Rye House Plot

“ If the ghosts of the little brothers of bygone days ever return to their former haunts, they must be deeply grieved or intensely amused, for the building has been everything from a malt-house to a Salvation Army barracks.
As we leave the town a flood of questions surges into the brain, perhaps never to be answered. Why is it there is such an attraction about Rye? Why will men and women travel half across the world to see these crooked streets once more? ”

“ And so they did, for when Mildred had climbed up three stairways in a five-story, narrow house, which even at that hour was filled with a babel of sounds, the old mansion seemed a refuge, and when she had glanced around the narrow room and two dark closets of bedrooms, she shuddered and said, "Papa, can we really afford nothing better?"
"Honestly, Millie, we cannot for the present. My income is exceedingly small, although it will soon be increased, no doubt. But if we pay too much for rooms we shall have nothing to live upon while waiting for better times. ”

“ A damp blind beggar on a stone, who was never dry in his life, and was, of course, a mere mass of rheumatic aches and pains, is a feature common to so many perspectives in England that he need not be dwelt upon. What is precious about Rye is that with its great charm it does not insist upon being dramatically different from those hundreds or thousands of other lovely old towns. ”

“ In this work the scenes and personages will be nearly all from real life. If the book were not in press the tenement-house fires in New York on Friday, causing the death of seven persons, would furnish a tragic climax to his story. What could be more terribly pathetic than the frantic mother penned in by the smoke and flame, dragging herself to the bedside of her children to die with them? In choosing the evils of the tenement-house system as a subject, Mr. Roe strikes at one of the worst features of city life. ”

“ His walk and the heat had brought color to his face, the drug had bestowed animation and confidence, while his heart gave an honest, loving welcome without the aid of any stimulant. They rode uptown together as happily and hopefully as if the nearly empty car were their own carriage, and they were seeking a home in Fifth Avenue instead of a tenement-house; but the hope and happiness of one was based on youth, love, faith, courage, and inexperience, and of the other on a lurid cloud that would darken steadily except as renewed gleams were shot through it by a light that was infernal. ”

“ The years have brought to the old houses unhonored age, a querulous second childhood that is out of tune with the time, their tenants, the neighbors, and cries out against them and against you in fretful protest in every step on their rotten floors or squeaky stairs. Good cause have they for their fretting. This one, with its shabby front and poorly patched roof, what glowing firesides, what happy children may it once have owned? Heavy feet, too often with unsteady step, for the pot-house is next door--where is it not next door in these slums?--have worn away the brown-stone steps since ”

“ The Five Points had been cleansed, as far as the immediate neighborhood was concerned, but the Mulberry Street Bend was fast outdoing it in foulness not a stone's threw away, and new centres of corruption were continually springing up and getting the upper hand whenever vigilance was relaxed for ever so short a time. It is one of the curses of the tenement-house system that the worst houses exercise a levelling influence upon all the rest, just as one bad boy in a schoolroom will spoil the whole class. ”

“ She shuddered as she saw the dimly lighted stairway, and it seemed to her morbid fancy that she was to be thrust into a subterranean dungeon. Such, in a certain sense, it was; for in some of the older station-houses the cells are located in the basement. At the end of the corridor, nearest the street, she saw several women, and, unkempt and disgusting as these station-house tramps appeared, the fact that some of her own sex were near was reassuring. ”

“ I love not to spend good money upon leaking roofs and bowing walls. Give me the parks and the coffee-houses, the Mall and the play-house! The devil may fly away with that rotten old house, for all I care!"
This sentiment, rapped out with a good many of the fashionable oaths of the time, had been Grey's first intimation that his beloved old home was falling into decay. As a child it had seemed all the more perfect from that lack of newness or primness, the wildness of the garden, the encroachments of weed and woodland, which mark the first stages of decay. ”

“ They gazed through windows into interiors furnished either "commercially" with slab-like chairs and unyielding settees, or "home-like" with the melancholy bric-à-brac of other summers—crossed tennis rackets, fit-form couches, and depressing Gibson girls. With a feeling of guilt they looked at a few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool—at three hundred a month. They went away from Rye thanking the real estate agent very much indeed. ”

“ The House With No Address was indeed no more. Its history, its architecture, its mechanical contrivances, its secret passage, its approaches, its inmates, had been for a day the admiration and despair of the congested Press. And the crowds that gathered before the fronts of the houses that concealed it, and the mews with the mysterious garage, had to be controlled and moved on by the police.
Our drama is as improbable as life itself. Can one label it more definitely? Its penultimate scene is at the Ringwood house, where the Aunt and the uncle toast their feet at the apple-wood fire. ”

“ His sphere thus defined, he naturally takes his stand among the poor, and in the homes of the poor. Until very recent times--the years since a change was wrought can be counted on the fingers of one hand-- he was practically restricted in the choice of a home to a narrow section on the West Side, that nevertheless had a social top and bottom to it--the top in the tenements on the line of Seventh Avenue as far north as Thirty-second Street, where he was allowed to occupy the houses of unsavory reputation which the police had cleared and for which decent white tenants could not be found ”

“ Nothing is left about the house but scattered leaves of catalogues, littered scraps of straw and hay, and a battery of pewter pots behind the hall-door. The men with the carpet-caps gather up their screw-drivers and bed-winches into bags, shoulder them, and walk off. One of the pen-and-ink gentlemen goes over the house as a last attention; sticking up bills in the windows respecting the lease of this desirable family mansion, and shutting the shutters. At length he follows the men with the carpet caps. None of the invaders remain. The house is a ruin, and the rats fly from it. ”

“ It stands, that house, within a stone's throw of many a door in which I sat friendless and forlorn, trying to hide from the policeman who would not let me sleep; within hail of the Bend of the wicked past, atoned for at last; of the Bowery boarding-house where I lay senseless on the stairs after my first day's work in the newspaper office, starved well-nigh to death. But the memory of the old days has no sting. Its message is one of hope; the house itself is the key-note. It is the pledge of a better day, of the defeat of the slum with its helpless heredity of despair. ”

“ Even in the great city there were few homes so shadowed by poverty and sorrow that they were not brightened by some indications of the hallowed time. The old mansion, that once may have been embowered in evergreens, was again filled with the aromatic breath of the forest, for Roger had commissioned a friend in the country to send so large a supply to Belle that she was embarrassed with riches of hemlock, laurel, and pine, which, although given away prodigally, left enough to transform their rooms into the aspect of bowers. ”

“ For surely the home of so much romance and grandeur and charm and importance must leave something behind it other than a few fleeting memories and a page or two of history. Houses have ghosts as well as people, and if ever there stood a house with a personality, that was sweet, poignant and indestructible, it was the House on Richmond Hill. ”

“ The staircase is too often a dark well in the centre of the house, and no direct through ventilation is possible, each family being separated from the other by partitions. Frequently the rear of the lot is occupied by another building of three stories high with two families on a floor." The picture is nearly as true to-day as ten years ago, and will be for a long time to come. The dim light admitted by the air-shaft shines upon greater crowds than ever. Tenements are still "good property," and the poverty of the poor man his destruction. ”

“ The house feels like a prison. I walk up and down and wonder that I ever called it home. Something is the matter with the sunsets; they come and go, and I do not notice them. Something ails the voices of the children, snowballing down the street; all the music has gone out of them, and they hurt me like knives. The harmless, happy children!—and Roy loved the little children. ”

“ His idea was to get in at some attic window, and so make his way into the street through the house; but this, although the only possible means that he could think of, for rescuing him from his very precarious situation, was fraught with dangers and difficulties; for who would allow a man to get in at an attic window, and walk undisturbed through their house into the street?
Jacob Gray, groaned as he thought of this, and wrung his hands in despair. “I cannot fight my way out,” he muttered. “There is but one remote chance for me, and that is to get into some house where there are no men. ”

“ The owner, a whimsical man, a lonely and eccentric bachelor of the type that always brightens English novels, would invite them in, make Father his steward and Mother his lady housekeeper. There would be a mystery in the house—a walled-off room, a sound of voices at night in dark corridors where no voices could possibly be, a hidden tragedy, and at last Father and Mother would lift the burden from the place, and end their days in the rose-covered dower-house.... ”

“ Opening into the large apartment was another about eight feet by twelve, and this was all.
Mildred drew a long breath. Could the whole domestic life of the family be carried on in those two rooms? "I never realized how thousands of people live," she sighed.
"It will only be for a little while, Millie," whispered her father.
The young girl shrank and shivered even in the summer morning at the ordeal of crowded life, with only intervening doorways and thin partitions between them and all sorts of unknown neighbors. ”

“ They ain’t sure that you’ll stay here long. Maybe them other relatives will come on, or begin suit in the courts, or something. And the neighbors don’t like to mix in, or take sides, until the matter’s straightened out.”
“Oh, dear, me!” sighed Ruth. “We love staying here at the old Corner House, but we never wished to take anybody’s rights away from them. Mr. Howbridge assured us that we were the only heirs, and that the estate would in time be settled upon us. It makes me feel very badly—this news you tell me, Miss Titus.”
“Well! let sleepin’ dogs lie, is my motter,” declared the seamstress. ”

“ Mrs Hopkinson found the house in great confusion, and full of strange looking men, some trying to seize valuable property which they looked upon as their own, as it had never been paid for—others guarding it for the general benefit of the creditors, and all heaping abuse, in no measured terms, on the head of the plausible swindler. Rachel was in her own room, preparing for departure, but sinking at times into gloomy reveries, which seemed to unfit her for any exertion. ”

“ I know a house where Ray would rather live than in a palace. You’ve heard about our old home on Dupont Circle? But you’ve never been out there, have you? It’s a dandy place, all right; trees, you know, and a big lawn, right in town! The house is nice; lots of rooms, and it’s for sale, don’t you think! Dirt cheap, too, they say, for anybody who can pay money down; the man who owns it has lost his wife, and has a sick daughter, and is going to break up and go to England, where his son lives ”

“ I lead the life of a gentleman now—nothing to do, and so many people to help me—drink—drink from morning till night. Damme, what could a king do more.”
CHAPTER XXXIV. The Girl in Her Melancholy Home.—The Prison House.—A Dungeon’s Gloom.—Unavailing Sorrow.
When Jacob Gray pitched upon the lone house at Battersea as his place of abode, he could not have resolved upon a house less likely to be visited by the curious, although seen from the river at a considerable distance: it was always pointed out by the watermen to their customers, as “Forest’s haunted house.” ”

“ There are a good many empty shelves, Roger."
"I don't intend to buy books by the cartload," he replied. "A library should grow like the man who gathers it."
"Roger," she said suddenly, "I think I see some fancy work that I recognize. Yes, here is more." Then she darted back into the sitting-room. In a moment she returned exclaiming, "I believe the house is full of my work."
"There is none of your work in the parlors, Millie."
She ignored the implied reproach in words, but could not wholly in manner. "So you and Mrs. Wentworth conspired against me, and you got the better of me after all. ”