time”; and meanwhile old Mrs. Lovell, Chatty’s grandmother, who understood her perhaps better than the others, gave her a little money for her paupers, and lent her a room in the Lovell stables (at the back of the old lady’s Mercer Street house) where she gathered about her, in what would afterward have been called a “day-nursery,” some of the destitute children of the neighbourhood. There was even, among them, the baby girl whose{22} origin had excited such intense curiosity two or three years earlier, when a veiled lady in a handsome cloak had brought it to the hovel of Cyrus Washington, the negro handy-man whose wife Jessamine took in Dr. Lanskell’s washing. Dr. Lanskell, the chief medical practitioner of the day, was presumably versed in the secret history of every household from the Battery to Union Square; but, though beset by inquisitive patients, he had invariably declared himself unable to identify Jessamine’s “veiled lady,” or to hazard a guess as to the origin of the hundred dollar bill pinned to the baby’s bib.
{21}
{22}
The hundred dollars were never renewed, the lady never reappeared, but the baby lived healthily and happily with Jessamine’s piccaninnies, and as soon as it could toddle was brought to Chatty Lovell’s day-nursery, where it appeared{23} (like its fellow paupers) in little garments cut down from her old dresses, and socks knitted by her untiring hands. Delia, absorbed in her own babies, had nevertheless dropped in once or twice at the nursery, and had come away wishing that Chatty’s maternal instinct might find its normal outlet in marriage. The married cousin confusedly felt that her own affection for her handsome children was a mild and measured sentiment compared with Chatty’s fierce passion for the waifs in Grandmamma Lovell’s stable.
{23}
And then, to the general surprise, Charlotte Lovell engaged herself to Joe Ralston. It was known that Joe had “admired her” the year she came out. She was a graceful dancer, and Joe, who was tall and nimble, had footed it with her through many a reel and schottische. By the end of the winter all the match-makers{24} were predicting that something would come of it; but when Delia sounded her cousin, the girl’s evasive answer and burning brow seemed to imply that her suitor had changed his mind, and no further questions could be asked. Now it was clear that there had, in fact, been an old romance between them, probably followed by that exciting incident, a “misunderstanding”; but at last all was well, and the bells of St. Mark’s were preparing
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