Read The Sword of Damocles: A Story of New York Life Page 2

  I.

  A WANDERER.

  "There's no such word."--BULWER.

  A wind was blowing through the city. Not a gentle and balmy zephyr,stirring the locks on gentle ladies' foreheads and rustling the curtainsin elegant boudoirs, but a chill and bitter gale that rushed with aswoop through narrow alleys and forsaken courtyards, biting the cheeksof the few solitary wanderers that still lingered abroad in the darkenedstreets.

  In front of a cathedral that reared its lofty steeple in the midst ofthe squalid houses and worse than squalid saloons of one of thedreariest portions of the East Side, stood the form of a woman. She hadpaused in her rush down the narrow street to listen to the music,perhaps, or to catch a glimpse of the light that now and then burst fromthe widely swinging doors as they opened and shut upon some tardyworshipper.

  She was tall and fearful looking; her face, when the light struck it,was seared and desperate; gloom and desolation were written on all thelines of her rigid but wasted form, and when she shuddered under thegale, it was with that force and abandon to which passion lends its aid,and in which the soul proclaims its doom.

  Suddenly the doors before her swung wide and the preacher's voice washeard: "Love God and you will love your fellow-men. Love your fellow-menand you best show your love to God."

  She heard, started, and the charm was broken. "Love!" she echoed with ahorrible laugh; "there is no love in heaven or on earth!"

  And she swept by, and the winds followed and the darkness swallowed herup like a gulf.