His face seemed to indicate the traveler who has journeyed in many
lands, seen all phases of life, thought much, suffered deeply, and at
times grown sick of all that life can inflict or bestow; his attire
indicated a member of some religious organization, perchance a member
of that society founded by Loyola, which has sometimes honored, but
oftener blasphemed, the name of JESUS. Directing his trunks,--there
were some three or four, huge in size, and strangely strapped and
banded--to be sent to his room, Gaspar Manuel resumed his cloak and
sombrero, and left the hall of the hotel.
It was an hour before he appeared again. As he emerged from one of
the corridors into the light of the hall, you would have scarcely
recognized the man. In place of his Jesuit-like attire, he wore a
fashionably made black dress coat, a snow-white vest, black pants and
neatly-fitting boots. There was a diamond in the center of his black
scarf, and a massy gold chain across his vest. And a diamond even more
dazzling than that which shone upon his scarf, sparkled from the little
finger of his left-hand.
But the change in his attire only made that face, framed in hair and
beard, black as jet, seem more lividly pale. It was a strange faded
face,--you would have given the world to have known the meaning of that
thought which imparted its incessant fire to his eyes.
Winding his cloak about his slender frame, and placing his sombrero
upon his dark hair, he left the hotel. Passing with his quick active
step along Broadway, he turned to the East river, and soon entered a
silent and deserted neighboring house. Silent and deserted, because it
stands in the center of a haunt of trade, which in the day-time, mad
with the fever of traffic, was at night as silent and deserted as a
desert or a tomb.
He paused before an ancient dwelling-house, which, wedged in between
huge warehouses, looked strangely out of place, in that domain of
mammon. Twenty-one years before, that dwelling-house had stood in
the very center of the fashionable quarter of the city. Now the
aristocratic mansions which once lined the street had disappeared;
and it was left alone, amid the lofty walls and closed windows of the
warehouses which bounded it on either hand, and gloomily confronted it
from the opposite side of the narrow street.
It was a double mansion--the hall door in the center--ranges of
apartments on either side. Its brick front, varied by marble over the
windows, bore the marks of time. And the wide marble steps, which
led from the pavement to the hall door--marble steps once white as
snow--could scarcely be distinguished from the brown sandstone of the
pavement. In place of a bell, there was an unsightly-looking knocker,
in the center of the massive door; and its roof, crowned with old
fashioned dormer-windows, and heavy along the edges with cumbrous
woodwork, presented a strange contrast to the monotonous flat roofs of
the warehouses on either side.