Crusoe in New York, and other talesHale, Edward Everett
General
Crusoe in New York, and other tales
Hale, Edward Everett
New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
This was, as you may think, a terrible shock to her. But she had hoped
and hoped for the voyage to come to an end, because there was a certain
brother of hers in America whom they were to meet at their landing, and
though she was very lonely on the packet-ship, in which she and her
mother and a certain family of the name of Hantsen--of whom she had
much to say--were the only Swedes, still she expected to find the
brother almost as soon, as I may say, as they saw the land.
She felt badly enough that he did not come on board with the quarantine
officer. When the passengers were brought to Castle Garden, and no
brother came, she felt worse. However, with the help of the clerks
there, she got off a letter to him, somewhere in Jersey, and proposed
to wait as long as they would let her, till he should come.
The second day there came a man to the Garden, who said he was a Dane,
but he spoke Swedish well enough. He said her brother was sick, and had
sent him to find her. She was to come with her trunks, and her
mother's, and all their affairs, to his house, and the same afternoon
they should go to where the brother was.
Without doubt or fear she went with this man, and spent the day at a
forlorn sort of hotel which she described, but which I never could find
again. Toward night the man came again, and bade her take a bag, with
her own change of dress, and come with him to her brother.
After a long ride through the city, they got out at a house which,
thank God! was only one block from Fernando Street. And there this
simple, innocent creature, as she went in, asked where her brother was,
to meet only a burst of laughter from one or two coarse-looking men,
and from half-a-dozen brazen-faced girls, whom she hated, she said, the
minute she saw them.
Except that an old woman took off her shawl and cloak and bonnet, and
took away from her the travelling things she had in her hand, nobody
took any care of her but to laugh at her, and mock her if she dared say
anything.
She tried to go out to the door to find even the Dane who had brought
her there, but she was given to understand that he was coming again for
her, and that she must wait till he came. As for her brother, there was
no brother there, nor had been any. The poor girl had been trapped, and
saw that she had been trapped; she had been spirited away from
everybody who ever heard of her mother, and was in the clutches, as she
said to my mother afterward, of a crew of devils who knew nothing of
love or of mercy.
They did try to make her eat and drink--tried to make her drink
champagne, or any other wine; but they had no fool to deal with. The
girl did not, I think, let her captors know how desperate were her
resolutions. But her eyes were wide open, and she was not going to lose
any chance. She was all on the alert for her escape when, at eleven
o'clock, the Dane came at last whom she had been expecting so
anxiously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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