



Produced by David Widger





THE HERMIT OF ------ STREET.

By Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)

Copyright, 1898, by Anna Katharine Rohlfs




CHAPTER I. I COMMIT AN INDISCRETION.

I should have kept my eyes for the many brilliant and interesting sights
constantly offered me. Another girl would have done so. I myself might
have done so, had I been over eighteen, or, had I not come from
the country, where my natural love of romance had been fostered by
uncongenial surroundings and a repressed life under the eyes of a severe
and unsympathetic maiden aunt.

I was visiting in a house where fashionable people made life a perpetual
holiday. Yet of all the pleasures which followed so rapidly, one upon
another, that I have difficulty now in separating them into distinct
impressions, the greatest, the only one I never confounded with any
other, was the hour I spent in my window after the day's dissipations
were all over, watching--what? Truth and the necessities of my story
oblige me to say--a man's face, a man's handsome but preoccupied face,
bending night after night over a study-table in the lower room of the
great house in our rear.

I had been in the city three weeks, and I had already received--pardon
the seeming egotism of the confession--four offers, which, considering I
had no fortune and but little education or knowledge of the great world,
speaks well for something: I leave you to judge what. All of these
offers were from young men; one of them from a very desirable young man,
but I had listened to no one's addresses, because, after accepting them,
I should have felt it wrong to contemplate so unremittingly the face,
which, for all its unconsciousness of myself, held me spell-bound to an
idea I neither stopped nor cared to analyze.

Why, at such a distance and under circumstances of such distraction, did
it affect me so? It was not a young face (Mr. Allison at that time was
thirty-five); neither was it a cheerful or even a satisfied one; but
it was very handsome, as I have said; far too handsome, indeed, for a
romantic girl to see unmoved, and it was an enigmatic face; one that
did not lend itself to immediate comprehension, and that, to one of my
temperament, was a fatal attraction, especially as enough was known of
his more than peculiar habits to assure me that character, rather than
whim, lay back of his eccentricities.

But first let me explain more fully my exact position in regard to this
gentleman on that day in early spring, destined to be such a memorable
one in my history.

I had never seen him, save in the surreptitious way I have related, and
he had never seen me. The day following my arrival in the city I had
noticed the large house in our rear, and had asked some questions about
it. This was but natural, for it was one of the few mansions in the
great city with an old-style lawn about it. Besides, it had a peculiarly
secluded and secretive look, which even to my unaccustomed eyes, gave it
an appearance strangely out of keeping with the expensive but otherwise
ordinary houses visible in all other directions. The windows--and there
were many--were all shuttered and closed, with the exception of the
three on the lower floor and two others directly over these. On the top
story they were even boarded up, giving to that portion of the house
a blank and desolate air, matched, I was told, by that of the large
drawing-room windows on either side of the front door, which faced, as
you must see, on another street.

The grounds which, were more or less carefully looked after, were
separated from the street by a brick wall, surmounted by urns, from
which drooped the leafless tendrils of some old vines; but in the rear,
that is, in our direction, the line of separation was marked by a
high iron fence, in which, to my surprise, I saw a gate, which,
though padlocked now, marked old habits of intercourse, interesting
to contemplate, between the two houses. Through this fence I caught
glimpses of the green turf and scattered shrubs of a yard which had once
sloped away to the avenues on either side, and, more interesting
still, those three windows whose high-drawn shades offered such a vivid
contrast to the rest of the house.

In one of these windows stood a table, with a chair before it. I had as
yet seen no one in the chair, but I had noted that the table was heavily
covered with papers and books, and judged that the room was a library
and the table that of a busy man engaged in an endless amount of study
and writing.

The Vandykes, whom I had questioned on the matter, were very short in
their replies. Not because the subject was uninteresting, or one they
in any way sought to avoid, but because the invitations to a great party
had just come in, and no other topic was worthy their discussion. But I
learned this much. That the house belonged to one of New York's oldest
families. That its present owner was a widow of great eccentricity of
character, who, with her one child, a daughter, unfortunately blind from
birth, had taken up her abode in some foreign country, where she thought
her child's affliction would attract less attention than in her
native city. The house had been closed to the extent I have mentioned,
immediately upon her departure, but had not been left entirely empty.
Mr. Allison, her man of business, had moved into it, and, being fully
as eccentric as herself, had contented himself for five years with a
solitary life in this dismal mansion, without friends, almost without
acquaintances, though he might have had unlimited society and any amount
of attention, his personal attractions being of a very uncommon
order, and his talent