He cared not a whit that the sparkling wine was poured, and gla.s.ses were touched, and toasts drank on his account; but a touch of wisdom must have come over his baby brain, for he made a sudden dash at his father's gla.s.s, sending the red wine right and left, and s.h.i.+vering the frail gla.s.s to fragments; he did more than that, he promptly seized on one of the sharpest bits, and thereby cut a long crooked gash in the sweet chubby finger, and was finally borne, shrieking and struggling, from the room, his little heart filled with mingled feelings of terror and rage. So much for Baby Hastings and his birthday.

In a neat white house, no more than a mile away from this great mansion, there was another baby. It was just when Pliny Hastings was hurried away to the nursery that this baby's mother folded away papers, and otherwise tidied up her bit of a nursery, then pushed a little sewing chair in front of her work table, and paused ere she sat down to give another careful tuck to the blanketed bundle, which was cuddled in the great rocking chair, fast asleep. Then she gathered the doubled up fist into her hand, and caressed it softly, while she murmured: "Bless his precious little heart! he takes a splendid nap for his birthday, so he does."

"Ben," this to the gentleman who was lounging in another rocker, reading the paper, "does it seem possible that Bennie is a year old to-day? I declare, Ben, we ought to have got him a present for his birthday."

The father looked up from his paper with a good-natured laugh. "Seems to me he's rather youthful to begin on that tack, isn't he?"

"Oh, Ben, no! I want every one of his birthdays to be so nice and pleasant. Do, papa, come here and see how nice he looks, with his hair all in a curl."

Thus appealed to, Mr. Phillips came over to the arm-chair, and together they stood looking down on the treasured bit of flesh and blood.

"Our eldest born," the mother said, softly.

"And youngest, too, for the matter of that," answered Mr. Phillips, gaily.

His wife laughed. "Ben, there isn't the least bit of sentiment in you, is there? Now they are having a wonderful time to-day in the grand corner house on the Avenue, the Hastings' house, you know, and it's all because their baby is a year old to-day, and he isn't a bit nicer than ours."

"Their baby's father is worth a million."

"I don't care if he is worth a billion, that don't make their baby any sweeter. Say, Ben, I just wish, for the fun of it, we had some little cunning thing for his birthday present."

Mr. Phillips seemed to be very much amused. "Well," he said, still laughing, "Which shall it be, a razor or a jack-knife?"

His wife actually shuddered. "Ben!" she said, with a reproachful face, "how _can_ you say such dreadful things? What if he should grow up and commit suicide?"

"What if I had a boy, and he should grow to be a man, and another man should tread on his toes, and he should knock the other man down, and the other man should die, and they should hang my boy," rattled off Mr.

Phillips in anything but a grave tone.

"Little woman, that's what I should call looking into the future, isn't it?"

A knock at the door interrupted them, and Roxie, the tidy little maid of all work, who had been out for an afternoon, appeared to them, talking rapidly.

"If you please, ma'am, I'm a quarter late, and could you please to excuse me; the clock around the corner doesn't go, and Kate she didn't know the time; and Mrs. Meeker said would you please accept her love and these grapes in a basket. She says they're the finest of the lot, and you needn't mind sending of it home, 'cause she'll let little Susie step around after it."

This mixture set Mr. Phillips off into another of his hearty laughs; but when they were alone again, he seized one of the great purple cl.u.s.ters, and flinging himself on the floor in front of the baby, exclaimed:

"I'll tell you what we'll do, little wife: we'll present one of these to the boy, and then you and I will eat it in honor of his birthday, unless, indeed, there may be some bad omen in this, even. You know the juice of the grape may, under certain circ.u.mstances, become a dangerous article?"

Mrs. Phillips laughed carelessly as she nestled in the little sewing chair, and prepared to enjoy the grapes. "No," she said, gaily; "grapes are very harmless omens to me. I'm not the least afraid that Baby Benny will ever be a drunkard."

There used to be in Albany, not many years ago, a miniature "Five Points," and one didn't have to go very far up what is now Rensselaer Street to find it, either. There were tenement houses, which from attic to bas.e.m.e.nt swarmed with filthy, ragged, repulsive human life.

In one of the lowest and meanest of these many cellars, on the very day, and at the identical hour, in which Master Pliny Hastings held high carnival at his father's table, and Baby Benny Phillips nestled and dreamed among the soft pillows of his mother's easy chair, a little brother of theirs, clad in dirt and rags, crawled over the reeking floor, and occupied himself in devouring eagerly every bit of potato skin or apple paring that came in his way. Was there ever a more forlorn looking specimen of a baby! It was its birthday, too--there are more babies in the world than we think for whose birthdays might be celebrated on the same day. But this one knew nothing about it--dear me!

neither did his mother. I doubt if it had once occurred to her that this poor bit of scrawny, dirty, terrible baby had been through one whole year of life. And yet, perhaps, she loved her boy a little--her face looked sullen rather than wicked. On the whole, I think she did, for as she was about to ascend the stairs, with the sullen look deepening or changing into a sort of gloomy apprehension, she hesitated, glanced behind her, and finally, with a muttered "Plague take the young one,"

turned back, and, catching him by the arm of his tattered dress, landed him on the topmost step, in a mud-puddle! but she did it because she remembered that he would be very likely to climb into the tub of soapsuds that stood at the foot of the bed, and so get drowned.

Mrs. Ryan came up her cellar stairs at the same time, and looked over at her neighbor, then from her to her forlorn child, who, however, enjoyed the mud-puddle, and finally commenced a conversation.

"How old is that young one of yours?"

"Pretty near a year--why, let me see--what day is it?--why, I'll be bound if he ain't _just_ a year old this very day."

"Birthday, eh? You ought to celebrate."

"Humph," said the mother, with a darkening face, "we shall likely; we do most generally. His loving father will get drunk, and if he don't pitch Tode head over heels out here on the stones, in honor of his birthday, I'll be thankful. Tode Mall, you stop crawling out to that gutter, or I'll shake you within an inch of your life!"

This last, in a louder and most threatening tone, to the ambitious baby.

But poor Tode didn't understand, or forgot, or something, for while his mother talked with her companion, out he traveled toward the inviting gutter again, and tumbled into it, from whence he was carried, dripping and screaming, by his angry mother, who bestowed the promised shake, and added a vigorous slapping, whereat Tode kicked and yelled in a manner that proved him to be without doubt a near relative of Master Pliny Hastings himself. Three brothers they were, Messrs. Pliny, Bennie and Tode, opening their wondrous eyes on the world on precisely the same day of time, though under such different circ.u.mstances, and amid such different surroundings, that I doubt if it looked equally round to them all. Besides, they hadn't the least idea each of the existence of the other; but no matter for that, they were brothers, linked together in many a way.

Perhaps you wouldn't have had an idea that their fathers were each occupied in the same business; but such was the case. Pliny L. Hastings, the millionaire, owned and kept in motion two of the hotels in a western city where the bar-rooms were supplied with marble counters, and the customers were served from cut-gla.s.s goblets, resting on silver salvers.

Besides he was a wholesale liquor dealer, and kept great warehouses constantly supplied with the precious stuff. Bennie Phillips'

good-natured father was a grocer, on a modest and unpretending scale; but he had a back room in his store where he kept a few barrels of liquor for medicinal purposes, and a clerk in attendance. Tode Mall's father kept an unmitigated grog-shop, or rum hole, or whatever name you are pleased to call it, without any cut gla.s.s or medicinal purposes about it, and sold vile whisky at so much a drink to whoever had sunk low enough to buy it. So now you know all about how these three baby brothers commenced their lives.

CHAPTER II.

JOHN BIRGE'S OPPORTUNITY.

One day it rained--oh, terribly. Albany is not a pleasant city when it rains, and Rensselaer Street is not a pleasant street. That was what John Birge thought as he held his umbrella low to avoid the slanting drops, and hurried himself down the muddy road, hurried until he came to a cellar stairs, and then he stopped short in the midst of rain and wind, such a pitiable sight met his eye, the figure of a human being, fallen down on that lowest stair in all the abandonment of drunkenness.

"This is awful!" muttered John Birge to himself. "I wonder if the poor wretch lives here, and if I can't get him in."

Wondering which, he hurried down the stairs, made his way carefully past the "poor wretch" and knocked at the door. No answer. He knocked louder, and this time a low "come in" rewarded him, and he promptly obeyed it.

A woman was bending over a pile of straw and rags, and an object lying on top of them; and a squalid child, curled in one corner, with a wild, frightened look in his eyes. The woman turned as the door opened, and John Birge recognized her as his mother's washerwoman.